Lusitania (4 page)

Wagons and carts delivered goods needed to sustain life during the liner’s seven-day voyage. Passenger bookings had dropped considerably since the start of the war, but the vessel still needed an almost unbelievable amount of supplies: 45,000 pounds of beef; 17,000 pounds of mutton; 4,000 pounds of bacon; 40,000 eggs; 2,500 pounds of pork; 1,500 pounds of veal; 750 pounds of fresh salmon; 2,000 chickens, 150 turkeys, and 300 ducks; three barrels of live turtles; 100 pounds of caviar; 5,500 pounds of butter; 28 tons of potatoes; 6,000 gallons of cream; 3,000 gallons of milk; 1,600 pounds of coffee; hundreds of crates of fresh fruit and vegetables; boxes packed with rare truffles, pâté, crab, and lobster; and case after case of wine and champagne.
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It was enough to sustain a small army.

Throughout the night, cranes lifted cargo into the liner’s hold. Since the beginning of the war, British owners had used the vessel to transport contraband across the Atlantic. This spring of 1915, Great Britain faced a munitions shortage, and needed American war matériel in its fight. America was officially neutral, but in this case neutrality was a convenient pretense: U.S. industries regularly provided arms and other contraband to Great Britain. According to American law, it was all perfectly legal: a private firm could sell its goods to anyone without violating neutrality.
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Yet the trade was generally one-sided: few goods or munitions went to Germany. Berlin strenuously and repeatedly complained that the American government, while claiming “an honorable neutrality,” was aiding its enemies, but to no avail.
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Roughly two thirds of the cargo on this voyage consisted of matériel for military use, including brass, copper wire, and machine parts. Even the foodstuffs shipped in bulk were contraband—at least according to the British government’s own definition of the term. More lethal cargo loaded into the forward holds between the bow and bridge included 4.2 million rounds of Remington .303 rifle ammunition consigned to the British Royal Arsenal at Woolwich; 1,248 cases of shrapnel-filled artillery shells from the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, each case containing four 3-inch shells for a total of some fifty tons; eighteen cases of percussion fuses; and forty-six tons of volatile aluminum powder used to manufacture explosives.
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According to American law, none of this fell under the category of ammunition forbidden aboard a passenger liner; instead, it was classified as a legal shipment of small arms.
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Work continued as dawn broke over New York City, revealing the Cunard Line’s immense passenger liner
Lusitania
. Her sleek black hull, pierced by innumerable portholes, stretched some 787 feet from a sharply narrowed bow to a gracefully curved stern. Decks of yellow pine and teak crowned a gleaming white superstructure dotted with rows of lifeboats and ventilators; above, four sixty-five-foot-high funnels—raked at graceful angles—towered over the vessel. Once they had proudly sported the distinctive Cunard colors of reddish orange banded in black; now, they were cloaked in drab wartime gray.
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Less than a decade old,
Lusitania,
an onlooker once marveled, was “more beautiful than Solomon’s Temple, and big enough to hold all his wives.”
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Subsidized by the British government on the understanding that in time of war she could be quickly converted to an armed auxiliary cruiser, she was immense. At just over 31,000 tons,
Lusitania
could accommodate three thousand persons, including crew, on her nine decks. At her maiden voyage in 1907, she had been the largest liner ever built, and until 1910 she was the fastest.
Lusitania
was a triumph: Man, through mastery of the Industrial Age, had finally tamed Nature.

By eight that Saturday morning, Pier 54 was crowded. Although the air was warm, clouds still cluttered the sky, releasing occasional bursts of rain over the scene.
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Yet not even the weather could dampen spirits as friends and relatives embraced and shouted farewells. “Smartly-dressed officers” moved among the milling crowd as “great truck loads of luggage” and last-minute consignments of mail were rushed aboard.
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Streets along the Chelsea Piers were clogged with a constant stream of wagons, vans, trucks, motorcars, and taxicabs, dispensing luggage and disgorging travelers destined for
Lusitania
. Passengers raced past newsstands where young boys loudly hawked the early editions. Within the papers lay an ominous announcement from the German embassy in Washington, D.C.:

