The Last Rail

The sea came up to meet the Promenade Deck. Charles Lauriat, the Boston bookseller, stood at the starboard rail as the water climbed past the portholes and swallowed the deck beneath his feet. The ship was going. He could feel it in the rail beneath his hands, in the angle of the deck under his shoes, in the sound of the sea no longer below but around him. The Lusitania’s bow had already gone. The water was at the bridge. It was rising still.

Lauriat had been on deck since the torpedo struck. He had helped launch boats that would not launch, had watched lifeboats swing out and jam and crash. Now there was nothing left to do on deck. The rail was the last fixed thing. He held it. The deck tilted beneath him and the sea reached for his shoes and he let go and the water took him.

He was one of hundreds. Those who remained aboard had passed beyond the reach of the boats. The lifeboats were gone or had never been launched, and the people still standing on the hull were crossing from the last solid surface into the cold open sea. For most of them the transition was not a leap or a dive. The deck simply went under their feet.

The Lusitania had been sinking for nearly eighteen minutes. The torpedo had struck at ten minutes past two. The second explosion had followed within seconds, a deep concussion from the hold that shattered lights and sent a column of water and debris cascading onto the boat deck. The list to starboard had steepened until the port-side boats hung uselessly inward and the starboard boats swung out over empty air. The crew had fought the boats and the boats had won. Now the ship was finishing the argument.

The stern rose. Survivors who later testified before the Mersey inquiry described the moment with the particularity of people who could not believe what they had seen and could not stop seeing it. The great hull, 785 feet of steel, tilted until the propellers emerged from the water. They gleamed. Three massive bronze screws, each one taller than a man, hung in the air above the sea, turning still, turning in nothing, catching the afternoon light. The ship’s bow was deep underwater. The stern climbed higher. The funnels, those four red-and-black Cunard funnels that had been visible for miles across the Atlantic, tilted past the vertical. The first funnel collapsed. It tore free from its mounts and fell into the sea, and the water around it erupted. As the tips of the ship’s four, 70-foot-tall funnels dipped beneath the surface, they formed whirlpools which dragged nearby swimmers down with the ship.

Then the sound. Survivors described it as a roar, a rumble, a thunder that came from inside the ship as it folded. The air inside the Lusitania, the air that had filled her corridors and cabins and grand saloons and cargo holds, was being expelled. The ship was breathing out. Compartments that had been airtight were opening to the sea, and the air that had been inside them was forcing its way out, and the sound it made was the sound of the ship dying. That sound reached the lifeboats that had pulled away. It reached the people still on the hull. It reached the people already in the sea.

Theodate Pope, the forty-eight-year-old reformer and traveler from Farmington, Connecticut, had been in the water since the ship’s list threw her from the deck. She had been standing near the port-side boats. The deck tilted and she fell. She hit the water and the cold stopped her breath. She was a strong swimmer. She was also, by her own later account, a person who had decided that she was going to die and had stopped fighting. She went under. She came up. She went under again. A man near her, also struggling, called out. She did not know him. He was drowning beside her and she was drowning beside him and neither of them could help the other. She lost consciousness. She would be pulled from the water later, alive, by a boat from the rescue steamers, with no clear memory of how she came to be in the boat.

The suction came as the hull went down. This was the second event. The torpedo and the internal explosion had been the first. The failure of the boats had been a failure of escape. But the ship’s final plunge created its own lethal mechanism, separate from the blast and separate from the cold.

A vessel of 30, 000 tons, displacing 30, 000 tons of water, sinking in eighteen minutes, creates a displacement that the sea must fill. The water rushed in to fill it. Everything on the surface near the ship was pulled toward the space the hull had occupied. People in the water felt it as a current that seized them and drew them backward, toward the place where the ship had been. Some were pulled under. Others were held beneath the surface and did not come back up. Debris that the same current was dragging inward—deck chairs, wooden gratings, hatch covers, spars, the splintered remains of lifeboats that had been smashed in the launching—battered those still struggling at the surface.

Survivor accounts differed on the nature of this force; some described a powerful vortex, while others, like Charles Lauriat, noted there was ‘very little vortex; there was rather a shooting out from the ship instead of a sucking in’ after she sank, a phenomenon attributed to water rushing into the funnels and being blown out again by explosions from the boilers.

The survivors who described the suction were consistent across accounts given at different times, to different questioners, in different settings. They did not all use the word suction. Some said pull. Others said draw. Still others said the water took them down. What they described was the same physical experience: the sea moving toward the ship as the ship moved into the sea, and the people in the sea moving with it.

