The First Boats to Queenstown (Afternoon, 7 May 1915)

Behind him, fishing boats were already nosing out of Queenstown harbor, their skippers steering toward the column of smoke on the southern horizon without knowing what they would find. The sea off the Old Head of Kinsale held two scenes at once that afternoon, separated by a few miles of cold water and by the entire distance between a man’s duty and a man’s escape. On the rocky shore below the lighthouse, a lifeboat, cracked and half-swamped, carrying perhaps a dozen survivors in various stages of exposure, grounded against the stones at roughly half past three.

Men and women who had been drinking coffee or walking the promenade deck an hour before were now crawling over each other to reach solid ground, their clothes plastered to their bodies, the water streaming from them still carrying the smell of coal dust and steam. Some could not stand. Some could not speak. A woman sat in the bottom of the boat with her dead child across her lap and would not release the small body when the fishermen reached down to help her up.

A few miles to the east, the periscope of U-20 was sliding below the surface for the last time. Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger had made his log entry. He had noted the torpedo strike, the second explosion, the rapid settling of the great liner by the bow. He had recorded the boats that did not launch and the people he could see in the water. His account was clinical, precise, and complete in the way that a mission report is complete: it described what happened to the target and what the attacker did next. It did not describe what happened to the people in the water after the submarine departed. That was not his subject.

His subject was the patrol, and the patrol was over. U-20 turned east-northeast, toward the open sea and the long transit home to Wilhelmshaven. Her fuel was low. Her torpedo tubes were empty. The crew was already looking past the event.

The contrast was total. On one side of that few miles of water, the disaster was just beginning. On the other, it was already finished. The people on the rocks and in the swamped boats did not know that the submarine was leaving. They did not know whether another torpedo would come. They knew only that the ship was gone, that the sea was full of people, and that the help they could see, fishing boats, coastal craft, small steamers coming from Queenstown, was not enough and was not fast enough.

The RMS Lusitania had been on her 202nd transatlantic crossing, bound for Liverpool from New York and scheduled to dock at the Prince’s Landing Stage that afternoon. Aboard her were 1, 264 passengers, three stowaways, and a crew of 693, totalling 1, 960 people. She was also carrying around 173 tons of war supplies, including 4.2 million rounds of rifle ammunition. Instead she went down in eighteen minutes, roughly eleven nautical miles off the Old Head of Kinsale. Despite being relatively close to shore, it took several hours for help to arrive from the Irish coast. By the time help arrived, many in the fifty-two-degree water had succumbed to the cold.

The first responders were not naval vessels. They were fishermen, lobstermen, and coastal traders who saw the column of smoke or heard the wireless signals and turned their boats toward the disturbance. The Bluebell was among the first. She was a small fishing craft, out of Queenstown or one of the neighboring coves, and her master pushed her into the debris field without hesitation. The Julia came alongside soon after. These were not rescue vessels. They had no medical equipment, no blankets, no capacity for the numbers they would encounter. They were working boats with holds that smelled of fish and bilge, and their crews pulled survivors from the water with their hands, with gaffs, with rope loops lowered over the gunwales.

The sea they entered was a scene that none of them had been prepared for by any experience. The water was strewn with wreckage: deck chairs, planking, hatch covers, lifebelts, cushions, paper, clothing, and the personal effects of nearly two thousand people scattered across a square mile of ocean. The bodies came next. Some were floating face down. Others floated face up, their faces blackened by smoke or distorted by the cold. Children were among them. The fishermen of the southern Irish coast knew the sea, and they knew death in the sea, but they had not seen it in this quantity and they had not seen it like this, the sudden, wholesale deposit of an entire ship’s company into eleven-degree water, with no warning and no preparation and no shelter.

The Bluebell took aboard what she could. Her master made the only decision available to him: he filled every space on the boat that could hold a person and then turned toward Queenstown. Among the survivors he pulled from the water, some were conscious. Others were not. A few were dead, and he did not know it until he tried to lift them and their weight was wrong, their limbs stiff, their skin the color that skin becomes when the blood has stopped circulating. He left those where they were. He could not save the dead. He could barely save the living. The Julia did the same, and other small craft whose names were not always recorded did the same, and the pattern of the afternoon’s rescue was set in those first minutes: each boat took what it could, left what it could not, and made for shore.

