The Lusitania

On the afternoon of 7 May 1915, the Cunard liner Lusitania, six days out of New York and within sight of the Cork coast, crossed the periscope of the German submarine U-20. One torpedo struck her starboard side. A second, larger explosion followed from within, and one of the fastest and most famous ships in the world sank in eighteen minutes, about sixteen kilometres off the Old Head of Kinsale. Of the 1,959 people aboard, 1,198 died.

The rescue from Queenstown

The response came from Cork. Fishing boats out of Kinsale and Courtmacsherry pulled for the site, some under oar, and the harbour towns emptied their vessels toward the smoke. Everything afterwards ran through Queenstown, today's Cobh: 761 survivors were landed on its quays and taken into hospitals, lodging houses and private homes, and the dead were laid out in the town's morgues and halls. Three days later, more than 160 victims were buried in mass graves in the Old Church Cemetery north of the town, where the long grave markers still stand. Many bodies were never recovered.

The shock that crossed an ocean

The Lusitania was a civilian liner, and among the dead were 128 Americans and nearly a hundred children. Germany argued she carried war munitions through a declared war zone, and she was indeed carrying rifle cartridges; the debate over her cargo has never fully closed. What is beyond debate is the effect. The sinking hardened opinion in the United States against Germany, became one of the great recruiting images of the war, and stands with the Titanic among the most famous maritime disasters in history. The two stories bookend the same three years in the same harbour: Queenstown was the Titanic's last port in 1912 and the Lusitania's refuge in 1915.

Cobh remembers. The Lusitania Peace Memorial by the sculptor Jerome Connor stands in Casement Square, near the quays where the survivors landed, and Kinsale's museum holds relics of the ship; the inquest into the disaster opened in Kinsale's own courthouse days after the sinking. The wreck lies on the seabed off the Old Head, a war grave in Irish waters.

On the walk

The tour tells Cork's story through the revolutionary decade the sinking landed in: 1915 Cork was a city of war recruitment posters and rising rebellion at once.