The confusion on the stairways became terrible, and the great number of little children, more than 150 of them under two years, a great many of them infants in arms, made the plight of the women still more desperate.
LUSITANIA GOES TO HER DOOM
After the life-boats had cut adrift it was plain that a few seconds would see the end of the great ship. With a great shiver she bent her bow down below the surface, and then her stern uprose, and with a horrible sough the liner that had been the pride of the Cunard Line, plunged down in sixty fathoms of water. In the last few seconds the hundreds of women and men, a great many of them carrying children in their arms, leaped overboard, but hundreds of others, delaying the jump too long, were carried down in the suction that left a huge whirlpool swirling about the spot where the last of the vessel was seen.
Among these were Elbert Hubbard and his wife, Charles Frohman, who was crippled with rheumatism and unable to move quickly; Justus Miles Forman, Charles Klein, Alfred G. Vanderbilt and many others of the best-known Americans and Englishmen aboard.
Captain Turner stayed on the bridge as the ship went down, but before the last plunge he bade his staff officer and the helmsman, who were still with him, to save themselves. The helmsman leaped into the sea and was saved, but the staff officer would not desert his superior, and went down with the ship. He did not come to the surface again.
Captain Turner, however, a strong swimmer, rose after the eddying whirlpool had calmed down, and, seizing a couple of deck chairs, kept himself afloat for three hours. The master-at-arms of the Lusitania, named Williams, who was looking for survivors in a boat after he had been picked up, saw the flash of the captain’s gold-braided uniform, and rescued him, more dead than alive.
INTERVIEW WITH CAPTAIN TURNER
Despite the doubt as to whether two torpedoes exploded, or whether the first detonation caused the big liner’s boilers to let go, Captain Turner stated that there was no doubt that at least two torpedoes reached the ship.
“I am not certain whether the two explosions—and there were two—resulted from torpedoes, or whether one was a boiler explosion. I am sure, however, that I saw the first torpedo strike the vessel on her starboard side. I also saw a second torpedo apparently headed straight for the steamship’s hull, directly below the suite occupied by Alfred G. Vanderbilt.”