The Names on the Pier

Two realities occupied the same ground in Queenstown. In the town’s custom sheds and sailing-rooms, on the piers and in the warehouses behind the harbor, bodies lay in rows on straw spread over stone floors, a logistical problem of scale that confronted coroners, clergy, and Cunard officials from the moment the first rescue vessels began returning to port. And in the hands of a clerk stooping over one of those bodies, a monogrammed handkerchief pulled from a pocket, or a ring on a finger too swollen to remove, became the fragile instrument by which a number might become a name.

The dead had been recovered from the sea over days. Fishing boats carried some in. Naval vessels hauled others from the water. A few were found floating at distances that astonished the men who found them. The Cunard line had offered cash rewards to local fishermen and sea merchants for bodies floating throughout the Irish Sea, and bodies had been recovered as far away as the Welsh coast.

Only 289 bodies were recovered. Of the 1, 198 passengers and crew who had sailed from New York on 1 May, the rest remained in the Atlantic, and the proportion of the dead to the recovered was itself a fact that settled over Queenstown like weather.

The town was small. Queenstown had served as an embarkation port for emigrants leaving Ireland for America, and its piers and harbor buildings had been built for the living. Now those structures served the dead. The Cunard Steamship Company dispatched officials from Liverpool. The local coroner, a man named J.J. Cotter, opened inquests. Clergy of several denominations moved through the sheds performing last rites. The work was systematic and it was improvisational. No facility in Queenstown had been designed to hold more than a few bodies at a time, and the scale of the disaster required the conversion of every available covered space into a temporary morgue.

The process of identification followed a pattern that was both bureaucratic and intimate. Each body was assigned a number. A clerk or coroner’s assistant recorded a description: sex, approximate age, height, color of hair, clothing, and any distinguishing marks such as scars, tattoos, birthmarks. Personal effects were catalogued: wallets, letters, watches, rings, eyeglasses, passports, ship’s tickets, keys, coins. Where a body carried papers bearing a name, identification was straightforward. Where it carried only a manufacturer’s label or a laundry mark, the process required correspondence, telegrams, and the slow machinery of cross-referencing against Cunard’s passenger lists and crew registers. Many bodies carried nothing. The sea had stripped them of possessions, or of the clothing that might have held possessions, and these were numbered and described and left, for the moment, unnamed.

The passengers aboard the RMS Lusitania had been, in life, a cross-section of the Atlantic world. Among them were American publisher Charles Lauriat, wealthy art collector and nationalist Sir Hugh Lane, and socialite Theodate Pope, names that carried weight in the newspapers of London and New York. Sir Hugh Lane had been carrying paintings, or was believed to have been carrying paintings, and his disappearance would generate speculation about lost canvases that would outlive the immediate grief. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, one of the wealthiest men in America, had been aboard. Charles Frohman, the theatrical producer who had brought Peter Pan to the stage, had been aboard. Their names appeared in the newspapers within days, and their fates, confirmed or unconfirmed, became the entry point through which the public encountered the disaster.

But the lists that grew in the Queenstown sheds and in the pages of the Cork Examiner, the Irish Times, the New York Times, and the Times of London were not lists of the famous alone. They were lists that ran to hundreds of names, and the names belonged to nurses and stewardesses, to firemen and trimmers, to children traveling with families, to single women traveling alone, to businessmen and teachers and musicians and infants whose names, in some cases, had to be reconstructed from passenger manifests because no one survived who could confirm which child had been which.

The juxtaposition was relentless and it was public. A reader opening a newspaper in London or New York on 11 or 12 May 1915 would find, side by side, the name of Alfred Vanderbilt and the name of a stewardess from Liverpool, the name of a theatrical producer and the name of a child from Illinois. The lists did not distinguish by class or prominence. They were alphabetical or chronological, and the effect of reading them, of scanning a column of names printed in tight type and understanding that each name corresponded to a body on straw in a shed in Queenstown, or to a body still in the water, was to transform the disaster from an event measured in numbers into an event measured in people. The abstract casualty figure, 1, 198 dead, became, through the mechanism of the published list, a concatenation of specific losses.

For the officials present, the work was a grim administrative duty performed under pressure. The coroner’s inquests required formal procedure. Bodies had to be examined, described, and released. Cunard’s representatives had to manage the logistics of identification, correspondence with next of kin, and the arrangement of burials or transport of remains. The town’s resources were stretched. Coffins had to be procured. Cemetery space had to be found. The harbor had to be kept functioning even as its sheds were full of the dead. The officials worked long hours, and the record of their work survives in the form of inquest depositions, Cunard correspondence, and the published lists themselves.

