The Cold That Seized the Chest

The boats that had not been launched were gone. Gone down with the hull, still cradled in their davits, descending through three hundred feet of water toward the seabed. The ropes that should have lowered them hung slack. The canvas that should have been stretched taut across their frames was folding inward under pressure. The capacity they carried, the empty seats and the unused buoyancy, was descending with them. So were the possibilities those seats had represented. The people who had stood beside them on a deck that was no longer there had been cast into the water or were still on the ship, and the ship was going down.

The official record of the Celtic Sea for 7 May 1915 gives the water temperature as approximately fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Twelve degrees on the Celsius scale. A figure that belongs to the calm language of maritime logs and hydrographic offices, a number that sits on a page the way a temperature sits on a thermometer, neutral, measured, indifferent to what it means for a human body immersed in it. The same water, felt rather than recorded, struck those who entered it as a physical blow. Survivors spoke of a shock that seized the chest and stopped the breath, a grip that clamped the limbs and began at once to draw the warmth from the body’s core. The cold was not gradual. It did not ask permission. It took hold with the immediacy of a hand closing on a throat.

The Lusitania’s stern rose. That is the phrase survivors returned to, the image that organized their accounts of the final minutes. The ship had been listing to starboard since the torpedo struck, the deck tilting beneath the feet of passengers who had climbed to the port side seeking higher ground. Now the bow went down. The stern came up. The great vessel, seven hundred and eighty-five feet long, four funnels still standing, reared nearly vertical in the afternoon light, and for a moment the full architecture of the ship was visible to those in the boats and those in the water. Rows of portholes caught the sun. The promenade decks stood at angles that made them look like shelves. The bridge wings jutted outward from a wall of steel. The name painted in gold on the stern, Lusitania, remained legible to anyone close enough to read it.

Oliver Bernard, who had been standing on deck and who survived by swimming, described the scene in terms that returned again and again to the spectacle of the ship’s final posture. The stern rose until the three remaining funnels pointed toward the sky at an angle that made them look like chimneys on a tilted house. Then the foremost funnel, stressed beyond what its stays could bear, tore free and crashed into the sea. Bernard described the sound. He described the displacement of water, the wave that radiated outward from the point of impact, the additional violence visited on those already struggling in the swell.

The funnel’s fall was not a detail. It was a mechanism. A ship of the Lusitania’s displacement, more than thirty thousand tons, does not sink quietly. As the hull descended, it displaced water downward and outward, creating currents that pulled floating objects and swimming persons toward the void the hull left behind. Survivors who had been in the water spoke of being drawn under, of the sensation of the sea opening beneath them, of fighting against a pull that was not current or tide but the simple physics of a massive body sinking through a fluid medium. The suction was not uniform. It was strongest near the ship and diminished with distance, but for those within a few hundred feet, those who had jumped from the decks in the final minutes, those spilled from boats that overturned, the drag was immediate and powerful.

Some were pulled under and came back up. Some were pulled under and did not.

The ship’s final descent took approximately eighteen minutes from the moment of the torpedo’s impact. That figure, eighteen minutes, would become the book’s organizing interval, the span of time in which a functioning passenger liner transformed into wreckage on the seabed. But the final plunge, the moment when the stern rose and the ship slid beneath the surface, occupied only a fraction of that span. Perhaps two minutes. Perhaps three. The survivors’ accounts do not agree on the precise duration, because time, under such conditions, is not a sequence of equal intervals but a series of overwhelming impressions. The stern rising. The funnel falling. The ship disappearing. The silence after.

From the lifeboats that had cleared the ship, the view was panoramic and terrible. Those who had been successfully lowered, all from the starboard side, watched the vessel’s final moments from a distance that reduced the spectacle to something almost geometric. The hull stood on end. The funnels were lines against the sky. The people on the decks were no longer individually visible but were suggested by the dark shapes that separated from the hull and fell. Lifeboat 1 had overturned as it was being lowered, spilling its original occupants into the sea, but righted itself shortly after, and those who climbed back into it now watched the ship go down from a vessel that had nearly killed them itself. Lifeboats 9 and 11, with only a handful of people aboard, and Lifeboats 13 and 15, dangerously overloaded with around 150 people, also witnessed the final plunge from the water.

Theodate Pope, a passenger who had been traveling in first class, was among those thrown into the water during the launching of a boat. She survived by clinging to wreckage. Her account, given later, described the moment of the ship’s disappearance as a kind of physical event in the water, a disturbance, a swell, a movement that reached the floating survivors even at a distance. The sea did not simply close over the ship. The sea reacted. The displacement sent a wave outward, rocking the boats, tossing the swimmers, mixing the people and the debris into a single churning field.

