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
“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
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
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
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.”
SUICIDE
THE WORLD SEEMED GALVANIZED.
In Chicago police arrested a man named Albert Rickward, despite the fact that he was English and only twenty-nine years old, two decades younger than Crippen. They searched him and found English notes with a value in American currency of about $2,000. This increased their suspicions. They held him for hours as they interrogated him and searched his luggage, which he had left at the train station. Rickward was furious. Eventually the police let him go, without apology.
In Marseille a shipping agent notified police that he had spotted Crippen and Le Neve boarding a steamer bound for Antwerp. French detectives and the British consul raced to the wharf but found the ship had just departed.
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, police intercepted a steamer, the
From Brussels came the report that the owner of a cafe outside the city had noticed two customers who exactly fit the description of the fugitives. One of them, the cafe keeper reported, was a woman dressed as a man. He was sure of it.
In fact, this last report was likely correct, but it was impossible to know which reports to take seriously,