For the families, the process was a private agony made public. Relatives traveled to Queenstown from England, from Ireland, from America. They arrived at the sheds and were conducted through rows of bodies, looking for a face or a detail that would confirm what they already feared. Some found their dead. Some found bodies they could not identify with certainty, and the uncertainty, the possibility that a loved one might be among the unrecovered, or among those too damaged or too stripped by the sea to be recognized, extended the ordeal beyond the point of physical endurance. The Cunard lists were incomplete. They were updated daily, names added and names corrected, and a family that found no name on Tuesday might find it on Wednesday, or might never find it.

The identification process relied on objects. A monogrammed handkerchief, a distinctive ring, a watch with an inscription, a letter in a pocket, a ship’s pass pinned inside a coat: these were the evidentiary basis on which names were attached to bodies. The objects were small. They had been carried on the person, in pockets and purses and waistcoat bands, and they had survived when the bodies that carried them had been in the water for days. The sea had taken clothing from some, and the clothing that remained was often the only means of identification. A manufacturer’s label in a suit could be traced to a tailor, and the tailor could be traced to a customer, but the process was slow and it failed more often than it succeeded.

The bodies that were never recovered presented a different kind of absence. Of the 1, 198 dead, the 289 bodies that were brought to Queenstown represented less than a quarter. The rest were in the sea, or had been carried by currents to coasts that had not yet been searched, or would never be found. For the families of the unrecovered, there was no shed to visit, no body to identify, no object to claim. When officials could not confirm that a body had been found, families could not confirm that a death had occurred, and the line between hope and torment dissolved.

The published lists grew. They appeared in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, and they were read with an intensity that ordinary casualty reports did not receive. The lists included the names of prominent figures, Vanderbilt and Frohman, and these names drew readers who might otherwise have passed over a shipping disaster. But the lists also included the names of ordinary passengers and crew, and the juxtaposition of the famous and the obscure, printed in the same column, in the same type, had the effect of democratizing the loss. The reader who came to the list looking for Vanderbilt’s name found, in the adjacent line, the name of a fireman or a nurse, and the finding was a kind of education.

The effect on public opinion was immediate. In Britain, the lists of names were read alongside the German embassy’s warning, which had appeared in New York newspapers on the morning of the Lusitania’s departure, and alongside the reports of the second explosion, which witnesses had described and which would become a subject of speculation and investigation. The names gave the disaster a human face that the casualty figure alone could not. In America, the lists included the names of American citizens, and the proportion of American dead, more than a hundred, transformed the sinking from a British tragedy into an American one. The lists were read in the context of the first Lusitania note, which cited attacks on three other ships, the Falaba, the Cushing, and the Gulflight, and affirmed the right of Americans to travel as passengers on merchant ships of any nationality, reaffirming the doctrine of strict accountability.

The German response to the sinking attempted to frame the Lusitania as a legitimate military target. The German Foreign Office, under State Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow, alleged that the Lusitania had been armed, which she had not, and that she had been carrying contraband, which she had, in the form of 4, 200 cases of rifle cartridges, a fact that would surface in the inquiry and in the cargo manifests. Von Jagow further alleged that the Lusitania had been under orders to ram enemy submarines, a practice that would have violated the Cruiser Rules governing naval engagement.

These claims were made in the context of a German submarine campaign that had been launched in response to the British blockade, and in the wake of the German embassy’s printed warning, which had been published in American newspapers on 1 May, the day of the Lusitania’s departure. The German government’s attempts to defend the attack only increased anger, and the lists of names being published in the newspapers made the defense appear, to the reading public, as an exercise in adding insult to a grievous wound.

The identification process in Queenstown was, in its way, a mechanism of transformation. It took the abstract, a number, a statistic, a casualty figure, and rendered it concrete. The bodies on the straw, the objects in the pockets, the names on the lists: these were the means by which the Lusitania ceased to be an incident and became a collection of specific human endings.

Each name on the list was a person who had boarded the ship at Pier 54 in New York, who had walked up the gangway, who had settled into a cabin or a stateroom, who had eaten dinner on the evening of 1 May, who had walked the decks as the ship passed the Irish coast on the morning of 7 May. Each name was a person who had been in the water eighteen minutes after the torpedo struck, or who had been below decks when the second explosion came, or who had been in a lifeboat that could not be launched.

