Thunderstruck

THE ROBINSONS

ETHEL AND CRIPPEN SETTLED INTO CABIN number five, which Ethel found to be “quite cozy.” The air, the sea, the throb of the engines, the miraculous crackle of the liner’s wireless, all of it thrilled her. “The whole ship was wonderful.”

By now her disguise was as natural to her as dresses once had been. “I felt so sure of myself,” she wrote. At one point she and an adolescent boy became “rather chummy,” as she put it. She could tell that he believed she too was a boy. To her amazement, she soon found herself chatting with him about football. Crippen observed the encounter. Later he told her, with a laugh, “How nicely you are getting on!”

She and Crippen spent hours on the deck, sitting and walking, “but, naturally, I kept rather aloof from the other passengers, and did not speak very much,” she wrote. “On the other hand, when any of the officers spoke to me I did not hesitate to reply, and did not feel in the least embarrassed.”

She marveled at the fact that even the captain gave her a good deal of attention. He was as gracious and accommodating as a steward. “I found plenty to amuse me,” Ethel recalled, “for Captain Kendall supplied me with plenty of literature in the shape of novels and magazines, not forgetting some detective stories.”

The captain also produced books for Crippen, who took a particular interest in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and two novels of the age, Nebo the Nailer by Sabine Baring-Gould and A Name to Conjure With by John Strange Winter, the mercifully truncated pen name for Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Palmer Stannard. Like many passengers, Crippen often checked the ship’s track chart, updated regularly, to see where the ship was and to gauge how many days remained of the eleven the Montrose typically required to reach Quebec. The ship’s open-sea velocity was thirteen knots.

As the weather grew colder, Ethel found that walking the deck with Crippen became less and less pleasant. The thin material of her boy’s suit offered little protection from the wind, and she had nothing else to wear. “So with a rug wrapped round me I used to tuck into a corner of the lounge with a novel before me, and read quite fanciful adventures,” she recalled. “I was as happy as I could expect to be.”

DURING LUNCH THAT FIRST DAY, as the Robinsons and their fellow passengers dined in the second-class saloon, Kendall slipped into their cabin and conducted a brief search. He found their hats and examined them. The inside of the older man’s had been stamped “Jackson, blvd du Nord, Bruxelles.” There was no label in the brown felt hat the boy wore, but Kendall saw that the inner rim had been packed with paper—a means, he presumed, of improving the fit.

The morning of the second day at sea Kendall told his first officer, Alfred Sargent, of his suspicions. He asked Sargent to take a discreet look and see what he thought. Sargent reported back that Kendall’s appraisal might be correct.

Kendall still did not feel certain enough to alert police by wireless, though he knew that after the ship exited the English Channel and entered the open Atlantic, his ability to send such a message would become limited. The shipboard transmitter had a range of about 150 miles, though its receiver could pick up signals at as great a distance as 600 miles. There was always the possibility of relaying a message via another ship closer to land, but to be absolutely certain of contact, he would have to send a message soon.

Kendall ordered Sargent to collect every English newspaper aboard and to say nothing of their suspicions to anyone else.

“I warned him,” Kendall wrote, “that it must be kept absolutely quiet, as it was too good a thing to lose, so we made a lot of them, and kept them smiling.”