Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

“The essence of war is violence,” he wrote, “and moderation in war is imbecility.”

The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a “dead wake.”

“I know you must be tempted to have most terrible imaginings; may I tell you that although it was very awful, it was not so ghastly as you are sure to imagine it. When the thing really comes, God gives to each the help he needs to live or to die.”

Prichard’s body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard’s letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world.

At the same time, he was not haunted by the disaster; nor did it leave him depressed and broken, as popular conception might have held. Wrote George Ball, “He was far too strong a character to brood over a matter that was beyond rectification and allow it to worry him to the point of melancholy—a characteristic he never at any time displayed.” Turner himself said, in an interview with the New York Times, “I am satisfied that every precaution was taken, and that nothing was left undone that might have helped to save human lives that day.”

Turner died on June 24, 1933, at the age of seventy-six. “He died as he had lived,” Ball wrote, “full of courage and spirit and without complaint. So passed to the great beyond one of the hardy and able sailors of the old hard school.”