CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
A Note to Readers
Epigraph
The Mysterious Passengers
PART I
GHOSTS AND GUNFIRE
PART II
BETRAYAL
PART III
SECRETS
PART IV
AN INSPECTOR CALLS
PART V
THE FINEST TIME
PART VI
PURSUIT BY THUNDER
EPILOGUE
INTO THE ETHER
CODA
VOYAGER
Notes and Sources
Notes
Archives and Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
About the Author
Also by Erik Larson
Copyright
For my wife and daughters,
and in memory of my mother,
who first told me about Crippen
A NOTE TO READERS
THERE IS MURDER IN THIS BOOK, the second most famous in England, but what I intend here is more than a saga of violence. P. D. James in The Murder Room has one of her characters observe, “Murder, the unique crime, is a paradigm of its age.” By chronicling the converging stories of a killer and an inventor, I hope to present a fresh portrait of the period 1900 to 1910, when Edward VII ruled the British Empire with a slightly pudgy cigar-stained hand, assuring his subjects that duty was important but so too was fun. “It doesn’t matter what you do,” he said, “so long as you don’t frighten the horses.”
The murder fascinated Raymond Chandler and so captivated Alfred Hitchcock that he worked elements into some of his movies, most notably Rear Window. Followed by millions of newspaper readers around the world, the great chase that ensued helped advance the evolution of a technology we today take utterly for granted. “It was hot news indeed,” wrote playwright and essayist J. B. Priestley, himself a scion of the Edwardian age, “something was happening for the first time in world history.” There was a poignancy as well, for the story unfolded during what many, looking back, would consider the last sunny time before World War I, or as Priestley put it, “before the real wars came, before the fatal telegrams arrived at every great house.”
This is a work of nonfiction. Anything appearing between quotation marks comes from a letter, memoir, or other written document. I relied heavily on investigative reports from Scotland Yard, many of which as best I can tell have not previously been published. I ask readers to forgive my passion for digression. If, for example, you learn more than you need to know about a certain piece of flesh, I apologize in advance, though I confess I make that apology only halfheartedly.
Erik Larson
Seattle
2006
A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.
J. M. Barrie
“Dedication”
Peter Pan
1904
THE MYSTERIOUS PASSENGERS
ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 20, 1910, as a light fog drifted along the River Scheldt, Capt. Henry George Kendall prepared his ship, the SS Montrose, for what should have been the most routine of voyages, from Antwerp direct to Quebec City, Canada. At eight-thirty in the morning the passengers began streaming aboard. He called them “souls.” The ship’s manifest showed 266 in all.
Captain Kendall had a strong jaw and a wide mouth that bent easily into a smile, a trait that made him popular among all passengers but especially women. He told good stories and laughed easily. He did not drink. By standards prevailing at the time, he was young to have command of his own ship, only thirty-five years old, but he was by no means untested. Already he had lived a life as eventful as any imagined by Joseph Conrad, whose novels always were popular among passengers once the Montrose entered the vast indigo plain of the Atlantic, though thrillers and detective tales and the latest books warning of a German invasion were in demand as well.
As an apprentice seaman, Kendall had served aboard a brutal vessel with a charming name, Iolanthe, where he witnessed the murder of a shipmate by an unstable crew member, who then began stalking Kendall to silence him. Kendall fled the ship and tried his hand at mining gold in Australia, a pursuit that left him penniless and hungry. He stowed away on another ship, but the captain caught him and marooned him on Thursday Island, in the Torres Strait off Queensland. After a brief stint harvesting pearls, Kendall joined a small Norwegian barkentine—a three-masted sailing ship—carrying seagull excrement bound for farms in Europe, but storms tore away portions of its masts and turned the voyage into an epic of starvation and stench that lasted 195 days. His love of ships and the sea endured, however. He joined the crew of the Lake Champlain, a small steam-powered cargo ship owned by the Beaver Line of Canada but subsequently acquired by the Canadian Pacific Railway. He was its second officer in May 1901, when it became the first merchant vessel to be equipped with wireless. He caught the attention of his superiors and soon found himself first officer on the railway’s flagship liner, the Empress of Ireland. In 1907 he gained command of the Montrose.