From the deck itself, in the final minutes, the perspective was vertical rather than horizontal. Those who remained on board, passengers who had not found boats, crew members who had stayed at their stations, people who had been trapped below or who had climbed to the highest points of the ship as the list increased, experienced the sinking as a steepening of the ground beneath their feet. The deck became a wall. The rail became a floor. People slid. People climbed. People held to stanchions and ventilators and any fixed object that offered a handhold, and as the angle increased, the holding became a matter of hanging, and then of falling.

The ship’s interior, in those final minutes, was a space in which the ordinary assumptions of architecture had inverted. Floors became walls. Stairwells became shafts. Doors that had been designed to open outward now opened downward, or would not open at all against the pressure of water or the torsion of the hull. Passengers who had retreated to interior spaces, cabins, dining saloons, public rooms, found themselves in rooms that tilted, that filled with water entering through portholes and doors and ventilators, rooms in which the furniture had slid to one end and the light, where there was light, came from directions that no longer corresponded to the design.

The ship’s electric power failed in stages. The lights went out in the lower decks first, then in the public rooms, then on the promenade decks. For a period, survivors could not agree on how long, the bridge and the wireless room retained power, the lights burning in the upper works of a ship that was already half submerged. Then those too went dark. The wireless operator had sent his distress signals. The signals had been received. Help was coming, but help was hours away, and the ship had minutes.

Captain William Turner was on the bridge. The testimony is not clear about precisely when he left it. Turner survived the sinking, and his subsequent account placed him on the ship until the final plunge, but the details of his movements in the last minutes are inconsistent across the records. What is clear is that the bridge, as the stern rose, became a position from which there was no easy descent. The deck below was tilted past the angle of footing. The sea was coming up.

The ship went down. The bow struck the seabed, three hundred feet below the surface, and the stern, still above water, began to settle. The hull, in its final moments, may have planed through the water in a manner that survivors described as a second surge of motion, a forward lurch before the final descent. The record is not precise. What is precise is the outcome: at approximately twenty-eight minutes past two in the afternoon, the RMS Lusitania was gone. The ship had travelled about two nautical miles from the point of the torpedoing to her final resting place, leaving a trail of debris and people behind.

The aftermath of the sinking was not silence. It was noise. The sea, where the ship had been, was covered with people and objects. Deck chairs, lifebelts, decking planks, hatch covers, spars, boxes, cushions, papers, clothing, the inventory of a liner’s contents scattered across the surface. People clung to what they could. People swam toward boats. People called out. People went quiet.

The water temperature, that fifty-five-degree figure from the hydrographic record, now began its lethal work in earnest. The human body, immersed in water at that temperature, loses heat rapidly. The first response is hyperventilation, an involuntary gasping that can cause drowning if the face is submerged. The second is the constriction of blood vessels in the limbs, redirecting blood toward the core. The third is the loss of manual dexterity, then the loss of muscle control, then the loss of consciousness. In water at fifty-five degrees, these stages can unfold within twenty to thirty minutes. Many of the people in the water had been strong swimmers. Many were young. Many were not. The cold did not discriminate. It worked on the strong and the weak, the young and the old, with the same patient efficiency.

The boats that had been successfully lowered, all from the starboard side, were now the only organized refuge on the surface. They were not enough. The RMS Lusitania had carried enough lifeboats for a fraction of her occupants. The boats that had been launched were fewer still. Some had overturned. Some had been swamped. Some were filled to capacity and could not take more swimmers. The people in the water who reached a boat and found no room held to the gunwales until their hands failed. Then they let go. Then they went under.

The suction created by the sinking ship was a subject of dispute in later testimony. Some survivors described being pulled under forcefully. Others reported no suction at all. The discrepancy may reflect the physics of the sinking: the drag would have been greatest near the hull and negligible at distance. Those who jumped from the stern in the final minutes would have been closest to the descending hull and most exposed to the displacement currents. Those who had been in boats a hundred yards away would have felt nothing. Both accounts could be accurate. Both accounts were given under oath.

The second explosion, which had followed the torpedo by seconds, had blown debris and people into the air. That debris was now in the water, mixed with the wreckage of the ship’s final breakup and the contents of cabins and storerooms that had opened as the hull twisted. The surface of the sea, for a mile in every direction, was a field of material. Some of it was useful for flotation. Some of it was not. The distinction, for those in the water, was immediate and practical and had nothing to do with the object’s origin or purpose. A deck chair that floated was a lifeline. A steel plate that sank was a death sentence.

