Thunderstruck

TESTAMENT

IN THE SPRING OF 1910, Marconi was again at sea when Beatrice gave birth to a son, Giulio. By this point Marconi had traveled so much and so far that Bea had no idea what ship he was aboard, only that he was somewhere in the Atlantic. That he would sail so near the time when his wife was expected to give birth was not surprising, given his obsession with work and his social blindness; that he would depart without leaving behind the name of his ship was something else entirely, a reflection of the decline of their marriage.

Beatrice sent him the news anyway, addressing the message only “Marconi-Atlantic.”

He got it. The message was transmitted from station to station, ship to ship, until it reached him in the middle of the ocean.

It would be hard to imagine a better testament to his achievement of eliminating the isolation of the deep sea, yet a better and more public proof—one that would galvanize the world and rupture the reservoir of doubt once and for all—was soon to occur.

With the technology at last in place, the stage was set.

AT EIGHT-THIRTY WEDNESDAY MORNING Hawley Harvey Crippen and Ethel Clara Le Neve, disguised as the Robinsons, father and son, stepped onto a gangplank at the Canadian Pacific wharf in Antwerp and walked aboard their ship, the SS Montrose. No one gave them a second glance, despite the fact that in this age of steamer trunks and bulky coats and dressing for dinner, all they carried was a single small suitcase.

“It was without the slightest sensation of nervousness that I stepped on board the big steamer in my boy’s clothes,” Ethel wrote. “The change of scene seemed to me a delightful thing to look forward to.”

She felt the same sense of adventure that she had felt on the night she and Crippen had sailed from England for Holland. This was escape of the purest kind. She was leaving behind a life corseted by class and disapproval, and doing it, moreover, in the guise of a male. She had shed not only her past but her sex as well.

She wrote, “I was quite easy and free from care when I followed Dr. Crippen on to the deck of the Montrose.”