Authors: Kevin Kiely
SOS Lusitania (12 page)
‘T
orpedo coming on the starboard side!’ Two crewmen on the deck below me shouted up and I ran for the stairs to tell Captain Turner. The news was screamed from one voice to another so that by the time I reached the
wheel-room
the Captain already knew. The liner suddenly jolted and shuddered, then shook with a deep groan. It strained to keep its speed, then lurched to one side as a terrific explosion rang out. A huge crack appeared in the top deck. Debris and water shot up, hit the mast and drenched the flags, turning them into coloured bits of rag. I thought of the warning in the newspapers.
‘Turn about and make a dash for harbour,’ Captain Turner shouted to Officer Bestic. ‘We have been hit by a torpedo! We
are only TEN miles off Kinsale. Hard-a-starboard!’ He kept repeating this. ‘Finbar,’ he ordered, ‘run to the Marconi room and tell McCormick to send an SOS to Kinsale. Keep sending it:
SOS Lusitania, emergency.’
Captain Turner stared at me, and there was no mistaking the shock in his eyes.
This time I fell on my way because of the crowds out on deck, all with anxious faces and asking questions of the stewards and the crew. I picked myself up quickly from the deck. My uniform hat was on the deck and I shoved it back on. McCormick was at the door of the Marconi room, heard my message and rushed inside. I shouted to him to keep transmitting the SOS signal.
When I reached the wheel-room again, Captain Turner and Officer Bestic were both pulling at the wheel, their faces damp with perspiration. ‘The wheel is jammed. The torpedo damaged the controls. We cannot steer!’ Captain Turner shouted at Dad, who rushed over and put his hands to the wheel too, but it was useless. ‘Steam pressure has dropped by sixty percent. We’re losing all power,’ shouted Captain Turner to my father, who just shook his head, unable to answer. I did not believe what was happening – my dreams and the warning notice were all coming true!
Suddenly there was a huge explosion down in the engine
rooms and the liner lost all speed, drifted and tilted over. I turned and looked out of the window and saw fire shoot out from the chimneystacks. The mighty
Lusitania
slumped over on her starboard side. I looked back towards the Captain and my father, hoping desperately that they would have some plan of action.
‘I’m giving the order to abandon ship,’ shouted Captain Turner. ‘I don’t know how long she can stay afloat.’
My father took me by the arm and dragged me outside. ‘Finbar, you go to the boat deck. Get a lifebelt on you. Join a queue with the bellboys. Go now, hurry. I will get to safety later…’ his voice failed him.
‘Dad, what will happen to us? I want to stay with you.’ I stared into his face, feeling more frightened than ever before in my life.
‘Finbar, go now. Do what I say. I must do my duty as Staff Captain. Go!’ He ran off. I stood looking after him as he disappeared along the deck among the crowd. His disappearance spurred me into action. I remembered two things: first, there were lifebelts in our cabin, and second I wanted to get the toys we had got for Colleen, Christopher and Sean – the accordion, cowboy outfit and rocking horse! But the toys were in the cargo deck and I realised that I’d have
to forget about them. Most importantly, I desperately wanted to go to Penny’s cabin and check on her. How could I do that?
The liner tilted further with a lurch, but I could still get to our cabin under the boat deck. The cabin door had burst open and the bunks had fallen on the floor, making it easier to pull out the lifebelts from underneath. Awkwardly I put the lifebelt on – little had I thought that I would ever wear one for real!
I
scrambled up to the boat deck as a steward was shouting out orders to crewmen. ‘There are over two thousand passengers in first, second and third class, as well as forty-five children and forty infants. There are seven hundred crew. We need to mingle among the passengers and keep the queues orderly. Hey you,’ he shouted at me, ‘you are crew. Wait until all passengers are safely in the lifeboats. You must not get aboard a lifeboat until instructed. You have not been trained how to command a lifeboat.’ I moved away from the crowds of passengers and tried to cling on to hope. The Irish coast seemed very far away, but luckily the fog had lifted.
Crewmen rushed about and passengers clung onto handrails or made their way with difficulty along where chairs and tables
were gathered in broken heaps against the railings because the liner was tilting so far over towards the sea. Passengers looked pale with fear. The air was filled with screams and crying.