The grimness of this calculus is not a criticism of the men who made it. No authority had trained them for mass casualty rescue. No protocol existed. Their boats sat low in the water and were never designed to carry more than a working crew and a catch. The decision to leave a body floating in order to take a living person aboard was not a decision anyone articulated in those terms. It was simply what happened, over and over, as each boat reached its capacity and the sea continued to hold more people than all the boats combined could carry.

The larger vessels from Queenstown arrived later. HMS Heron, a naval patrol boat, was among the first of the organized flotilla to reach the scene. The tug Warrior came with her. These were sturdier vessels, better suited to the work, but they arrived into a situation that had already deteriorated past the point where sturdy vessels were enough. The people in the water had been there for an hour or more. The water temperature was eleven degrees Celsius, cold enough to kill a grown adult in twenty to thirty minutes, cold enough to kill a child or an elderly person much faster. By the time the Heron and the Warrior reached the debris field, many of those in the water were beyond rescue.

The masters of these vessels faced a scene that no amount of naval preparedness could have fully addressed. The sea was full of people, some still clinging to wreckage, some in lifeboats that were overloaded and taking water, some in the water itself with nothing beneath them but their lifebelts and the cold. The Heron’s captain had to decide where to go first, which boats to tow, which people to pull aboard, and which to leave for the next vessel. Every decision had a cost. Every minute spent pulling survivors from one section of the debris field was a minute not spent pulling survivors from another. The people he could not reach immediately were dying while he worked, and he knew it, and his crew knew it, and there was nothing to be done about it except to work faster and to make the choices as they came.

The Warrior took boats in tow. Overloaded lifeboats, still carrying twenty or thirty people each, were lashed to the tug’s stern and pulled toward Queenstown at whatever speed the tug could manage. The people in those boats had survived the sinking. They had survived the water. They were now surviving the transit, which was its own ordeal: the cold wind across the open deck of a lifeboat, the wet clothes, the shock, the injuries sustained during the scramble to get off the ship. Some of them died in the boats while the Warrior towed them. Some of them died as the boats were being unloaded at the quay in Queenstown. The line between survivor and casualty was not fixed. It moved with the cold and the shock and the time it took to get from the debris field to the harbor.

What the rescue vessels delivered to Queenstown was not a coherent account of what had happened. The survivors who came ashore were in no condition to provide one. They were cold, injured, traumatized, and in many cases unable to distinguish the sequence of events that had put them in the water. Two torpedoes, said one. One, said the next. The ship blew up, said a third. It simply went down, said a fourth. The boats were lowered badly. The boats were not lowered at all. The captain was on deck. The captain was not. The first reports carried inland from the harbor were fragmentary, contradictory, and shaped by shock, and they would prove remarkably resistant to correction in the days that followed.

This incoherence was not a failure of the survivors. It was the product of the experience itself. The Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes. The people who got off the ship did so in conditions of extreme violence and confusion: the list, the overturned boats, the people falling from the deck, the second explosion whose origin no one could explain. They entered the water from different points on the ship, at different times, and they saw different things.

A man in Boat 14 saw one thing. A woman clinging to a hatch cover saw another. A child pulled from the water by the Julia saw nothing at all except the cold and the fear. When these people reached Queenstown, they told what they had seen, and what they had seen was not the same event. It was fragments of an event, seen from different angles, at different moments, through different lenses of terror and pain.

The rescue flotilla grew as the afternoon wore on. More vessels came from Queenstown, from Cobh, from the Royal Navy depot, from the fishing communities along the coast. By late afternoon the debris field was being swept by a dozen boats, and the living were being separated from the dead, and the dead were being left where the sea had put them because there was no room for them on the rescue vessels and no time to stop for them. This was the triage that no one had planned and no one had trained for. It was made on the water, by men in small boats, in real time, with no guidance from any authority on shore.

The Admiralty’s conduct in the hours after the sinking would come under scrutiny in the weeks that followed. The question of whether more could have been done, whether rescue vessels should have been dispatched sooner, whether the naval presence in the area was adequate to the threat that the Admiralty knew existed, these questions would be asked. They would be asked at the Mersey inquiry and in the press and in the diplomatic correspondence between Washington and Berlin. But on the afternoon of 7 May, on the water off the Old Head of Kinsale, there was no inquiry. Only boats and people and the cold sea and the choices that the boatmen and the naval officers had to make as they found them.

