Coffins with the Lusitania's dead in a mass grave.

Survivors and bodies of victims have arrived in Queenstown, which is soon transformed into "the Town of the Dead." As the bodies of passengers are delivered to local undertakers, survivors refuse to remain in their hotels, instead haunting the docks in hope of finding out the fate of friends and relatives. 

By the end of the day, the Cunard Line is able to produce a fairly complete tally of the Lusitania's losses. 1,198 of the ship’s 1,962 passengers and crew are dead, a toll nearly as great as the roughly 1,500 lives lost when the Titanic struck an iceberg in 1912. Of the 197 Americans on board the Lusitania, 128 had been killed. The dead also included nearly 100 children.

Back in the United States, newspaper headlines are filled with shock, outrage, and dark conspiracy theories. The Washington Post, for example, quoting unnamed U.S. officials, reports that the Germans had planned the Lusitania's sinking for several weeks. The families of Lusitania passengers, desperate for information about their loved ones, begin showing up at the White House. President Woodrow Wilson, though reportedly appalled by the carnage, holds back on making any public comment and reinforces the appearance of calm by going golfing, albeit with instructions to aides that he be notified of any new developments.

But other Americans are less restrained by what they see as German barbarism. Former president Theodore Roosevelt, for example, denounces the Lusitania's sinking as "piracy on a vaster scale of murder than any of the old-time pirates ever practiced."