“A torpedo trail, you say? Off the starboard bow?”
At the first warning shouts over the telephone from the crow’s nest, Captain Turner’s peaceful afternoon was spoiled. Even as First Officer Hefford acknowledged the sighting and hung up the phone, Turner saw the two lookouts abandon their nest to shinny down the foremast ladder in a panic. The captain, already hurrying to the starboard side of the bridge house, made it only a few steps when the torpedo struck with a clanging, sickening impact.
Before his anxious gaze a column of water shot up over the bridge. It seemed to hang there against blue sky as it passed away astern with the Lusitania’s plunging forward motion. Having stumbled from the initial shock, Turner kept going, but he faltered again as he felt the rubber-matted deck sink and tilt from the sudden inrush of water below. With the explosion, his vessel began an unnatural roll that didn’t seem as if it would end.
Turner called to Hefford at the controls: “Are the watertight doors all closed? If not, close them!”
Even as he gave the command, he knew it would be of little use. Whatever the electric board showed, the automatic doors between the coal bunkers and the boiler rooms would be jammed partway open by slumping coal and dust piles. No amount of effort could keep them clear while the men worked at firing the boilers. He knew, too, his order might trap some of the coalers below in flooding chambers, or force them to climb straight upward for any hope of escape.
“Lieutenant, what is the degree of list?” he asked, feeling the ship’s lopsided tilt growing worse.
Lewis had given up taking his four-point bearing. He went to the commutator device mounted on the tilting rear bulkhead and read the needle. “Seven degrees starboard, Captain. Two degrees forward as well, sir.”
“Right. Let me know when it reaches ten starboard.” He’d already ordered all portholes to be closed that morning, but had it been done? Too late to check now, and calm was essential in a crisis. Glancing out through the windscreen, Turner could confirm that the ship was well down by the bows, with waves already breaking over the starboard bulwark. Natural enough, with a forward torpedo hit—but how could it be happening so quickly?
To see which compartments had been damaged, he took himself over to the Pearson’s Fire and Flood Indicator board. Its alarm bell was ringing monotonously, and should be silenced to let a man think. But as he went, there came another massive concussion underfoot. The bridge shuddered with a second rumbling explosion, louder and more prolonged than the first. Before him, as he grabbed the counter for balance, the lights on the Pearson’s board went crazy. The forward compartments, the hold, powder magazine, coal bunkers and boiler rooms, all were compromised. Then the indicator lamps themselves flickered, threatening a power failure.
“Ten degrees list, Captain, and still going,” Lewis reported, steadfastly watching the pendulums that showed the average angles.
“All right, then,” Turner said. “Notify me if it goes past fifteen. Meanwhile, have the ship’s carpenter assess the damage forward and report back to me. Helmsman, rudder hard a-port! If we run her in toward shore, maybe we can beach her.”
“Aye aye, sir,” the helmsman said, taking in the gravity of the command. As he swung the wheel and the mate rang up on the telephone, Turner headed to the door—a steep downhill shuffle—and out onto the starboard bridge wing.
No submarine in sight now, and no more torpedo tracks. But looking astern, he saw that the ship was in a panic. Under a pall of smoke rising aft from the ventilators, passengers milled along the boat deck. They lurched and slipped on wet tilted planking, with some already lying inert on the deck or staggering with bloodied heads and shirtfronts, likely from falls. White-faced people clustered at the lifeboats, a few even trying to climb in as officers restrained them. One starboard boat was gone, lost in the explosion, and most hung far out from the tilting deck at the limit of their anti-sway chains. At each moment, more humanity crowded out from below.
Surveying the scene, the pitiful passengers clawing and swarming desperately about the decks, the thought came to Turner: A bunch of bloody monkeys. He felt a sudden sick remorse for his own callous phrase.
So Captain Dow may have been right after all to resign his Lusitania command. Passengers and war explosives don’t mix. Just throw a torpedo into the pot, and this is what you get, bloody chaos! So much for the all-knowing protection he’d been promised. Well, he was not beaten, not yet.
Then as he watched, the ship began to right itself. Beneath his soles he felt the deck straightening, the strain on his old ankles easing. But it could never come near an even keel, and the change didn’t reassure Turner. He knew it only meant that the flooding had penetrated deeper in, to the transverse coal bunker beneath him or possibly the port-side. A temporary relief at best, when the list that could sink them lay forward. His ship was going down by the bows.
Looking out on the foredeck, where waves washed right in over the dagger-pointed prow, he suddenly realized that they were still making eighteen knots headway. The engines had never stopped, for he hadn’t ordered them to do so. The U-boat that had attacked them was left behind by now, and their need to run away was over in any case.
Time to face it, they must abandon ship. This forward motion was lending greater force to the flooding, and worse, making it impossible to launch the lifeboats.
Going to the starboard telephone station, he rang inside to the bridge and commanded, “Engine room, Full Speed Astern.” That should stop them soon enough.
“Aye, sir,” came the answer. Through the open bridge door, he saw Hefford lay down the phone, ring back and forth on the telegraph repeater to make the alert bells chime, and finally set the lever full astern. If anyone was standing by the engines, as they must be, his order would be obeyed. He turned his gaze aft.
Within seconds new detonations sounded, and ghostly-white gouts of steam shot up topside all the way astern. Amid renewed shouts and panic from the decks, Turner realized his mistake.
Engineering Inspector Laslett had warned him before departure that the low-power steam system was failing, wearing out with age. It wouldn’t stand a sudden change, and it was due to be overhauled in port next week. But he had forgotten, and this sudden pressure reversal had been too great.
What an old fool he was! The main steam lines had failed, probably crippling the engines. If he’d merely signaled Full Stop, they might yet have slowed the ship down in time to lower boats.
Well, perhaps they still could. Shuffling up the sloping deck, dragging himself along by the bridge rail, he went back inside to face his officers.
There were no reproaches awaiting him there, but no good news either. He heard first from the steersman: “The helm is not responding, sir. The wheel seems to be jammed at half-port. I cannot make her turn toward land.”
“No surprise, man. We’re listing to starboard, so your steering engines are fighting the whole weight of the rudder, lifting tons of metal. Just hold her as you can.”
“Steam pressure is down, Captain,” Lieutenant Hefford reported, “from 190 pounds to 50. The engine room says one steam main is broken. The turbines are still turning, locked in forward motion.”
“Try to get them reversed, or stopped at least. We have to lose way.”
“Sir, the list is increasing again,” was Third Officer Lewis’s report. “Seventeen degrees starboard, five forward.”
“My God.” Turner for once found himself unable to put a good face on things.
As if that weren’t enough, the young officer Bisset appeared in the doorway from astern, soaking wet and covered with soot. “Captain, sir, the Marconi room reports their electricity has failed. They’re sending out S.O.S. on battery power, giving our position.”
He waited in the sharply-angled doorway. “Any orders, sir?”
“Orders, yes.”
S.O.S.–Save Our Ship. Turner imagined the plight of those below, now in darkness, his officers and stokers trapped in the coal-black depths. Little enough hope of saving them, much less the ship.
“Lower all lifeboats to the rail,” he told Bisset, or Bestic, whomever. “But do not launch them yet, until the ship has stopped. Relay this order to all stations: Prepare to abandon ship.”