Part of our series based around the work of Dom Robinson and his Deep Wreck Diver Youtube channel. Dom is doing his own form of local history detecting, visiting shipwrecks!
At 2:10 in the afternoon on May 7th, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was eighteen miles off the Old Head of Kinsale on the southern coast of Ireland when a single torpedo struck her starboard side. Seconds later, a second, larger explosion tore through the ship from within. The electrics failed four minutes after that, trapping passengers in lifts, below decks, and on the wrong side of bulkheads. Captain William Turner gave the order to abandon ship five minutes in. The Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes. 1,198 people died. 761 survived.
The wreck lies at 90 metres, roughly 18 kilometres south of the Irish coast. She has been there for 111 years. She is one of the most controversial shipwrecks in history, and she still has not given up all her secrets.
The ship
The RMS Lusitania was, at her launch in 1906, among the greatest ships ever built. Designed by naval architect Leonard Peskett for Cunard and constructed at the John Brown shipyard on the Clyde, she was built for one purpose: speed. She won the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing in 1908. She made 202 transatlantic crossings over eight years. She was 239 metres long, carried nearly 2,000 passengers and crew, and was the kind of ship that made people feel that ocean travel had become, if not safe, at least magnificent.
When war was declared in 1914, the British government made provisions to commandeer her as an armed merchant cruiser if needed, but she continued in civilian service. On May 1st, 1915, she departed New York for Liverpool on what would be her final crossing. At the helm was Captain Turner. On board were 1,960 passengers and crew.
Germany had, since February 1915, declared the waters around Britain a war zone. Any shipping, military or civilian, was liable to be sunk without warning. A notice to this effect had been placed in American newspapers. Most passengers on the Lusitania didn’t seem to take it all that seriously.
The attack
SM U-20, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, had been operating in the waters off southern Ireland for several days before the Lusitania crossed his path. He was, by the morning of May 7th, running low on fuel and torpedoes and preparing to return home. Then, at around 1:20pm, one of his crew spotted a large vessel on the horizon.
U-20 manoeuvred into position. At a range of 700 metres, Schwieger ordered the firing of a single torpedo.
It struck the Lusitania near the bow. Schwieger, watching through his periscope, noted in his log an “extraordinarily large explosion” followed the first; a far larger explosion than a single torpedo could explain. That second explosion, which rocked through the ship from within and is believed to be what sent her to the bottom in under twenty minutes, has been the source of controversy ever since.
Captain Turner remained on the bridge until the water came up to meet him. He was pulled unconscious but alive from the sea three hours later. Meanwhile the U-20 slipped away. Behind her 1,198 people were left to drown or die of hypothermia in water that was 11 degrees Celsius.
What the wreck contains — and what it doesn’t tell us
The questions that have surrounded the Lusitania since she went down are not small ones.
The first is the question of that second explosion. One torpedo struck her. The Titanic, hit by an iceberg, took two hours and forty minutes to sink. The Lusitania was gone in eighteen. Something inside the ship contributed to her end, and nobody has ever definitively agreed on what it was.
Germany’s position, stated at the time, was that the Lusitania was carrying war munitions, that the torpedo detonated them, and that the sinking was therefore legitimate under the rules of war. The British government denied it, or at least evaded it, for decades. In 1982, government files from that year showed that officials were still privately uncomfortable about whether earlier denials had been accurate — one Foreign Office official noted that the subject might “literally blow up on us.”
The manifest tells part of the story. The Lusitania was carrying 4,200 cases of rifle cartridges, 1,250 cases of shrapnel shells, and aluminium powder used in the production of explosives. This was known, and it was listed. What the British government initially denied, then later conceded, was the presence of this cargo. Whether it caused the second explosion is another matter. Robert Ballard, who surveyed the wreck in 1993, concluded that the ammunition was still in the hold and had not detonated. The most widely accepted explanation for the second explosion is now a rupture of the ship’s steam lines or a coal-dust ignition; though neither has been proven beyond argument.
The second question concerns ownership and access. The Lusitania has changed hands several times since she sank. An American businessman named Gregg Bemis eventually acquired full ownership for a dollar in 1982, having first purchased a stake in 1968 for $2,400 from the Liverpool and London War Risks Insurance Association. He spent decades and millions of dollars fighting the Irish government for the right to excavate the site. Dives conducted under licence recovered live ammunition from the wreck (small arms rounds, physically retrieved from the seabed) which confirmed the munitions were there but did not settle the question of the second explosion.
The Irish government has designated the Lusitania a protected site. Diving on her requires permission. The wreck itself, by all accounts, has deteriorated significantly since Ballard mapped it in 1993. Sections of the hull have collapsed. The structure is fragile. A century of salt water, combined with the violence of the sinking itself, has left her in a condition very different from the photographs of her in her prime.
The wreck as a dive site
At 90 metres, the Lusitania sits well beyond the reach of recreational diving. Reaching her requires specialist certification and the kind of methodical, unhurried preparation that deep wreck diving demands.
What divers describe is a ship whose scale is vast and difficult to take in. She went down fast and she went down at a list, which means the wreck sits awkwardly on the seabed, recognisable but disordered. The bow slammed into the bottom with the ship still moving forward, driven by her own momentum.
She is not a comfortable wreck. She is a grave. 1,198 people died in those eighteen minutes, and the sea returned only 289 of them. The rest still lie inside or around her on the seabed, or were carried away by the tides long ago.
That is what lies at 90 metres.
Dom Robinson has dived the Lusitania. The experience, he has said, stays with you. There is a difference between reading about a ship and descending through cold, dark water to find one; seeing the scale of it, and the evidence of what happened on a May afternoon in 1915.
The full story of the Lusitania is not settled. The second explosion has never been definitively explained. The question of what the British government knew about the cargo and when they knew it remains contested. The wreck is deteriorating and will not be accessible forever.
But what is settled is the bare human arithmetic of the disaster: 1,960 people left New York. Only 762 of them were to step on land again The ship itself sank in eighteen minutes. Eighteen minutes is no time at all when you’re fighting for your life, and the lives of the people you love.
The rest of it, the munitions, the cover-up allegations, the question of whether the ship was sacrificed, is a conversation with 111 years on the clock and showing no sign of ending soon.