Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1955 | Volume 6, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1955 | Volume 6, Issue 4
Those who watched from the pier knew the emotions usual at sailings. They felt the initial pain of separation as the gangplanks dropped away and the first feet of clearing water divided them from those who were departing. Then, as the eye’s focus shifted from the waving figures at the railing and took in the majestic whole of the ship now pulling back into the river, with its graceful lines beneath the gay banners fluttering from its masts, those who had been left behind felt the sting of envy as they imagined the adventure, the gaiety, and the fun that awaited those aboard during the week of freedom ahead of them.
Envy and regret were the dominant emotions on May 1, 1915, as the Cunarder Lusitania set sail from New York. A new summer season was about to begin, and many of those who stood on the dock were themselves anticipating the coming joy of a tour, despite the ugly war in Europe. To the shouted farewells were frequently added the promises of meetings somewhere across the ocean.
There were no forebodings. Those who had found time to glance through the morning’s newspapers may have noticed an official German advertisement: Americans were warned that a war zone existed around the British Isles and that they sailed on Allied vessels at their own risk. But that grim announcement attracted little attention then.
Neither those who sailed nor those who stayed behind suffered the anxieties of the threat of danger. In a few months’ time the great war in Europe would be a year old; and Americans had already become accustomed to its costs in blood and money, to its fluctuating victories and defeats. That it might touch civilians embarked on a noncombatant ship was unimaginable—ungallant as well as illegal, in an age that still associated gallantry and legality with war.
The Lusitania never reached port. The shock of its sinking—the first outraged perception of what modern war meant—turned Americans onto a course that led them further through war to an unwilling new role in a wider world.
The great vessel had been then less than eight years in service. The pride of the British merchant fleet, it was a world removed from the grimy uncomfortable craft that only a generation earlier had ferried passengers across the Atlantic. Sea travel by now had been embellished with elegance and grace; the trim decks were made for the leisurely stroll of unworried vacationers, and the concern for comfort hid every evidence that it was still the business of ships to carry goods.
In the last decades of the Nineteenth Century the great powers, engaged in an obsessive naval race, discovered that it was in the national interest to build up the size of their merchant marine. Competition from the French and Germans and Italians compelled Great Britain to fight bitterly to retain its supremacy. Direct government subsidies were everywhere thrown