Mychail Pulik was born in Tsarist Russia in 1881. At some point, having left his home, he had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled in South Ste. Marie, Michigan, in the United States of America.
By the spring of 1915, however, he had decided to return home, possibly because of the war in Europe and the fact that the Imperial Russian forces were faring very badly on the eastern front against those of the Central powers. As a consequence, he had
booked third class passage on the May sailing of the Lusitania from New York to Liverpool on the major part of his journey. Having left South Ste. Marie some time in April, on the morning of 1st May 1915, he boarded the liner at the Cunard berth at Pier 54 in New York in time for her liner’s scheduled 10.00 a.m. departure. His ticket was numbered 35294. The sailing was then delayed until the early afternoon of the same day so that the Cunarder could load cargo and embark passengers and crew from the Anchor Lines vessel, Cameronia, which the British Admiralty had requisitioned for war service as a troop ship at the end of the previous month.
Six days later, on the early afternoon of 7th May, the Lusitania was torpedoed by the German submarine, U-20, off the coast of southern Ireland, and she sank in just 18 minutes. At that stage of her voyage, she was only about 250 miles away from the safety of her home port.
There were 68 Russian nationals on board her when she sank and of these, 39 were killed and 29 survived the action. Mychail Pulik was lucky enough to be one of the survivors and after having been rescued from the sea, he was landed at Queenstown. Some of the Russian survivors were later to complain to The Russian Consul General in Liverpool that they were very badly treated by the British Authorities at Queenstown and it is possible that Pulik was one of these.
It is not known if he ever made it back to his homeland, and if he did, if he survived the war on the eastern front and the subsequent major revolutions in Russia. He was 34 years of age at the time of the sinking.
Cunard Records, Graham Maddocks, Geoff Whitfield, Michael Poirier, Jim Kalafus, Cliff Barry, Paul Latimer, Norman Gray.
Copyright © Peter Kelly.