Titanic had sailed from here on her maiden voyage, never to be seen again. Lusitania’s handful of survivors had been brought here after the submarine sent her to the bottom in ’15. The Celtic, the Vanguard, so many others, a catalogue of departures and catastrophes.
Cobh had seen all that, lives launched, voyages started and ended; but now the harbour lay quiet. Where usually a dozen great ocean liners were berthed here, this morning the Manhattan was the only one. The war had stopped the British, German and French lines from calling in. They would not return until the war was over. And as for American ones, there were damned few, and all of those were heading for home.
As they approached the dock, the sound of a band could be heard, playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. The mist drifted clear, revealing the musicians, their uniforms starched, their brass instruments gleaming, pink cheeks distended with musical wind. Behind them, held back by a row of black-uniformed police, was a crowd of some two or three thousand people, waving flags and cheering. And beyond the trumpeting of the band, the forty-nine bells of St Colman’s cathedral could be heard pealing energetically.
‘They must have missed us,’ George Symonds remarked. ‘We’ve berthed here more times than I can remember, but they never rang the bells for us before.’
Randall merely grunted. He was not in a jocular mood. He had received a radio message the day before from the American vice-consul in Cork, Robert Patterson. He knew the diplomat would be waiting to board as soon as they were berthed. He was not looking forward to that particular interview.
And news had reached them of the last American ship to sail from Cobh, the SS Iroquois, captained by his old friend Edgar Chelton, with whom he had served in the last war. It had been a disastrous voyage. Heavily overcrowded, and having endured a three-day storm, the Iroquois had delivered her passengers in poor shape – many with sprains and black eyes from having been rolled out of their cots, and worse, complaining bitterly about the way they had been treated by the captain. There had been insufficient food, they had been jammed in like cattle, the conditions had been insanitary, the crew rude and aggressive.
Ominously, halfway through this unpleasant voyage, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, the head of the German navy, had warned the United States naval attaché in Berlin that the Iroquois would be ‘torpedoed and sunk, just like the Athenia’.
When this news had been radioed to Captain Chelton, he’d taken immediate precautions. All radio sets on board had been disabled, every nook and cranny of the cabins had been searched, and the passengers had been made to line up one by one in the trunk room to have their baggage searched. That had added panic to an already chaotic situation. Randall was determined not to end his own career on such a low note.
The fog clung to Cobh as Cobh clung to Ireland, tenacious and grey. It skulked in the streets, never lifting, just changing its contours. The passengers on the observation deck were admiring the quaintness of the place and taking photographs. Dr Meese was telling Mrs Dabney and anyone else who would listen that Cobh was pronounced ‘cove’. The British, he said, had tried to rename the place ‘Queenstown’, after Queen Victoria, but the obstinate Irish had patiently outworn that, and reverted to the old name. At least two and a half million Hibernians, he said, had emigrated to America through this little place. He added, in all modesty, that his own family had come over on the Mayflower, and had settled in Virginia in 1682. No Johnny-come-lately, he.
As they crowded to the shore rails of the ship, Manhattan listed perceptibly to that side. The purser had to use his megaphone to order passengers back from the rail. Their weight was too great for the balance of the ship.
Manhattan docked gingerly in the fog. The gangplank was set up, and the shore crowd surged forward, all but overwhelming the line of nervous young Irish policemen, who had valiantly linked arms to restrain the rush. They managed to push the mob back, but with difficulty. The passengers on the decks fell silent at the sight of this struggle.
The first person on board, as Commodore Randall had anticipated, was Robert Patterson, the American vice-consul, a harassed-looking young man from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Randall met him on the bridge.
‘Boy, am I glad to see you,’ he greeted Randall, wringing the Commodore’s hand fervently. ‘I’ve got six hundred Americans for you.’
‘And I’ve got a hundred places for you,’ Randall replied briefly.
The vice-consul looked aghast. ‘A hundred? What about the rest?’
‘They’re going to have to wait, Mr Patterson.’
‘Wait for what?’
‘Ships are being requisitioned. It’s just a question of time.’
‘My God, they’ll lynch me. Can’t you take more?’
‘I have over seven hundred extra already. And aside from passengers, I’m due to take on twenty extra kitchen staff here.’
The vice-consul reeled. He steadied himself against the compass table. ‘But – but I’ve promised them all a place on Manhattan.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t have done that. I can take a hundred and that’s it. I can’t risk overloading my ship. You’ll have to choose a hundred of the most deserving cases. Women and children first is the law of the sea. Able-bodied young men will have to go to the end of the line.’
Patterson rubbed his face as though trying to wake himself from a dream. ‘Where will they go? Most of them are running out of money already.’
A steward had made a large pot of strong coffee for Commodore Randall. He poured the vice-consul a cup and handed it to him. ‘I suggest you make a general appeal to all the hotels and private houses to offer whatever lodgings they can to American refugees, until such time as they can be offered a passage home. You can tell them Uncle Sam will refund them in due course.’
Patterson gulped his coffee, scalding his mouth. ‘It’s not the Irish I’m worried about. It’s the Americans. They’re busting their britches to get home.’
Commodore Randall looked at the tranquil surroundings of Cobh town, with its charming old houses. ‘I don’t think the Nazis are arriving here any time soon,’ he pointed out dryly.
‘You tell them that. They’ve been camped in my office for weeks, screaming about submarines.’
‘They don’t have to worry their heads about submarines.’
‘If the United States gets into this war, they do.’ He gestured at the huge American flags painted on Manhattan’s sides. ‘Those will make a nice, fat target. They want to get home before we find ourselves caught up in it.’
‘How the hell have six hundred Americans ended up here, anyway?’
‘There’s been a rumour going around that US ships aren’t going to travel to Europe any longer – that Cobh is going to be where they turn around from now on.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It’s what everyone believes. So they all came here to be sure of getting a ship.’
Randall sighed. ‘Whatever the case, I can’t take more than a hundred. And we’ve been delayed enough already. I want to sail in two days. You need to go out to that crowd and explain things.’
Though Commodore Randall had not encouraged any of his passengers to go ashore in Cobh, Mrs Dabney and a party of others could not resist the lure of the charming old town. With their cameras at the ready, they climbed the steep streets up to the gigantic edifice of St Colman’s cathedral, which dominated the harbour, encrusted with every neo-Gothic embellishment that its Victorian architect could think of. From here (the fog having started to clear) they were able to admire the azure bay spread out below them, dotted with green islands, and watch the inquisitive sailboats which were nosing in from all quarters of County Cork to inspect the proud bulk of their own Manhattan.