The Boats That Would Not Launch

The Cunard regulations were precise. Each lifeboat was assigned to a named officer. Each crew member had a station. The drill, printed in the ship’s operating manual, described a sequence: alarm sounded, passengers mustered at boat decks, boats uncovered and swung out, passengers seated in order, falls lowered in unison, boat released at the waterline. The entire operation was designed to take ten minutes. A level deck was assumed. A ship moving slowly enough that boats could descend on falls without swinging was assumed. Trained crew at every station were assumed. Above all, time was assumed.

None of those conditions held off the Old Head of Kinsale, shortly after two o’clock on the afternoon of 7 May 1915.

The torpedo had struck the starboard side, just forward of the bridge, and the detonation that followed, the second explosion, the one that survivors would argue about for decades, had torn upward through the ship’s interior with a force that sent a column of steel plating, coal smoke, cinders, and debris high above the deck. The plume of water knocked Lifeboat No. 5 off its davits. Below, crew working in the boilers claimed they were inundated immediately.

On the bridge, Captain Turner felt the ship heel to starboard and not recover. The turbines dropped dramatically following the second explosion, pointing toward a failure in the ship’s steam-generating plant. Whether in the boilers themselves or in the high-pressure steam lines to the engines, the distinction would matter to investigators but not to the passengers now scrambling up a deck that was tilting beneath them at an angle that made walking, then standing, then crawling impossible.

The list was immediate. It was severe. It was the single physical fact that would govern every decision, every attempt, and every death in the minutes that followed.

The Lusitania carried forty-eight lifeboats, twenty-two regular wooden boats and twenty-six collapsible canvas boats stored on the deck above. Under the British Board of Trade regulations then in force, that number was legal.

The Lusitania’s design differed from her sister ships, however. Her boats were not rigged under davits in the same comprehensive manner as the Olympic or the Britannic, which had received full complements of lifeboats all rigged under davits. This difference would have been a major contributor to the high loss of life, since there was not sufficient time to assemble and launch the collapsible boats stored on the upper deck.

But even the boats already in their davits, ready and uncovered, could not be used. The list saw to that. Only six out of 48 lifeboats were launched successfully, with several more overturning and breaking apart.

On the port side, the boats swung inward as the deck tilted. Gravity worked against procedure. A lifeboat suspended from davits on the high side of a listing ship does not hang over the water. It hangs over the deck, crashing into the superstructure, its gunwales grinding against railings and stanchions and the angled steel of the boat deck itself.

Crew who reached their stations and pulled the falls found the boats jammed against the ship’s structure, unable to clear. Passengers who climbed into port-side boats found themselves trapped in cages of wood and rope and steel, tilted at angles that made it impossible to sit, impossible to lower, impossible to exit without climbing back onto a deck that was now so steeply pitched that movement required hands and knees.

A few port-side boats did clear. Lifeboat 14, with eleven people on board, was lowered and launched safely, but because the boat plug was not in place, it filled with seawater and sank almost immediately. Lifeboat 2 floated away from the ship with no one in it. These were the exceptions.

On the starboard side, the boats swung outward, over the water, which was the design’s intent. But the list that pushed the port-side boats inward also pulled the starboard boats away from the ship’s hull at an angle that made controlled lowering nearly impossible. The falls ran through blocks designed for a ship on an even keel. With the deck canted fifteen degrees, then twenty, then more, the boats on the starboard side hung at an angle that caused them to tip as they descended. Bow down or stern down. Water poured in over one end. Passengers who had climbed in were pitched forward or backward, sliding along benches, falling against thwarts, collecting in a mass of bodies at the low end of a boat that was supposed to descend evenly and did not.

The crew at the falls had seconds, not minutes. The ship was going down by the bow. The forecastle was already awash. Water was climbing the starboard side, reaching the boat deck, cold and green and absolute. Men who had trained, when they had trained, on a level deck in fair weather now worked falls they could barely hold, on a deck they could barely stand on, with passengers who were screaming and climbing and grabbing at ropes and at each other. Some crew held their stations. Others did not. The distinction between the two would be argued in testimony and in print for years, but the physical reality was simpler than the testimony: there were not enough trained hands at enough falls, and the ship was not level, and the boats were not cooperating with the people who needed them.

The Lusitania had not conducted a full lifeboat drill before leaving Liverpool on her final voyage. The Board of Trade required one, and the ship’s log recorded that one had taken place, but survivors who had been aboard in port stated that no drill had occurred. The discrepancy between the log entry and the passenger recollection would surface at the Mersey inquiry and would not be resolved there. What was resolved, in the eighteen minutes the ship remained afloat, was the consequence: crew who did not know their stations stood at falls they did not know how to operate, and passengers who did not know where to go stood at boats that could not be lowered.

