Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

hydroplanes—horizontal rudders—now

The firing of a torpedo made a U-boat suddenly 3,000 pounds lighter.

“manometer,” which registered depth,

Passengers could rent deck chairs for a dollar per voyage; another dollar got them a blanket, known in the ship’s vernacular as a “rug.”

Russia, in the Duchy of Finland (which would become independent in 1917),

In fact, Wilson had by now lost confidence in Page, though the ambassador did not yet seem to know it. The president had left enough hints, however, often failing to respond to Page’s communiqués.

Even moving at a mere 5 knots, a boat of U-20’s class could cover a maximum of only 80 nautical miles before the batteries failed.

A ship had to be fully stopped before the crew could lower a boat safely.

In 1892 a writer named Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a popular short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,”

Gilman claimed that Mitchell’s cure drove her “to the edge of insanity.” She wrote the story, she said, to warn would-be patients of the dangers of this doctor “who so nearly drove me mad.”

Gertrude Adams, a passenger in second class traveling with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, wrote later, “There were so many on the ship that it really was like living in a town, one saw fresh people every day & never knew who they were.”

Turn of the Screw,

As Churchill passed the operating theater, he saw doctors at work trepanning a soldier, that is, cutting a hole in his skull.

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.”

ONLY SIX OF THE LUSITANIA’S TWENTY-TWO CONVENTIONAL lifeboats got away before the ship made its final plunge;

The time that had elapsed since the impact of the torpedo was eighteen minutes.

OF THE LUSITANIA’S 1,959 PASSENGERS AND CREW, only 764 survived; the total of deaths was 1,195. The 3 German stowaways brought the total to 1,198. Of 33 infants aboard, only 6 survived. Over 600 passengers were never found. Among the dead were 123 Americans.

“Swansdown” robe

potentially explosive condition known as thermal shock.

“The world,” he said, “must be made safe for democracy.”

These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain’s hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower

A new war came, and on September 16, 1941, a Nazi U-boat torpedoed and sank a British ship, the Jedmoor, off the Outer Hebrides, killing thirty-one of its thirty-six crew. Among the lost was a fifty-five-year-old able seaman named Percy Wilfred Turner—Captain Turner’s youngest son.

She built it in Avon, Connecticut, and called it Avon Old Farms School, which exists today.