It was not the most glamorous of ships, especially when compared to the Empress, which was new and nearly three times as large and infinitely more luxurious. The Montrose was launched in 1897 and in succeeding years ferried troops to the Boer War and cattle to England. It had one funnel, painted Canadian Pacific’s trademark colors—buff with a black top—and flew the line’s red-and-white-checkered “house” flag. It carried only two classes, second and third, the latter known more commonly as “steerage,” a term that originally denoted the belowdecks portion of a ship devoted to steering. A Canadian Pacific timetable from the era described the second-class quarters. “The Cabin accommodation on the MONTROSE is situated amidship, where least motion is felt. The staterooms are large, light and airy. There is a comfortable ladies’ room and a smoking room, also a spacious promenade deck. An excellent table is provided. Surgeons and stewardesses are carried on all steamers.” The line’s motto was, “A little better than the best.”
The manifest for the upcoming voyage listed only 20 passengers in second class but 246 in third, nearly all immigrants. In addition the Montrose carried a crew of 107, among them a wireless operator, Llewellyn Jones. Canadian Pacific had been aggressive about installing wireless on its transoceanic vessels, and the Montrose, despite its age and modest decor, carried the latest apparatus.
TO BE SUCCESSFUL, KENDALL knew, a captain needed more than skill at navigation and ship-handling. He had to dress well, be charming, and possess a knack for conversation, while also owning the mental wherewithal to monitor a thousand operational details, including whether the lifeboats were adequately secured, whether the correct foods and wines had come aboard, and—a new responsibility—whether the ship’s Marconi set and aerial were in good repair and ready to receive the inevitable flurry of trivial messages that engulfed a liner upon departure. Although the jokes, bon voyages, and riddles were utterly predictable, they nonetheless reflected the wonder with which people still treated this new and almost supernatural means of communication. First-time passengers often seemed mesmerized by the blue spark fired with each touch of the key and the crack of miniature thunder that followed, though shipping lines had learned from experience that wonderment faded quickly for passengers whose cabins were too close to the wireless room. They learned too that it was prudent to locate Marconi sets a good distance from the wheelhouse so as not to distort the magnetic field registered by the ship’s compass.
Before each voyage Kendall tried to read as many newspapers as he could to keep himself up to da
te on current events and thereby arm himself to meet his nightly obligation to host guests at his table. Amazing things were happening in the world, so there was a lot to talk about. A year earlier Louis Blériot had flown his airplane across the English Channel, from Calais to Dover. While on display at Selfridge’s department store, the craft drew 120,000 admirers. Science seemed foremost on people’s minds; talk of X-rays, radiation, vaccines, and so forth infused dinner conversation. If such talk ever lagged, there was always the compelling subject of Germany, which by the day seemed to grow more pompous and bellicose. Another foolproof way to inject life, if not violence, into a moribund conversation was to comment upon the apparent decline of morality, as made evident most shockingly in Bernard Shaw’s recent play, Misalliance, which Beatrice Webb, the social reformer, called “brilliant but disgusting,” with “everyone wishing to have sexual intercourse with everyone else.” If all the above failed to ignite a good conversation, one could always talk about ghosts. The whole country seemed engaged in the hunt for proof of an afterlife, with the exploits of the venerable Society for Psychical Research often in the news. And if by chance a conversation became too heated, too lively, one could recall anew how one felt upon the death of King Edward and remark upon how eerie it was that Halley’s comet should appear at nearly the same time.
Shortly before his passengers were due to board, Kendall bought a copy of the continental edition of London’s Daily Mail, an English-language newspaper distributed in Europe. The edition was full of fresh detail about the North London Cellar Murder and the escalating search for two suspects, a doctor and his lover. Back in London, the ship had been visited by two officers from Scotland Yard’s Thames Division, patrolling the wharves in hopes of thwarting the couple’s escape.
