Erik Larson Quote

However, in a later interview, housed in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, Beesly was less judicious. As an Englishman and a lover of the Royal Navy, he said, I would prefer to attribute this failure to negligence, even gross negligence, rather [than] to a conspiracy deliberately to endanger the ship. But, he said, on the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available, I am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance, the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war. So much was done for the Orion and other warships, he wrote, but nothing for the Lusitania. He struggled with this. No matter how he arranged the evidence, he came back to conspiracy. He said, If that’s unacceptable, will someone tell me another explanation to these very very curious circumstances?