Theodate Pope, the socialite from Farmington, Connecticut, had been walking on the port-side promenade deck when the torpedo struck. She was thrown against a bulkhead. She recovered, found her cabin, collected her belongings, and made her way to the boat deck. There she found scenes that defied the Cunard regulations’ orderly sequence. Passengers milled at boat stations where no crew stood. Boats hung at angles. Some were already filling with people who had climbed in and could not be lowered. Others swung empty, jammed against superstructure. Pope climbed into a boat, accounts differ on which one, and was in it when it was lowered, or fell, or was tipped. She survived. She would later describe the experience in terms that made clear the distance between the printed drill and the actual event. The drill assumed calm. The event provided terror.

Charles Lauriat, the American publisher, was on deck almost immediately after the impact. He reached a starboard boat, his assigned station or one near it, and found it already crowded. He assisted at the falls. The boat descended, but too quickly. The falls ran through the hands of the men holding them, or the men holding them let go, or the angle of the descent caused the boat to tip. Lauriat’s boat reached the water. Others did not.

He would testify to what he saw: boats lowering bow-first, spilling passengers into the sea. Boats lowering stern-first, the bow rising vertical, the occupants sliding backward into water that was now covered with coal dust and debris. Boats that struck the ship’s side as they descended, smashing against riveted plates, breaking apart before they reached the water. Boats that reached the water and were immediately swamped by the suction of a ship that was still moving, still turning, still drawing water and everything in it toward the wound in her starboard side.

The ship was still under way. This was Captain Turner’s order: keep the engines going, head for Queenstown, beach her if possible. The decision would be debated and condemned and defended in the inquiries that followed.

But its effect on the boats was immediate and mechanical. A ship moving through the water creates a wake. A lifeboat lowered into that wake, or into the current of water rushing along the hull of a moving ship, is pushed and pulled and spun.

Boats that reached the waterline were dragged. Falls that should have been released could not be released, because the boat was under tension, pulling against the davits, and the release mechanism jammed or the crew at the falls could not reach the mechanism or the mechanism was underwater. Boats were towed under by a ship that was still moving and was also sinking, which meant that the water along the hull was not merely a current but a vortex, pulling boats and people and debris toward the gash in the starboard side where the sea was pouring in.

The numbers would be counted later. Of the forty-eight lifeboats the Lusitania carried, six were successfully launched. Six boats, carrying perhaps three hundred people, from a ship that carried nearly two thousand. The remaining boats, thirty-eight of them, wooden and collapsible, were never launched. They went down with the ship. Some were swept off the deck as the water rose. Some were still in their davits when the stern rose and the hull slid beneath the surface. Some were crushed by the funnel that collapsed forward as the ship’s angle steepened, sweeping the boat deck with tons of steel and rigging and canvas.

The question of why the second explosion occurred, the one that amplified the torpedo’s damage and accelerated the sinking, would occupy investigators, naval architects, and historians for a century. The ship’s cargo included a shipment of rifle cartridges, documented on the manifest, and the question of whether those cartridges contributed to the second explosion became a point of diplomatic and historical contention.

Later researchers would model the damage. Explosives researchers at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, in 2012, argued that their experiments and evidence from the wreck showed that the torpedo itself caused the catastrophic failure, with the second explosion having little impact. Earlier simulations had struggled to account for the rapidity of the sinking absent further internal damage. The disagreement was never resolved to universal satisfaction.

But the question of what caused the second explosion, while historically significant, was not the question that determined who lived and who died in the eighteen minutes the Lusitania remained afloat. The question that determined that was simpler, and it was mechanical: could the boats be launched? The answer was no. Most of them could not. The list, the crew, the drills, the davits, the falls, the still-turning screws, the angle of the deck, the weight of the boats, the panic of the passengers, the absence of trained hands at the falls: these were the factors that killed people in the water.

Not the torpedo. Not the second explosion. Those were the acts of aggression. The failure of the life-saving apparatus was the act that turned aggression into catastrophe.

A ship is a system. A system under stress behaves according to its design and its tolerances. The Lusitania’s lifeboat system was designed for a ship on an even keel, with trained crew at every station, with time enough to follow a printed sequence of steps, and with a ship slow enough or stopped enough that boats could be lowered into calm water alongside a hull that was not moving. None of those tolerances held.

The system failed not because it was poorly designed, though it was, by later standards, inadequately designed, but because the conditions it was built for did not exist on the afternoon of the seventh of May. The conditions that existed were war conditions.