‘Hurry! Put on your lifejackets,’ shouted the crewmen repeatedly. The last piles of lifejackets were grabbed by people at the end of the queues. Each jacket was padded with cork, wrapped in tough canvas and had straps and a belt.
Suddenly, out of the darkness, explosions erupted in the boilers, and flames shot out of the chimneystacks like a fireworks display. Panic-stricken passengers stared in terror at the chimneys that seemed about to fall on top of them. I caught a glimpse of Captain Turner and my father shouting orders as they clung onto the railings outside the wheel-room.
Crewmen peeled off the huge canvas hoods from the last of the lifeboats and opened the deck railings which were the only barrier between the cold sea and us, hundreds of feet below. Women and children crowded into the boats and sat along the benchlike seats. ‘Each boat can only take seventy,’ I heard a crewman say, counting people as they passed him. When a lifeboat was filled with women and children, the ropes and pulleys lowered the boat until it landed safely in the water.
Within the chaos of the liner, the crew kept pushing people into the remaining lifeboats and screaming, ‘Lower away, lower
away for Chrissake.’ As before, the boats moved down towards the water on creaking ropes with jerks and jolts. In one of the lifeboats that was already in the sea, Evangelical women led the survivors in a chorus of the hymn: ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’. Kinsale was ten miles away, and that was a long distance to row with seventy people in a boat. The land seemed very far away indeed and I wondered would I ever reach it?
B
y now I was feeling desperate. I was on my own, without my father or my friend Penny or even another crew member. As the very last lifeboat was being loaded I watched it fill up, but crew members were not allowed on board, there were too many passengers. Where were the rest of the lifeboats? I wondered. Probably buried under the ship.
When the number on the lifeboat had reached seventy-three, including men, women and children, the overcrowded boat was lowered. The deck sloped at such an angle that I felt weak in the stomach. The people aboard clung to one another until they reached the surface of the sea. I knew then that it would be sink or swim for me, and for all of us left without a lifeboat to board. I wasn’t a great swimmer, but I had no choice but to try.
Then the strangest thing happened. From a stairhead that was tilted because the liner slumped forward, came a man dressed like a seal, dragging a huge trunk along. As he got closer to me I could see that he had a thick suit of black rubber covering him from head to foot, with openings for his eyes, mouth and nose. He wore a pair of goggles. He opened the trunk and with great exertion heaved out a bulky coil of brown rubber that had loops of rope attached to it and two wooden paddles. Then he took out a small chest, like a treasure chest, edged with strips of metal. As those of us remaining on deck sought a place from which to jump into the sea, the Seal Man seemed to fidget and poke at the large coil of rubber. ‘Here, hold this,’ he ordered me, holding out a rope, and I gripped it as he thrust it into my hand. The lump of rubber soon puffed up into a small boat!
‘Come with me, boy,’ he said. ‘Get in. You will be of help to me and you will not take up much weight.’ From nowhere, it seemed, he pulled out a black net bag, stuffed the two paddles into it and slung it across his back.
‘We will jump from here,’ the seal man shouted when he found an empty lifeboat bay. ‘I will push the boat over the side. As soon as you sight it in the water, jump in that direction. When you reach the water, swim for one of the loops of rope
attached to the boat’s sides and wait for me. Got it?’ He spoke in military tones as if ordering soldiers, and I got the feeling he had done this before, he was so calm and cool. This was a great relief to me. I felt I could do this – it was my only chance of survival.
He pushed the boat over the side and it fluttered more than fell till it hit the water far below.
‘Right,’ he bellowed, checking quickly on the boat bobbing about on the ocean. ‘Jump on the count of three – and jump far to the left and the boat will float back to us. Ready!’ he shouted. ‘One! Two! Three! Jump!’
On landing in the water I hit a broken deckchair floating there and felt a sharp pain in my ankle as I sank, then surfaced and bobbed up and down, gasping for air and spitting out a mouthful of seawater. I was not far from the rubber boat. I swam desperately towards it. The Seal Man was beside me in an instant.