The German embassy in the United States had placed fifty newspaper advertisements warning people of the dangers of sailing on a British ship in the area. The warning had been printed. It had been published in New York newspapers just as the Lusitania departed on 1 May. Whether it constituted fair warning or legal cover or propaganda was a question for diplomats and lawyers. On the water, it was irrelevant. The people in the water had read the warning or had not read it, and they were in the water regardless, and the warning did not warm them or dry them or bring them to shore any faster.

The second explosion, the one that followed the torpedo strike, the one that no survivor could explain and that Schwieger’s log did not fully account for, remained a question. Some survivors described it as a second torpedo. Others recalled an internal blast, a boiler, a coal dust detonation, something in the cargo. The cargo included 4, 200 cases of rifle cartridges, munition that would later become a point of contention between Cunard, the Admiralty, and the German government.

But on the afternoon of 7 May, the second explosion was not a point of contention. It was a memory, or a sensation, or a blank where a memory should have been. The people who had been near it did not describe it clearly because they had not experienced it clearly. They had heard a sound and felt a shock and been thrown or submerged or deafened, and what they carried away from it was not an explanation but a bodily impression of force and heat and noise that no later inquiry would fully resolve.

The rescue vessels that reached the debris field found, among the living and the dead, the evidence of the ship’s last minutes. Lifebelts that had been put on incorrectly, or not put on at all. Children who had been separated from their parents in the rush to the boats. Dining room passengers who had climbed to the boat deck only to find the list already so severe that the port-side boats hung against the hull and could not be lowered. Those who had jumped from the rail.

Those washed off the deck as the bow went under. Those who had climbed down the hull on ropes and deck chairs and anything that would hold their weight. The rescue boats collected all of these, and what they collected was not a narrative but a population, shocked, cold, injured, and carrying in their bodies the physical record of the ship’s last eighteen minutes.

The Heron and the Warrior and the Bluebell and the Julia and the other craft whose names were recorded or lost worked the debris field until there was no one left to pull from the water. The living had been taken aboard or had been left because they were beyond saving. The dead remained. The sea would give them up in the days that followed, washed ashore on the rocks below the Old Head, found by fishing boats, recovered by naval vessels sweeping the area. But on the afternoon of 7 May, the dead were still in the water, and the rescue boats were turning toward Queenstown with their cargoes of the living, and the living were not speaking in coherent sentences because coherent sentences were not available to people who had been through what they had been through.

The flotilla made for Queenstown at whatever speed each vessel could manage. The small fishing boats were slow. The Warrior, towing lifeboats, was slower. The Heron could move faster but had to navigate through the debris field with care, because the water was full of wreckage that could foul her screws or hole her hull. The transit from the debris field to Queenstown took hours. During those hours, people in the boats continued to die.

The cold did not stop when they were pulled from the water. The shock did not stop. The injuries did not stop. The rescue was not a single event but a process, and the process had its own casualties, and the people who survived the sinking and the water and the transit were the people who survived the transit, and the people who did not survive the transit were added to the dead without ceremony or record.

By the day’s end, 767 passengers and crew from the Lusitania had been rescued and landed at Queenstown, though four died shortly after. The final death toll for the disaster came to a catastrophic number. Of the 1, 960 aboard at the time of her sinking, 1, 197 had been lost, including 94 children and about 128 Americans.

As the afternoon light began to fail, the first of the rescue boats entered Queenstown harbor. The port was not ready for them. Queenstown was a small town with a small harbor and a naval depot, and its facilities for receiving mass casualties were, to put it plainly, nonexistent. No plans existed for this. No protocols had been drafted. No stockpiles of blankets or medical supplies or mortuary space had been laid by. There were people, the townspeople, the naval personnel, the doctors and nurses who could be mustered, and the buildings that could be pressed into service, and the harbor itself, and that was what Queenstown had.

The survivors who came ashore were carried or helped up the quays. Some could walk. Many could not. They were taken to whatever spaces were available: the seamen’s institute, the railway hotel, private houses, the naval barracks. The dead who had been brought in, or who died on the quays, were taken to the Cunard storage sheds at the waterfront, where the harbor’s cargo was normally held. The sheds were stone and timber, cold and drafty, and they were not morgues. But they were what Queenstown had, and the dead were taken there because there was nowhere else to take them.

The overloaded rescue boats steamed into Queenstown at dusk, delivering a shock of physical and human wreckage that the port’s ad-hoc systems must now receive.