A torpedo had struck. A second explosion had followed. The ship was listing, moving, sinking, and on fire in places where coal dust and debris had been thrown aloft and had come down burning. The system was not designed for this. The system was designed for peace.

The counter-argument is straightforward and it has the merit of moral clarity: a German submarine commander, operating under orders to wage unrestricted submarine warfare, fired a torpedo into a passenger liner filled with civilians who had no means of defense.

This is true. Walther Schwieger, in his war diary, recorded the attack in the calm, operational language of a patrol report. The single torpedo was noted. The second explosion was noted. The ship’s rapid sink was noted. He did not stop. He did not rescue. He turned U-20 northeast and continued his patrol.

The act of aggression was his. The moral responsibility for the attack was his, and his government’s. But moral responsibility and causal responsibility are not the same thing, and the causal chain that led to the deaths of nearly twelve hundred people ran through more hands than Schwieger’s.

The Admiralty possessed intelligence about U-20’s patrol and did not relay it to the Lusitania in time. Cunard operated the ship under ambiguous wartime protocols, neither fully civilian nor fully auxiliary, neither warned adequately nor protected at all. The Board of Trade maintained lifeboat regulations calibrated for peacetime passenger loads and peacetime emergencies. And the design of the ship itself carried boats that could not be rigged and crew that had not been drilled and a system that could not function under the conditions that war imposed.

The eighteen minutes were not a single moment. They were a sequence of failures, each one building on the last. The torpedo struck. The second explosion followed. The ship listed. The engines continued. The boats could not be lowered on the port side. The boats could not be lowered safely on the starboard side. Crew could not reach their stations. Passengers could not form queues on a deck that was tilting past the angle of human locomotion. The collapsible boats could not be assembled. The wooden boats could not be cleared. The water rose. The funnels went under. The stern rose. And the boats that should have carried the people off the ship, forty-eight of them, enough for everyone, more than enough if they could have been launched, went down with the ship or were smashed or were swamped or were never reached.

The Lusitania’s lifeboat capacity, on paper, was adequate. The ship carried boats for 2, 605 people. She carried 1, 959. The arithmetic was not the problem. The problem was that the boats existed as objects, wooden hulls, canvas sides, ropes and falls and davits, and not as a system that could be operated under the conditions that obtained. A lifeboat that cannot be launched is not a lifeboat. It is weight. It is wood and canvas and rope. It is an object that takes up space on a deck that is tilting and that will, in a few minutes, be underwater. The Lusitania carried enough lifeboats. She did not carry enough launchable lifeboats. The distinction is the distinction between a regulation and a rescue.

The survivors who reached Queenstown that evening, or who were pulled from the water by the boats that had been launched and by the fishing vessels and tugs that came from the harbor, carried with them the knowledge of what they had seen on the boat deck. Boats had swung inward and crushed against the superstructure. Boats had lowered unevenly and spilled their passengers into the sea. Crew had stood at falls they could not operate. Passengers had climbed into boats that would never reach the water. The collapsible boats stored above were unreachable, unassembled, useless. The deck had tilted and the water had risen and the boats that remained in their davits had gone under as the ship went down.

The dead would be laid out in the sheds at Queenstown. They would be counted. The number would be argued, as everything about this disaster would be argued, but it would settle at approximately 1, 198. Of those, the vast majority had been on the boat deck, or below it, when the ship went down. They had not drowned in the open sea. They had drowned on a ship that could not launch its boats. They had drowned because the system that was supposed to save them was designed for conditions that did not obtain and could not function under conditions that did.

The ship’s stern rose. The funnels went under, one after another, the fourth funnel last. The boats that remained, those still in their davits, those that had been half-lowered and jammed, those that had been swept off the deck by the rising water, went with the hull. The sea closed over them. The water that had been pouring into the starboard side now poured over the boat deck, over the bridge, over the crow’s nest, over everything that had been above the waterline and was now below it. The ship was gone. The boats were gone. The people who had not been in the six boats that launched, or in the water, or on rafts of debris, were gone with them.

The stern hung in the air for a moment, vertical or nearly so, a wall of black steel and riveted plate and the painted name that was now underwater. Then it slid. The sea took it. The boats that had been launched were scattered across a mile of ocean, some upright, some overturned, some swamped, some with survivors clinging to their hulls. The boats that had not been launched were gone. They were in the water, but not on it. They were below it, still attached to the davits of a ship that was descending toward the seabed three hundred feet below, carrying their wooden hulls and their canvas sides and their unused ropes and their unused capacity and the unused lives of the people who had stood beside them on a deck that was no longer there.