Everyone loved a mystery. Kendall knew at once that this would be the mainstay of conversation throughout the voyage—not aircraft or dead kings or haunted country houses, but murder at its most loathsome.
The question at the fore: Where were the fugitive lovers now?
THE JOURNEY BEGAN IN TYPICAL fashion, with Kendall greeting his second-class passengers as they came aboard. Passengers always seemed at their best at the start of a voyage. They dressed well, and their faces bore an appealing flush of excitement and apprehension. They stepped from the boarding ramp carrying few belongings, but this did not mean they were traveling light. The bulk of their baggage—typically multiple trunks and valises—was stowed belowdecks or delivered to their staterooms. Many chose to keep with them a small carrying case containing their most important belongings, such as personal papers, jewels, and keepsakes. Nothing about the passengers struck Kendall as unusual.
The Montrose eased from the wharf amid the usual squall of white handkerchiefs and began making its way down the River Scheldt toward the North Sea. Stewards helped passengers find the ship’s library and its dining room and lounges, known as “saloons.” Despite the modest proportions of the Montrose, its second-class travelers felt as pampered as they would have felt on the Lusitania. The stewards—and stewardesses—brought blankets and books to passengers, and took orders for tea, Belgian cocoa, and scotch, and carried pads and envelopes upon which passengers could write messages for transmission via the Marconi room. Kendall made it a point to stroll the deck several times a day looking for untidy uniforms, tarnished fittings, and other problems, and trying always to greet passengers by name, a good memory being another attribute necessary for the captain of a liner.
Three hours into the voyage Kendall saw two of his passengers lingering by a lifeboat. He knew them to be the Robinsons, father and son, returning to America. Kendall walked toward them, then stopped.
They were holding hands, he saw, but not in the manner one might expect of father and son, if indeed one could ever expect a boy on the verge of manhood to hold hands with his father. The boy squeezed the man’s hand with an intensity that suggested a deeper intimacy. It struck Kendall as “strange and unnatural.”
He paused a moment, then continued walking until he came abreast of the two. He stopped and wished them a pleasant morning. As he did so, he took careful note of their appearance. He smiled, wished them a fine voyage, and moved on.
He said nothing about the passengers to his officers or crew but as a precaution ordered the stewards to gather up every newspaper on the ship and lock them away. He kept a revolver in his cabin for the worst kinds of emergencies; now he placed it in his pocket.
“I did not do anything further that day or take any steps because I wanted before raising an alarm to make sure I was making no mistake.”
WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS CAPTAIN Kendall would discover that his ship had become the most famous vessel afloat and that he himself had become the subject of breakfast conversation from Broadway in New York to Piccadilly in London. He had stepped into the intersection of two wildly disparate stories, whose collision on his ship in this time, the end of the Edwardian era, would exert influence on the world for the century to come.
DISTRACTION
IN THE ARDENTLY HELD VIEW of one camp, the story had its rightful beginning on the night of June 4, 1894, at 21 Albemarle Street, London, the address of the Royal Institution. Though one of Britain’s most august scientific bodies, it occupied a building of modest proportion, only three floors. The false columns affixed to its facade were an afterthought, meant to impart a little grandeur. It housed a lecture hall, a laboratory, living quarters, and a bar where members could gather to discuss the latest scientific advances.
Inside the hall, a physicist of great renown readied himself to deliver the evening’s presentation. He hoped to startle his audience, certainly, but otherwise he had no inkling that this lecture would prove the most important of his life and a source of conflict for decades to come. His name was Oliver Lodge, and really the outcome was his own fault—another manifestation of what even he acknowledged to be a fundamental flaw in how he approached his work. In the moments remaining before his talk, he made one last check of an array of electrical apparatus positioned on a demonstration table, some of it familiar, most unlike anything seen before in this hall.
