The Canadian passenger on the Lusitania who was sunk a second time by the same U-boat capitan

Dead Wake by Erik Larson. The Last Crossing of the Lusitania is the subtitle. Page 333. Captain Schwieger was the German U-boat captain who sank the Lusitania. In the year following the sinking, further ships with Americans were sunk by Germans, elevating tensions and making the entry of America into the war more likely.

In war and sailing, there are always oddities and improbabilities.

That June, 1916, the Kaiser issued an order forbidding attacks against all large passenger ships, even those that were obviously British. He went on to order so many restrictions on how and when U-boat commanders could attack ships that the German navy, in protest, suspended all operations against merchant vessels in British waters.

But the Lusitania remained a point of conflict. President Wilson’s protests failed to generate a response he deemed satisfactory—much to the delight of Britain’s director of naval intelligence, Blinker Hall, who argued that any delay in resolving the Lusitania situation was “advantageous to the Allied cause.”

Kapitänleutnant Schwieger did his part to worsen relations between America and Germany. On September 4, 1915, in the midst of a patrol during which he sank ten steamships and one four-masted bark, he torpedoed the passenger liner Hesperian, killing thirty-two passengers and crew.

The Hesperian was clearly outbound, on its way to New York, and thus unlikely to be carrying munitions or other contraband. Among its cargo was the corpse of a Lusitania victim, Frances Stephens, a wealthy Canadian at last being transported home to Montreal.