The people in the boats watched. This is the testimony that comes through most consistently across the survivor accounts: the experience of watching from a small boat as the ship went down, as the people in the water called for help, as the calls diminished. The boats were few. The boats were full. The people in the boats had survived, and their survival was in many cases a matter of chance, the chance of being on the starboard side, the chance of finding a boat that could be lowered, the chance of not being thrown out during the launch. They could not save everyone. They could not save most. They could not save many.

The panorama of the sinking, seen from those boats, was a scene that would be described in different terms by different witnesses, but whose essential elements were consistent. The ship stood on end. The funnel fell. The ship slid beneath the surface. The sea closed over it. The people in the water called out. The calls diminished. The sea, at fifty-five degrees, did its work.

The cold was the second killer. The first was the sinking itself: the initial explosions, the list, the failure of the boat-launching operation, the final plunge and its hydrodynamic forces. But the cold was the killer that continued working after the ship was gone. It worked on the people in the water. It worked on the people in the boats, who were wet and exposed to the wind. It worked on the children, whose small bodies lost heat faster than adults’. It worked on the elderly, whose cardiovascular systems were less resilient to the shock of immersion. It worked on the injured, whose wounds were compounded by the cold. It worked on everyone who was wet, for as long as they were wet, until rescue arrived or until it did not.

The rescue vessels were coming. The distress signals had been received in Queenstown and in other ports along the Irish coast. Tugs, trawlers, and fishing boats were being dispatched. But the nearest vessel was still an hour away, perhaps more, and the people in the water did not have an hour. The mathematics of hypothermia, in water at fifty-five degrees, gave them twenty to thirty minutes before loss of consciousness. The mathematics of rescue gave them something longer than that. The gap between those two figures was the space in which people died.

The RMS Lusitania’s sinking was not a single event. It was a sequence: the torpedo, the second explosion, the list, the failure to launch boats, the final plunge, the suction, the cold. Each stage produced its own casualties. The people who survived the torpedo and the explosion and the list and the plunge and the suction still had to survive the cold. Many did not.

The death toll, which would be fixed at one thousand one hundred ninety-eight, included people who died at every stage of the sequence. The explosion killed some. Falling debris killed others. The list killed those trapped below decks as the ship tilted. The final plunge killed more. The suction killed still more. The cold killed the rest. Drowning, which is to say the combination of all these forces, the exhaustion, the cold, the inability to hold on, the inability to swim, the inability to breathe, killed them all.

The sea, after the ship was gone, was a field of people. Some were alive. Some were dead. Some were dying. The boats moved among them. The boats that could pick up swimmers did. The boats that were full did not, or could not. The people in the water who could reach a boat did. The people who could not did not. The sea was cold. The sea was calm. The calm was the condition that made the cold lethal, a calm sea does not kill by violence but by patience, by the slow, steady extraction of heat from a body that cannot replace it.

The Old Head of Kinsale was visible from the site of the sinking. The lighthouse, the headland, the green fields of County Cork. The ship had been ten miles off the Old Head when the torpedo struck. The land was close enough to see. The land was not close enough to swim to. The distance between the visible shore and the people in the water was the distance between hope and its absence. Some survivors reported that they could see the coast. Some reported that they could see people on the coast. No one on the shore could reach them in time.

The people in the water were distributed across a mile of ocean. Some were near the boats. Some were far from any boat. Some were alone. Some were in groups, holding to the same piece of wreckage, calling to each other, losing their grip one by one as the cold took their hands. The sea held them. The cold held them. The distance held them. They were scattered across a field of water that was calm and blue and fifty-five degrees and indifferent to the fact that it was full of people who were dying.

The boats that had been launched were scattered across that same mile of ocean. Some floated upright, half full of water. Others had turned over, hulls pointing skyward. A few were swamped beyond use. Here and there, survivors clung to the overturned keels. The boats that had not been launched were gone. They had gone down with the ship, still seated in their davits, descending through three hundred feet of water. Their wooden hulls and canvas sides and coiled ropes and empty seats traveled with the hull toward the seabed. The unused capacity traveled with them. So did the chances of survival for the people who had stood beside those boats on a deck that no longer existed.

The ship was gone. The people remained. The sea held them in its cold embrace, and the embrace tightened with every minute that passed before the rescue boats arrived. A man clung to a deck chair in the cold water, gasping. His fingers had gone white. The Atlantic held the living and the dead in a grip that tightened with each minute before rescue arrived.