Life Aboard the Lusitania
Reliving the infamous sinking
through the letters of a survivor—my great-grandmother.
By Emily Walker in Slate
A century ago, a 30-year-old
passenger on the Lusitania named Minnie Campbell was minutes away from
going down with the fast-sinking ocean liner, which had just been torpedoed by
a German U-boat, when a Cunard Line employee pushed her into one of the last
lifeboats launched into the Atlantic.
“You’re just a tiny thing,” the
seaman supposedly told the young Scot as he flung her into the nearly full
lifeboat. From that boat Minnie watched the Lusitania slip beneath the
frigid water off the coast of Ireland, killing nearly 1,200 people.
Adamina Campbell, my great-grandmother,
was tiny, at under 5 feet tall and less than 100 pounds. It’s a good
thing she was so small, we like to say in my family, because it seems to have
helped make her one of the 763 people who survived the infamous sinking.
“Here I am, all alive and kickin!
You see I won’t drown.”
The British passenger ship Lusitania
was completing a transatlantic crossing from New York harbor to Liverpool,
England, when it was struck on May 7, 1915. The ship sank in just 18 minutes,
hitting the ocean floor 8 miles from Ireland. The brazen attack against a
civilian ship outraged Great Britain, already in the midst of fighting the
Germans, and it shocked the United States, too—128 Americas were among the
dead. It’s widely believed that the sinking of the Lusitania paved the
way for America’s participation in the Great War, although that wouldn’t come
about for another two years.
“I can scarcely realize yet that I was in the
disaster at all,” Minnie wrote in a letter to her brother on May 14, one week
after she made it off the ship. That letter and another longer one that Minnie
wrote days later are prized possessions in my family. The paper on which they
are written is brittle and Minnie’s cursive handwriting faded, but when I read
them, I can picture my great-grandmother boarding the ornate and imposing Lusitania
in New York City on May 1, 1915, returning home after visiting her brother
David, who had immigrated to the states. It was to be a weeklong sail to
Liverpool, and from there she’d make her way back home to Patna, Scotland.
Minnie was an unmarried 30-year-old
schoolteacher when she traveled on her own to America to visit her brother
David. Always exceptionally close with her brother—one of Minnie’s nine
siblings—she and David posed for a photo together during her visit, both with
mischievous grins that fit the adventuresome spirits I imagine them
possessing.
It was adventuresome, or maybe just
foolish in retrospect, for Minnie to return to Scotland on the Lusitania
while Great Britain was more than nine months into a war with Germany. David, a
bricklayer in Ellettsville, Indiana, had just recently received a letter from
his Scottish sweetheart, who urged her “dearest Dave” to keep his sister Minnie
with him in Indiana for a bit longer, saying it wasn’t safe to travel by sea to
Europe. “Shipping is really at a standstill just now with so many … submarines
about.”
The Germans even warned passengers
of the danger of sailing in Great Britain’s waters in a notice that, while
written more than a week before the Lusitania’s return voyage, didn’t
appear in newspapers until the day the ship left New York City.
NOTICE!
Travellers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are
reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great
Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to
the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial
German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her
allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travellers sailing
in the war zone on the ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own
risk.
IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY
Washington, D.C. 22nd April 1915
Washington, D.C. 22nd April 1915
But Minnie wasn’t worried about
German submarines, and if any of the nearly 2,000 people on board the Lusitania
were concerned, they didn’t show it. Most couldn’t fathom that a ship loaded
with innocent passengers would be a target, war or no war.
“Everybody most was joking about the
submarines and calling them soup tureens,” Minnie wrote to her brother in a
letter dated 10 days after the sinking. A few passengers tried on their life
preservers now and then, but Minnie’s was still in its wrapper in her
second-class stateroom.
“I had a dandy time on board up
until the time of the accident,” Minnie wrote to David. During those six days
of travel, she’d made friends with the two girls in her cabin—one English, one
Irish; the trio stayed up late turkey trotting on the Thursday prior to attack,
returning to their room after midnight. None of the portholes were darkened,
Minnie wrote. Surely if anyone thought Germans were searching for the ship to
attack it, the ship would be sailing in complete darkness at night.
On Friday, May 7, Minnie awoke to
the ship moving slowly through fog. It was thought that the Lusitania’s
greatest defense from a submarine attack was its speed—it was the fastest
passenger liner in service at the time—but as part of an effort to save money
on fuel during wartime, the Lusitania never sailed at full speed on its
final journey.
Minnie had her trunk all packed and
ready to unload in Liverpool, which they were to reach later that day. The Lusitania
had just sailed into the “danger zone” where German submarines could be
lurking. Captain William Turner ordered the lifeboats to be swung out from
their cranes so they’d be ready to go if something were to happen.
After lunch Minnie and her two
friends went up one level to write letters. By then the fog had lifted, the day
was bright, and the ship’s speed was increased slightly for the final push to
England.
At 2:15 p.m. a seaman spotted the
telltale white fizz of a torpedo streaming through the clear water, heading
toward the starboard side of the Lusitania. “We were right there when
the awful ramming sound came and the steamer shook from bow to stern,” Minnie
wrote.
She ran to the top deck of the ship
and was on the stairs when a second explosion rocked the ship, causing the
glass on the roof of the ship to shatter.
“Everyone went pale to the lips,
some women screamed and fainted. But Dave, I seemed to stay cool through it
all,” Minnie wrote to her brother.
All of the accounts I’ve read of
those 18 minutes between the torpedo striking and the ship’s bow hitting the
ocean floor describe confusion giving way to rising panic and, then,
gruesomeness. In Diana Preston’s 2002 book Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy, she tells of babies being thrust
into the arms of strangers and lifeboats spilling passengers in the water. One Lusitania
employee called the chaos “a horrible and bizarre orchestra of death.”
After the torpedo struck, it took
Captain Turner 10 minutes to slow the ship down enough to where the lifeboats
could be launched into the water. By then the Lusitania listed
drastically to the starboard side, causing the lifeboats on the port side to
swing inward toward the ship, making them impossible to launch.
Luckily for Minnie, she was on the
starboard side of the ship and happened to be passing one of the six lifeboats
that were successfully lowered when the seaman pushed her in.
“Oh it was awful,” Minnie wrote to
David. “[T]he lifeboats on both sides of us swamped as they were being lowered
& we were being drawn further into the Lusitania’s side until someone got a
knife & cut the rope. It seemed like as if [the ship] would come on top of
us every minute. However, we got clear before she made the final plunge.”
Minnie’s lifeboat was leaking badly
and passengers tried to bail it out using a bucket and their hats. The men in
the boat rowed, but they were still 8 miles from shore. Finally an Irish
fishing trawler towed Minnie’s lifeboat to a government ship, which eventually
brought them to shore in Ireland.
She eventually reunited with her two
roommates, and the survivors were all put up in hotels in Queenstown, Ireland,
and bought dry clothes at Cunard’s expense. She made it home to Scotland
several days later, where she penned a letter to her brother that began with:
“Here I am, all alive and kickin! You see I won’t drown.” Several days later
she wrote a longer letter to David detailing the entire ordeal. “My dear boy, I
know you felt bad but my time hadn’t quite come yet,” she wrote.
In 1922, Minnie married my
great-grandfather, William Little, a mechanic from Patna who was 8 years her
junior. She thus became Minnie Little, declaring in both her first and last
names the very quality that may have saved her life when lifeboat space was dear.
Their wedding ceremony was performed on board the Caronia, a Cunard Line
ship that brought them to America for good.
Emily P. Walker is a writer living in Madrid. Previously she
covered health care in Washington, D.C.
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