Lauriat, who had held the rail until the water reached his waist, described being pulled down. He had entered the sea as the deck went under. The current caught him. He went under. He came up. He went under again. He was a strong man, fifty years old, experienced in the water from summers on the New England coast. He fought the pull. He survived it. He would later write that the suction was the most dangerous moment, worse than the cold, worse than the initial shock of the water. The cold could be endured for minutes. The suction could kill in seconds.

The water was cold. The Irish Sea in early May runs at roughly fifty-two degrees. That temperature does not kill immediately. It kills in stages.

The cold shocks the body first—a gasp, a spasm, a sudden involuntary intake of breath that can fill the lungs with water. Then the cold moves inward. The extremities lose function. Hands cannot grip. Legs cannot kick. The body redirects blood to the core, to the heart and the brain, and the limbs go numb. Consciousness narrows.

A person in water at fifty-two degrees has perhaps thirty to sixty minutes before hypothermia renders them helpless. But those thirty to sixty minutes are not minutes of full capacity. They are minutes of declining capacity, each one worse than the last.

And the people in the water had already been through the explosion, the listing, the boat failures, and the panic. Many of them were injured. Many were exhausted. Many were wearing heavy clothing that absorbed water and dragged them down. The cold was not the first enemy. It was the last one.

The debris field spread across the surface. The Lusitania, in her final moments, had vomited her contents into the sea. Deck chairs floated. Wooden gratings from the hatch covers floated. Collapsible boats—canvas-and-wood folding rafts that had been stowed on the upper deck and had broken free as the ship rolled—floated. Life belts and life jackets, some still on the people who wore them, some torn free and floating alone, scattered across the water. Spars. Ropes. Cushions. The detritus of a liner that had carried 1, 959 people across the Atlantic and was now beneath the surface. The ship travelled about two nautical miles from the time of the torpedoing to her final resting place, leaving a trail of debris and people behind.

The people who survived the suction and the cold found the debris. They clung to it. A collapsible boat, half-swamped, held several people. A deck chair supported one. A wooden grating supported two. The sea was not empty. It was littered with the ship’s remains and with the people who had been on the ship, and the living and the dead floated among the same wreckage. The water did not separate them.

The boats that had gotten away—perhaps a dozen of the Lusitania’s twenty-two lifeboats, some full, some nearly empty, some crewed by experienced seamen and some by passengers who had never held an oar—were scattered across a mile of open water. They had pulled away from the ship to avoid the suction. Now they sat where they had stopped, their occupants looking back at the place where the Lusitania had been. The ship was gone. The funnels were under. The propellers were under. The hull was under. What remained on the surface was the debris and the people and the spreading slick of oil and coal dust that the sea had carried up from the ship’s bunkers.

The people in the boats could hear the people in the water. The sound carried across the calm sea. Witnesses would later struggle to describe it. Not screaming, not exactly. A collective sound, the sound of hundreds of voices calling for help, calling for boats, calling for anyone, and then the sound thinning as voices went silent, one by one, as the cold and the water and the exhaustion took the people who had been calling. The people in the boats heard it and could not do much. Some boats pulled toward the voices. Others did not, because the people in the boats were afraid of being swamped by the people in the water, or because the people in the boats were themselves half-dead with cold and shock and could not row.

The sea was calm. This was the cruel detail. The Irish Sea on 7 May 1915 was flat, with a long, low swell from the southwest. No storm. No wind. No fog. The afternoon light was clear and the Irish coast stood visible on the horizon—the Old Head of Kinsale, its lighthouse, its green headland, the cliffs. The coast was right there. It was close. It was seven miles from where the Lusitania went down. The people in the water could see the coast, and the coast was close, and they could not reach it.

The ship had sunk at ten minutes past two, or a few minutes after. The first rescue vessels—the tugboats and fishing boats from Queenstown, the coastal steamers—would not begin arriving for another hour. The people in the water had to last that long. Many did not.

The people who clung to debris held on until their hands failed. The water at fifty-two degrees numbs the hands in minutes. A person gripping a wooden grating loses the ability to grip. Their fingers open. They slide off. They go under. The people who wore life belts floated, but life belts do not prevent hypothermia. They keep the body at the surface while the body cools. A person in a life belt in fifty-two-degree water floats and grows colder and grows quieter and then stops moving. The people who clung to collapsible boats fared better if the collapsible was not swamped. But the collapsibles were low in the water, and the sea broke over them, and the people on them were wet and cold.

