He did his duty as he understood it, remaining on the bridge of his command after having ordered all passengers and crew to abandon ship. He went down with the ship but death did not follow sinking.
His life jacket made him buoyant and lifted him from the bridge, but the descending hull pulled him under. “The whole ship seemed to be plucked from my feet by a giant hand,” Turner said. When he came back to the surface, he found himself in an archipelago of destruction and death. “Hundreds of bodies were being whirled about among the wreckage,” he said. “Men, women and children were drifting between planks, lifeboats and an indescribable litter.”
He had done all he could, he believed, and now an instinct to live ignited. He began to swim. He recognized another man nearby, William Pierpoint, the Liverpool police detective. All at once, Pierpoint disappeared. Like newlywed Margaret Gwyer, he was dragged into a funnel. “I thought he had gone,” Turner said. But in a burst of steam and hissing air, Pierpoint popped back out, his body coated with a layer of wet black soot that clung to him like enamel. At which point, Turner said, Pierpoint “started swimming for home like ten men, he was so scared.”
The ship was still moving at about 4 knots, by Turner’s estimate. But as he watched, its bow struck bottom—he was sure of it. “I noticed it because the sinking of the hull stopped for a few seconds with the stern in the air, quivering her whole length of 800 feet, and then down she went.”
It was a strange moment for a sea captain. Twenty minutes earlier Turner had stood on the bridge in command of one of the greatest ocean liners ever known. Now, still in uniform, he floated in the place where his ship had been, in a calm sea under a brilliant blue sky, no deck, cabin, or hull in sight, not even the ship’s tall masts.
He and Pierpoint swam together. Turner saw the bodies of some of the ship’s firemen floating nearby, upside down in their life jackets—he counted forty in all. Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike. Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses. Rescuers later reported that wherever they saw spirals of gulls, they knew they would find bodies. Turner’s experience left him with such a deep hatred of seagulls, according to Norman, “that until his retirement he used to carry a .22 rifle and shoot every seagull he could.”
Turner spent three hours in the water, until he was pulled aboard a lifeboat, and later was transferred to a fishing trawler, the Bluebell.
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