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the
Lusitania
but soon determined the ship would not be effective as an armed cruiser because the rate at which it consumed coal made it too expensive to operate under battle conditions. The Admiralty retained control of the
Mauretania
for conversion to a troopship, a role for which its size and speed were well suited, but restored the
Lusitania
to Cunard for commercial service.The guns were never installed, and only the most astute passenger would have noticed the mounting rings embedded in the decking.
    The
Lusitania
remained a passenger liner, but with the hull of a battleship.
    A STICKLER for detail and discipline, Captain Turner called himself “an old-fashioned sailorman.” He had been born in 1856, in the age of sail and empire. His father had been a sea captain but had hoped his son would choose a different path and enter the church. Turner refused to become a “devil-dodger,” his term, and at the age of eight somehow managed to win his parents’ permission to go to sea. He wanted adventure and found it in abundance. He first served as a cabin boy on a sailing ship, the
Grasmere
, which ran aground off northern Ireland on a clear, moonlit night. Turner swam for shore. All the other crew and all passengers aboard were rescued, though one infant died of bronchitis. “Had it been stormy,” one passenger wrote, “I believe not a soul could have been saved.”
    Turner moved from ship to ship and at one point sailed under his father’s command, aboard a square-rigger. “I was the quickest man aloft in a sailing ship,” Turner said. His adventures continued. While he was second mate of a clipper ship, the
Thunderbolt
, a wave knocked him into the sea. He had been fishing at the time.A fellow crewman saw him fall and threw him a life buoy, but he floated for over an hour among circling sharks before the ship could fight its way back to his position. He joined Cunard on October 4, 1877, at a salary of £5 per month, and two weeks later sailed as third officer of the
Cherbourg
, his first steamship. He again proved himself a sailor of more than usual bravery and agility. One day in heavy fog, as the
Cherbourg
was leaving Liverpool, the ship struck a small bark, which began to sink. Four crew and a harbor pilot drowned. The
Cherbourg
dispatched a rescue party, which included Turner, who himself pulled a crewman and a boy from the rigging.
    Turner served as third officer on two other Cunard ships but resigned on June 28, 1880, after learning that the company never promoted a man to captain unless he’d been master of a ship before joining the company. Turner built his credentials, earned his master’s certificate, and became captain of a clipper ship, and along the way found yet another opportunity to demonstrate his courage. In February 1883, a boy of fourteen fell from a dock into Liverpool Harbor, into water so cold it could kill a man in minutes. Turner was a strong swimmer, at a time when most sailors still held the belief that there was no point in knowing how to swim, since it would only prolong your suffering. Turner leapt in and rescued the boy. The Liverpool Shipwreck and Humane Society gave him a silver medal for heroism. That same year he rejoined Cunard and married a cousin, Alice Hitching. They had two sons, the first, Percy, in 1885, and Norman eight years later.
    Even now, as a certified ship’s master, Turner’s advance within Cunard took time. The delay, according to his best and longtime friend, George Ball, caused him great frustration, but, Ball added, “never, at any time, did he relax in devotion to duty nor waver in the loyalty he always bore to his ship and his Captain.” Over the next two decades, Turner worked his way upward from third officer to chief officer, through eighteen different postings, until on March 19, 1903, Cunard at last awarded him his own command. He became master of a small steamship, the
Aleppo
, which served Mediterranean ports.
    His home life did not fare as well.