The people in the water were not a single group. They were scattered. The debris field was wide. The current and the wind and the swell moved people apart. A person clinging to a deck chair might be fifty yards from the nearest collapsible boat and unable to call loudly enough to be heard. The people in the water were alone, or in pairs, or in small clusters of three or four, holding onto the same piece of flotsam. The sea was calm and the sea was huge and the people in it were small.

The Lusitania had carried 1, 959 people. The boats that had gotten away held perhaps 500 to 600. The rest were in the water or had gone down with the ship. The exact numbers would be disputed at the inquiry and afterward. The Cunard records listed 1, 264 passengers, three stowaways, and a crew of 693. The dead would be counted at 1, 198, though the count was never exact, because some bodies were never recovered and some were recovered and never identified. What is certain is that the majority of the people on the Lusitania entered the water, and the majority of those who entered the water did not leave it alive. The ship had also been carrying around 173 tons of war supplies, including 4.2 million rounds of rifle ammunition, almost 5, 000 shrapnel-filled artillery shell casings and 3, 240 brass percussion fuses.

The ship’s final plunge had taken people who had survived the torpedo. It had taken people who had survived the second explosion. It had taken people who had survived the listing and the boat failures and the panic. The suction was indiscriminate. It did not select by class or age or nationality. First-class passengers and third-class passengers alike went under. Women and men. Children. Crew members who had stayed at their posts and passengers who had fought for boats and passengers who had never reached the boat deck. The sea took them all.

Among those who did not survive was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, the American millionaire, who had been seen on deck handing his life belt to a woman who had none. He was not seen again. Among those who did not survive was Charles Frohman, the theatrical producer, who had been sitting in the saloon, calm, reading a book. He was not seen again. Among those who did not survive was Sir Hugh Lane, the art collector, whose paintings, rumored to be aboard in sealed cases in the cargo hold, went to the bottom with him. The ship took them as it took the others, without distinction, without regard for what they carried or what they were.

The historical content of the Lusitania’s sinking is not only the torpedo. It is not only the second explosion. It is not only the list or the boats or the Admiralty’s intercepted messages or the German embassy’s warning. The historical content is the eighteen minutes and what happened in the water after the eighteen minutes were over. It is the moment when a structure that had been built to carry people across the sea became the thing that killed them, and when the sea that had been beneath them became the thing that held them and took them down. The ship’s death was a mechanical event. The people’s deaths were not mechanical. They were physical, and they were personal, and they were documented by the people who survived them.

The survivors told their stories to the Mersey inquiry in London, to the county coroner’s inquest in Kinsale, to newspaper reporters who met them at the docks in Queenstown, to their families, and in some cases to themselves, in written accounts composed in the days and weeks after. Their accounts do not agree on every detail. They do not agree on the timing of the second explosion, or on the degree of the list, or on whether the boats could have been launched if the crew had been better trained. But they agree on the water. They agree on the cold, the suction, the debris, and the sound of voices going silent. They agree on what it was like to be in the Irish Sea on the afternoon of 7 May 1915, holding onto a piece of wood, watching the coast of Ireland, and waiting.

On 8 May, the local county coroner, John Hogan, opened an inquest in Kinsale into the deaths of two males and three females whose bodies had been brought ashore. The inquest was a formality. The bodies had been recovered from the water by fishing boats and tugs. They had been floating. Hogan’s inquest would establish the cause of death—drowning, in each case—and the identities where identities could be established. The bodies were a fraction of the dead. More would wash ashore in the coming days, along the coast of Cork, along the Old Head, along the beaches and coves. Some would never be found. Hogan’s inquest was the first formal proceeding, the first official reckoning, and it began with five bodies in Kinsale while the rescue boats were still bringing more in.

The rescue was still underway. The steamers from Queenstown—the Flying Fox, the Bluebell, the Julia, the Warrior—were crisscrossing the debris field, pulling people from the water, taking them aboard. The people they pulled out were cold, many of them unconscious, many of them injured. The people they did not pull out were still in the water, or had gone under, or were floating face-down among the deck chairs and the gratings and the splintered wood.

The sea was calm and the afternoon light was still on the water. The coast of Ireland was visible. The lighthouse at the Old Head of Kinsale was visible. The people in the water could see these things, and the people on the rescue boats could see the people in the water, and the distance between them was not great, and the distance was enough to kill.

Out beyond the debris field, beyond the boats and the bodies and the spreading oil slick, a periscope broke the surface. It rose from the water, held for a moment, and sank again. The people in the water did not see it. The people in the boats did not see it. It was too far away, too small, too brief. But it had been there, watching, and then it was gone, moving northeast, leaving the scene it had made.