Outside on Albemarle Street the police confronted their usual traffic problem. Scores of carriages crowded the street and gave it the look of a great black seam of coal. While the air in the surrounding neighborhood of Mayfair was scented with lime and the rich cloying sweetness of hothouse flowers, here the street stank of urine and manure, despite the efforts of the young, red-shirted “street orderlies” who moved among the horses collecting ill-timed deposits. Officers of the Metropolitan Police directed drivers to be quick about exiting the street once their passengers had departed. The men wore black, the women gowns.
Established in 1799 for the “diffusion of knowledge, and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical improvements,” the Royal Institution had been the scene of great discoveries. Within its laboratories Humphry Davy had found sodium and potassium and devised the miner’s safety lamp, and Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, the phenomenon whereby electricity running through one circuit induces a current in another. The institution’s lectures, the “Friday Evening Discourses,” became so popular, the traffic outside so chaotic, that London officials were forced to turn Albemarle into London’s first one-way street.
Lodge was a professor of physics at the new University College of Liverpool, where his laboratory was housed in a space that once had been the padded cell of a lunatic asylum. At first glance he seemed the embodiment of established British science. He wore a heavy beard misted with gray, and his head—“the great head,” as a friend put it—was eggshell bald to a point just above his ears, where his hair swept back into a tangle of curls. He stood six feet three inches tall and weighed about 210 pounds. A young woman once reported that the experience of dancing with Lodge had been akin to dancing with the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Though considered a kind man, in his youth Lodge had exhibited a cruel vein that, as he grew
older, caused him regret and astonishment. While a student at a small school, Combs Rectory, he had formed a club, the Combs Rectory Birds’ Nest Destroying Society, whose members hunted nests and ransacked them, smashing eggs and killing fledglings, then firing at the parent birds with slingshots. Lodge recalled once beating a dog with a toy whip but dismissed this incident as an artifact of childhood cruelty. “Whatever faults I may have,” he wrote in his memoir, “cruelty is not one of them; it is the one thing that is utterly repugnant.”
Lodge had come of age during a time when scientists began to coax from the mists a host of previously invisible phenomena, particularly in the realm of electricity and magnetism. He recalled how lectures at the Royal Institution would set his imagination alight. “I have walked back through the streets of London, or across Fitzroy Square, with a sense of unreality in everything around, an opening up of deep things in the universe, which put all ordinary objects of sense into the shade, so that the square and its railings, the houses, the carts, and the people, seemed like shadowy unrealities, phantasmal appearances, partly screening, but partly permeated by, the mental and spiritual reality behind.”
The Royal Institution became for Lodge “a sort of sacred place,” he wrote, “where pure science was enthroned to be worshipped for its own sake.” He believed the finest science was theoretical science, and he scorned what he and other like-minded scientists called “practicians,” the new heathen, inventors and engineers and tinkerers who eschewed theoretical research for blind experimentation and whose motive was commercial gain. Lodge once described the patent process as “inappropriate and repulsive.”
As his career advanced, he too was asked to deliver Friday Evening Discourses, and he reveled in the opportunity to put nature’s secrets on display. When a scientific breakthrough occurred, he tried to be first to bring it to public notice, a pattern he had begun as early as 1877, when he acquired one of the first phonographs and brought it to England for a public demonstration, but his infatuation with the new had a corollary effect: a vulnerability to distraction. He exhibited a lofty dilettantism that late in life he acknowledged had been a fatal flaw. “As it is,” he wrote, “I have taken an interest in many subjects, and spread myself over a considerable range—a procedure which, I suppose, has been good for my education, though not so prolific of results.” Whenever his scientific research threatened to lead to a breakthrough, he wrote, “I became afflicted with a kind of excitement which caused me to pause and not pursue that path to the luminous end…. It is an odd feeling, and has been the cause of my not clinching many subjects, not following up the path on which I had set my feet.”