‘The boat landed upside down,’ he shouted. ‘We must turn it. I will submerge. Stay there.’ He held his nose, flung himself forward and disappeared under the ocean soon to re-emerge with the net bag in his hand. He had taken it off his back. He pushed it into my hands.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘pay attention.’ Seawater and spittle lashed
me from his mouth. ‘I have to swim under the boat and flip it over. You, boy, must help me turn it. Hold that bag in one hand and push with the other. It might take a few attempts, but we must succeed. Go under the narrow end and raise the side of the boat as high as you can.’ He dived under the boat and disappeared.
My ankle stung in pain but I had no choice but to follow orders. I pushed the side of the boat upwards as hard as I could, and somehow the boat, presumably because of the man’s skill and practice, righted itself quickly, and was ready for boarding. The Seal Man pulled himself aboard along the narrow end of the boat and then he hauled me in. I was still clutching the bag with the paddles. He pulled the paddles out of the bag, pushed them through loops on either side of the boat and fastened them securely with ropes that passed through holes in the handles. Then he began to row furiously away from the sinking liner, past lifeboats and people clutching to lifebelts floating in the water. I was soaked to the skin and had a sore ankle, but I knew I was very lucky.
‘Ten miles to row,’ shouted the Seal Man. ‘We’ll make it safely to land, boy. It will take a few hours. Your job is to watch the coastline closely, boy, and keep track of where we’re going. You’d better do it right or we’re gone!’
Looking back at the
Lusitania
as he rowed us away I could see from our rubber boat that it was going to be a battle against the sea for each person stuck there, struggling in the water. My heart went out to them. Would any of them manage the long swim to shore? In the icy temperatures and with their soggy clothes and shivering bodies, I doubted it. Mothers with babies tried to hold them safely above the water line; the babies screamed in the cold and looked like plump, squealing fish. Some mothers had already drowned and their babies just floated away. I saw Nurse Ellis go underwater in the distance, and I gasped in shock. I ached to see Dad and Penny, but Nurse Ellis was the only person I recognised.
The Seal Man rowed on, and all the time we passed people who were panicking. They were spluttering and inhaling seawater through their mouths and noses, and I watched as some finally lost their breath in the panic. For minutes their arms slashed at the water and then stopped as they slumped over, face down in the sea, or else turned skywards, their heads thrown back, mouths open, with vacant, lifeless eyes. Gulls swooped towards some of the drowned who floated on the surface. I saw a gull shriek then perch on a man’s shoulders near his upturned face. I looked away.
I stared and stared, transfixed, searching for my father as
some crewmen clung to the liner that began to shoot out flames. A boy stood on the burning deck and in a sudden movement fell from such a height I could not see where he hit the water. The chimneystacks loomed overhead from the tilting liner, and began to crack in two, falling headlong on top of people who screamed in terror. The wire cables that held the chimney stacks in position snapped as explosions rained on top of the remaining crew who were washed overboard into the waves from the doomed liner.
I turned around in the Seal Man’s boat to watch more of the awful spectacle. Crewmen grabbed deckchairs and collapsible rafts while others fastened their lifejackets tightly, chose their spot in the water and jumped clear. I kept my eyes peeled for my father or Penny. The collapsible rafts were the only refuge for many, who swam towards them. Some people managed to grab onto them and held on for dear life. Others clutched desperately at anything that might keep them afloat and save them from a watery grave.
The liner, a vessel of such power and might, tilted so close to the sea’s surface that she finally fell over into the water. This caused a mighty splash, as if a volcano was erupting from beneath the sea. A mound of foaming water sent swimmers, corpses, deckchairs and other wreckage churning to the
surface as the sea level rose over the sinking wreck.
We rowed between the lifeboats and as we were much lower in the water we passed by unnoticed. We moved slowly away, and from under the water where the
Lusitania
had disappeared came a final loud explosion. My eyes filled up with tears. I was crying for my father and Penny – and for the horror that had unfolded in front of my eyes.
The Seal Man rowed like some inhuman creature in his suit of black skin, impervious to the cold. My ankle stung, but I didn’t care. I began to wonder again who he was and how he had this life-saving equipment. Was he a spy? Had he been spying on board the
Lusitania
? I would probably never know. I was so exhausted from all the trauma that I felt myself sliding into a swoon of sleep and slumped over against the side of the boat.
I was awoken by a shout: ‘Boy! Stay awake. Look for the shore at all times!’