It was only an accident—though in retrospect, an ominous one—that the notice appeared next to an advertisement for
Lusitania
’s voyage. This warning had been the subject of worried debate among German officials in America. Ambassador to the United States Johann, Count von Bernstorff, had received the text several months earlier from Berlin but, “thinking it a great mistake” that would unduly antagonize the country, he had shoved it into a desk drawer and did his best to ignore its existence.
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In April, Berlin had finally insisted that Bernstorff publish the warning. There was a week’s delay: only on the morning of May 1 did the German notice finally appear in the press.
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It had, a German spokesman said, merely been “an act of friendship.”
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Staring up at
Lusitania
’s hull, seventeen-year-old Alice Lines, holding tight to a three-month-old girl named Audrey Pearl, was unnerved by the coming voyage. It wasn’t the idea of the crossing itself: there had been frequent journeys across the Atlantic since the British nanny began working for the family of American Frederick Warren Pearl. A former surgeon-major during the Spanish-American War, Pearl had firsthand knowledge of the potential dangers: the family had been in Europe when the Great War erupted, and Germany had arrested Pearl as a spy. He wore English tweeds and carried a copy of
The Times
of London—all the proof they needed. His release sent the family—Pearl, his wife, Amy, five-year-old son Stuart, three-year-old daughter Amy (called “Bunny”), and one-year-old Susan, along with Alice—back to America, where a fourth daughter, Audrey, was born in early 1915. Now, Amy Pearl was expecting a fifth child as they again set off, this time for London, where her husband was to take up a Red Cross job with the American embassy. Luckily for Alice, a second nanny, a Danish girl named Greta Lorenson, had joined the household to help care for the children.
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Newsboys shouted the warning, and talk of a possible submarine attack rumbled through the waiting crowd. Still clutching baby Audrey, Alice scanned the German notice. The ship seemed so big and so fast, yet it was hard to forget the possible danger. Now the Germans had practically advertised their intent to sink her. Nervously, Alice showed the notice to her employer’s wife. “Take no notice, dear,” Mrs. Pearl assured her, “it’s just propaganda.”
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Others echoed Amy Pearl’s dismissal. Americans, a British journalist declared, were “as safe on Broadway” as they were aboard
Lusitania
; the warning was merely “a piece of impudent bluff … an infantile effort to make Americans afraid.”
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“Like many other passengers, I gave the notice no serious thought,” recalled Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat. “No idea of canceling my trip occurred to me.”
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Oliver Bernard, a theatrical scenic designer, saw the warning as he read the morning newspaper over breakfast. He was “not seriously perturbed” by what he imagined was a gesture meant “to embarrass the United States Government and create further consternation in England.” The speed of
Lusitania,
coupled with “the presence of so many American citizens on board,” he thought, completely eliminated the possibility of a submarine attack.
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Margaret, Lady Mackworth—returning to Great Britain with her father, David Thomas—paid no attention to the warning: “Feeling ran strong,” she wrote, “and that we should be driven off our own boat by German threats, to take shelter on one of a neutral nationality after we had already booked our passage, was unthinkable.”
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The German notice was not the only warning. That morning, thirty-seven-year-old millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt had sleepily struggled out of bed in his luxurious apartment at the Vanderbilt Hotel he had built on Park Avenue. He had spent the previous evening with his second wife, Margaret, at the theater, attending a performance of
A Celebrated Case,
a new Broadway play produced by David Belasco and Charles Frohman; today, he would sail aboard
Lusitania
.
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At eight, the telephone rang. It was Vanderbilt’s mother, Alice: had Alfred seen the notice in that morning’s newspapers?
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Alfred dismissed it as a joke. His valet, Ronald Denyer, then handed him a telegram: “Have it on good authority
Lusitania
is to be torpedoed. You had better cancel passage immediately.” It was signed simply, “
Morte
.”
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It seemed absurd, and Vanderbilt dressed in a charcoal gray suit, a tweed cap atop his head, and a pink carnation jauntily adorning his lapel. Photographers and reporters swarmed around his motorcar as it pulled up at Pier 54 later that morning; spotting his friend, millionaire wine and champagne merchant George Kessler, Vanderbilt made his way through the crowd. He pulled the newspaper notice from his pocket, waved it at Kessler, and said, “How ridiculous this thing is! The Germans would not dare to make any attempt to sink this ship!”
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Broadway impresario Charles Frohman, whose play Vanderbilt had enjoyed the previous evening, was also bound for
Lusitania
that morning. “It seems to be the best ship to sail on,” he wrote to a friend in London.
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Actor John Barrymore unsuccessfully tried to dissuade Frohman from his trip. Barrymore’s sister, actress Ethel, recalled that Frohman’s voyage was “much against everybody’s wishes.” When she’d seen him earlier that week, the impresario told her, “Ethel, they don’t want me to go on this boat,” adding that he had received a message warning him off. He seemed determined to go; when Ethel left, he leaned over and kissed her cheek—something he had never before done.
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To another friend, Frohman joked, “If you want to write me, just address the letter care of the German submarine.” Now, as he arrived at the pier from his suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel, Frohman faced a bank of reporters. Asked if he was afraid of U-boats, the manager grinned, saying, “No, I am only afraid of IOUs.”
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The notice troubled London merchant Henry Adams, head of the Mazawattee Tea Company. With his new wife, Annie, he was to return to Great Britain aboard
Lusitania,
but now thought a change of vessel might be best. He discussed the situation with Annie and argued that they should take a neutral liner, but his wife, who had relatives employed by Cunard, insisted that they sail as planned. “I have always been a confirmed Cunarder,” she said.
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Others were visibly anxious that morning. Twenty-six-year-old Dorothy Allen, nanny to the six young Crompton children traveling on
Lusitania
with their parents, stood at the pier, nervously crying at the idea of a potentially dangerous wartime crossing.
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