>I know that Captain Turner ordered the life boats unloaded at the beginning but I always thought was because the ship was still moving and that he didn't want to endanger the passengers.
The order was called down after one, and perhaps two, of the port boats threw out its passengers while launching. The mechanics of the first "upset" can give a pretty good time frame of how long the severe initial list lasted. Ogden Hammond and his wife, who were in the first class lounge, had time to gather themselves, exit the lounge and walk aft on the port side to either the last or second-to-last lifeboat in the first class area of the boat deck. The boat had been swung out, successfully, and lowered to an extent that the passengers could enter. Ogden and Mary Hammond entered it. When the lowering began, the boat had only gone down a few feet when Ogden apparently saw the crew at the davits having difficulty. As the lifeboat fell out from under him, he was able to momentarily grab one of the ropes and so was not dropped the 80 or so feet into the water with the mass of other people who had been seated around him. When he fell, seconds later, he was spared the sort of incapacitating or fatal injuries that 60 or so people simultaneously falling into a very small area inflict on one another, but still broke several ribs and I think his shoulder. After this, the order was called down, and the people who were in already loaded boats compelled to get out.
So, you see, there are elements of both self protection and denial in the stories the crew later told about the severe list. The ship recovered from it in the time it took a man and a woman to walk from the lounge to the far reaches of the main boat deck. The Hammond's boat did not dump because of the list, but because of an apparent equipment malfunction. The order to empty the loaded boats was understandable, but at the same time disastrous. Particularly in later years, this order disappeared from the narrative in favor of tales of boats careening down the deck crushing all before them (which, BTW, do not appear in any of the first person accounts left by port side survivors written while the memory was still fresh and the anger still palpable in May 1915) and men heroically struggling to push boats "uphill" and over the side of the ship. What actually happened was that the passengers got out of the boats and stood there angry and confused (excruciatingly detailed in 1915 letters and 1917 testimony) as the ship heeled and recovered a second time. There was a last minute effort made to lower one of the boats, but it was capsized- apparently as the Lusitania sank a few yards away from it. When the ship sank, many people climbed in to the boats, and to judge from the severe injuries inflicted on Mr. Myers who sank with the Lusitania in one of her port side boats, did not fare too well. (He broke limbs and, from a vaguely worded line in one of his letters seems to have had an abdominal rupture as well.)
>What would you do to Save yourself or others
Get out of the water as quickly as possible. Those who did not drown in the first few minutes died a protracted death from hypothermia, and had the misfortune to feel themselves growing progressively weaker and more confused and groggy over a period that lasted for hours. Unless you could get yourself entirely on to a piece of debris, you would have the horrible experience of finding it increasingly harder to maintain your grip on whatever you were holding. Until you either let go and sank, or let go and drifted away in your life jacket, sinking deeper and deeper into a stupor.
So, I guess if I HAD to effect an escape plan from the ship, it would involve a course of action that did not leave me dead or incapacitated by the mechanics of the sinking; did not leave me strangled or carried under by a drowning victim trying to climb atop me; and gave me the ability to have ALL of my limbs out of the water within the first 45 minutes to an hour before the onset of progressive shock.
Hmmmm...to save others. An "iffy" proposition in time travel. Scan down to Mrs. Logan's account:
Surely following her into the water and preventing her little boy from being torn away from her and drowned would be both humane and commendable, but on the other hand one would be setting a chain of events in to effect that would carry through Robert's entire natural lifespan. That is why time travel discussions are so frustrating- if you went back and did NOT alter the pattern you'd be scarred by the memory of watching people whom you could have saved die, and if you DID alter the pattern you could, theoretically, be unleashing a new Stalin or Jack the Ripper or Paris Hilton upon the world.
