Captain Turner stood on the port wing of his bridge, looking aft. The scene along the Boat Deck, to his disciplined eye, was a mad melee—disgraceful, but hardly to be helped given the circumstances. Perhaps if so many of his crew had not been trapped in the baggage room by the explosions forward, or very likely drowned below decks in the sudden flooding, it might have gone better—and if the crew hadn’t been shorthanded to begin with, and a green lot at that!
Now a mere handful of officers tried to control the deck, with only one or two crewmen at each lifeboat station. The passengers were running wild, everything was askew, the engines out of control, the electricity dead, the rudder jammed. But at least along the starboard rail, now that the ship had slowed a little, they were getting a few boats away. The starboard side was well down near the water, so the lifeboats could be lowered a short way or merely dropped. If they didn’t swamp or land atop one another, or slip down endwise from a single rope, the passengers in them had a decent chance.
It was not a sure thing, not by any means…on that side he’d seen whole boatloads of humanity dragged under by their neglected chains and tackle, or crushed down into the water by the tilting boat davits as the great ship rode under the waves. But with his crew so short, there was little to be done about it.
And here along the port side it was worse. With the Lusitania heeled back twenty or more degrees from port and tilting forward, it seemed unlikely that any boat could slide down the canted side of the hull without rolling over or being gouged to pieces by the protruding rivet-heads. Perhaps, as the water eventually rose up along the deck, they could float them off one-by-one—that is, if the bow waves of the still-turning ship didn’t drive the boats inboard, trapping them under wires and davits, and if they weren’t swamped in the water by an overload of swarming passengers.
For the time being, he decided, loading the portside lifeboats was nothing but a risk. When Turner saw passengers climbing into the forward ones within earshot, he would call down through his speaking trumpet.
“Empty the boats, do not lower them! The ship will not sink, we are all right. Please clear the upper deck.”
Even so, the clambering, jabbering monkeys kept milling around and scrambling in, more and more of them as the lower decks submerged and the list increased. For any to go back inside the tilting cabins and wait was too much to ask, he supposed. And now here came that junior mate Bisset, shouldering his way down for’ard through the mob, to shout some gibberish up at him from the boat deck. “Yes, what is it, Bisset? Sing it out, man!”
“Sir, Staff Captain Anderson wants me to request that you flood the port ballast tanks. That might level out the list and make it easier to launch boats.”
As if I didn’t know that, Turner thought to himself. What to tell him, then, that the tanks were already flooding themselves quite nicely, thank you? That no one could get to the manual controls, or that the pumps wouldn’t operate in any case? No; that would give a poor impression to the passengers, and would likely cause a worse panic. Instead he called down. “Quite right, Mr. Bisset. An excellent idea, and I shall handle it. Give Captain Anderson my regards.”
But almost before he could finish, something untoward occurred. In spite of all Turner’s admonitions, the forward port lifeboat had filled up with women and children, with the male passengers swarming around trying to lower it. There came a sharp metallic sound as someone took a hammer and knocked out the pin to the snubbing chain, the anti-sway link that secured the boat’s inside rail to the edge of the deck.
As this was done, the heavy, overloaded timber boat was suddenly released to swing free on its ropes—not outboard, but inboard of the rail. Its immense weight crushed into the crew and passengers on the steeply canted deck, including those waiting ready with the lowering-ropes in hand. Once they let go, either pinned in place or trying to struggle clear, the boat was free to start slowly forward and inward, down the sloping planks, grinding and crushing to death all those passengers who were caught in the V-angle of deck and superstructure.
Amid the shrieks of victims and the sick wails of its occupants the boat, greasing its way with human blood, quickly gathered speed on the incline. Carrying trapped bodies along, it came down and lodged with a sickening crunch under the bridge wing where Turner precariously stood. A lucky escape for young Bisset, who had the seamanlike agility to pull himself up the side of the bridge and avoid being crushed.
Then, amid the horrified cries of the survivors, as the Captain and officer stood helpless, the snubbing chain on the second boat astern was knocked loose, and it too swung inboard and slid free. Amid more screams and a fresh human stampede, it came barreling down the deck in the same bloody path, over the few wounded who had survived the first juggernaut. Sweeping all those before it into the obstacle of the previous lifeboat, it then rode well up over the wreckage. The women and children who cowered inside the first boat were crushed amid a new wailing cacophony of pain and terror.
“Bisset…Bestic…go back! Stop them—” Turner was barely able to choke out the words before his Junior Third Officer began climbing aft along the top rail, hurrying to keep any more boats from being released.
The old captain, unable to offer any help, gripped the rail and watched in vain as injured passengers clawed and struggled to save themselves a few feet below him. Alas, Bisset wasn’t in time to keep a third lifeboat, and then a fourth, from breaking free, both careening down the same gory path toward Turner and smashing their pitiful human wreckage into the gruesome tangle of the first two—which now, perhaps mercifully, began to be drowned in rising sea waves as the Lusitania’s bow steadily submerged.
Defeated, Captain Turner descended the steep incline back to his bridge house. He had to get the log books and the codes, to safeguard them or sink them to the sea bottom. Calling to the helmsman to save himself, he waded in to do this final duty. The control room was awash now in bright red—not with seawater, but human blood.