The lists did not distinguish between those who had been killed by the torpedo, those who had been killed by the second explosion, those who had drowned, and those who had died of exposure in the water. The lists did not assign responsibility. They simply recorded the dead. But the recording itself, the act of naming, of publishing, of making the loss specific and legible, was a form of accusation. The names on the pier in Queenstown, carried into print, became the evidence against which every subsequent defense, every subsequent inquiry, and every subsequent diplomatic note would be measured.

The work in the sheds continued through the middle of May. Bodies continued to arrive. The lists continued to grow. The coroner’s inquests proceeded, and the depositions taken from survivors and officials formed a record that would be drawn upon in the formal investigations to come. The Cunard officials present in Queenstown were performing a duty that was simultaneously humanitarian and corporate, the care of the dead and the management of liability, and the tension between these functions was visible in the way the work was done. Identification was a service to the families. It was also a defense against claims. Every body identified, every effect catalogued, every name confirmed was a piece of evidence in a case that had not yet been formally opened but that everyone present knew was coming.

The bodies that could not be identified were buried in Queenstown. The burials took place at the Old Church Cemetery on the hill above the harbor, and the graves were marked with numbers rather than names. The numbers corresponded to the descriptions recorded by the clerks: the height, the hair color, the clothing, the distinguishing marks. These descriptions were kept in the hope that someone, eventually, might come forward to claim a body that had been buried without a name. Some were claimed. Most were not.

The effect of the lists, and of the images from Queenstown, was to harden public opinion in a way that the casualty figure alone could not have done. The figure 1, 198 was a number. It was a large number, but it was abstract, and abstract numbers do not sustain moral outrage over time. The names were different. The names were specific. They belonged to people who had lived in specific places, who had worked at specific trades, who had been traveling for specific reasons.

The names could be looked up. They had addresses. They had families. The names made the sinking personal, not in the sense that every reader had known a victim, but in the sense that every reader could imagine a victim, because the victims were not a mass but a collection of individuals, each with a name and a story, and the stories were being told in the newspapers alongside the lists.

The transition from escalation to outcome was visible in the physical transformation of Queenstown itself. The town that had received the survivors now held the dead. The sheds that had been improvised as first-aid stations were now morgues. The piers that had received the rescue vessels now received the boats carrying bodies. The harbor that had been a place of departure for emigrants was now a place of arrival for the drowned. The town’s identity had changed, and the change was permanent. Queenstown would be associated with the Lusitania for as long as the names on the lists were read, and the names would be read for as long as the disaster mattered, and the disaster would matter for as long as the questions of responsibility and accountability remained unresolved.

The questions were already forming. The cargo of rifle cartridges in the Lusitania’s holds, 4, 200 cases of Remington. 303 caliber ammunition shipped by the J.P. Morgan firm and listed on the manifest, was a fact that would surface in the inquiry and in the press, and it would complicate the moral picture. The Admiralty’s conduct, the failure to provide Captain Turner with a precise warning, the absence of an escort, the signals that had been sent and not sent, was a subject that would be examined in detail in the investigations to come. Room 40’s decrypts of German signals, which had revealed U-boat activity off the Irish coast, were a secret that would not surface for decades. But these questions were, in the middle of May 1915, still in the future. What was present, in Queenstown, was the immediate reality of the dead.

The lists grew. The names accumulated. The dead were counted and described and, where possible, identified. The process was meticulous and it was agonizing and it was necessary, because without the names, the dead were a mass, and a mass could be abstracted, and an abstraction could be debated, and a debate could be deferred. The names prevented deferral. They made the loss specific, and the specific loss demanded a specific response.

By 14 May, the lists had been published in newspapers across Britain and America. The names of the identified dead ran in columns. The names of the missing, those whose bodies had not been recovered, ran in separate columns, and the distinction between the two categories was itself a source of anguish for families who could not determine which column contained the name of their relative. The lists were incomplete. They were corrected and updated. They contained errors, names misspelled, names duplicated, names attached to the wrong descriptions. But they were, for all their imperfection, the record. They were the means by which the dead were reclaimed from the sea and returned to the world of the living, and they were the means by which the living were confronted with the cost.

The names on the pier in Queenstown, the names of the identified and the numbers of the unidentified, the names of the famous and the names of the obscure, the names of the passengers and the names of the crew, constituted a ledger. The ledger was not a legal document. It was not an inquiry transcript or a diplomatic note or a war diary. It was a list of dead people, compiled by clerks and coroners in a small Irish port, and it was published in newspapers, and it was read by millions. The ledger transformed private loss into public fact. And the public fact, once established, could not be unmade. The dead were named. The cost was counted. The demands for accountability followed.