From the lips of Captain Turner, of the Lusitania, and from several of the survivors the world has heard the story of the sudden appearance among the débris and the dead of the sunken liner, of the German submarine that had fired the torpedo which sent almost 1,200 non-combatants, hundreds of them helpless women and children, and among them more than a hundred American citizens, to their deaths. But it remained for the captain of the steamship Etonian, arriving at Boston on May 18, to add the crowning touch to the tragedy.
Captain William F. Wood, of the Etonian, specifically charged that two German submarines deliberately prevented him from going to the rescue of the Lusitania’s passengers after he had received the liner’s wireless S. O. S. call, and when he was but forty miles or so away, and might have rendered great assistance to the hundreds of victims.
Captain Wood charged further that two other ships, both within the same distance of the Lusitania when she sank, were warned off by submarines, and that when the nearest one, the Narragansett, bound for New York, persisted in the attempt to proceed to the rescue of the Lusitania’s passengers, a submarine fired a torpedo at her, which missed the Narragansett by only a few feet.
STORY OF ETONIAN’S CAPTAIN
The Etonian is a freight-carrying steamship, owned by the Wilson-Furness-Leyland lines, and under charter to the Cunard Line. She sailed from Liverpool on May 6. Captain Wood’s story, as he told it without embellishment and in the most positive terms, was as follows:
“We had left Liverpool without unusual incident, and it was two o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, May 7, that we received the S. O. S. call from the Lusitania. Her wireless operator sent this message: ‘We are ten miles south of Kinsale. Come at once.’
“I was then about forty-two miles from the position he gave me. Two other steamships were ahead of me, going in the same direction. They were the Narragansett and the City of Exeter. The Narragansett was closer to the Lusitania, and she answered the S. O. S. call.
“At 5 P.M. I observed the City of Exeter across our bow and she signaled, ‘Have you heard anything of the disaster?’
“At that very moment I saw the periscope of a submarine between the Etonian and the City of Exeter. The submarine was about a quarter of a mile directly ahead of us. She immediately dived as soon as she saw us coming for her. I distinctly saw the splash in the water caused by her submerging.
