*Appam* puts in at Norfolk

On the morning of 1 February 1916 the British liner Appam, flying the German naval ensign, appeared at the entrance to the Hampton Roads anchorage in Virginia. At about eight o’clock she dropped anchor off Fort Monroe. The ship, already given up for lost in England, had been brought across the Atlantic by a German prize crew from the auxiliary cruiser Möwe, which had captured her on 15 January off Madeira. Hampton Roads is the common anchorage of the ports of Norfolk and Newport News, which is why in the press and in the British chronology of the war the story was recorded as the arrival of the Appam at Norfolk.

A sensation in the roads

According to a British report sent from New York that same day, there were 452 people on board. Besides the passengers and crew of the Appam herself, there were seamen from several ships sunk earlier by the Möwe, German civilians freed from British captivity and the 22-man prize crew. Nobody in the United States had expected such a visitor. For the British it was also the first certain news that a German raider was once again at work in the Atlantic. The Admiralty had known nothing of her cruise until then. Now British warships and four French cruisers were hastily sent out to hunt for her.

The commander of the prize crew, Lieutenant of the Reserve Hans Berg, a merchant captain in civilian life who knew American ports well, reported to the collector of customs, Norman Hamilton. On the President’s instructions Hamilton was responsible on the spot for the observance of neutrality. Berg showed him the order of Commander Nikolaus zu Dohna-Schlodien: he was to bring the captured ship to the nearest American port and lay her up there, which in practice meant leaving her there for the duration of the war. In the presence of the German vice-consul he gave his word as an officer that neither he nor his men would leave the United States without the authorities’ permission. Nearby, at Newport News, two interned German auxiliary cruisers, the Prinz Eitel Friedrich and the Kronprinz Wilhelm, had been lying since 1915.

A treaty more than a century old

The Germans, however, had no intention of asking for internment. As early as 2 February Ambassador Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff informed Secretary of State Robert Lansing that the Appam would remain in the American port “until further notice”. He invoked Article 19 of the Prussian–American treaty of 1799, the same one that had come up a year earlier in the dispute over the sinking of the sailing ship William P. Frye. The article allowed the warships of both states to bring captured vessels into the other party’s ports and to take them out again freely. Berlin argued that the Appam was a prize and not an auxiliary warship, and so was not covered by the Thirteenth Hague Convention, which Britain had in any case not ratified. Bernstorff even demanded that the Americans detain the Appam’s British crew for the duration of the war, because in his view they had resisted the capture of the ship.

The British ambassador, Cecil Spring Rice, replied that a treaty more than a hundred years old was obsolete, and that the holding of Britons in American waters by a foreign crew would be a breach of neutrality. London demanded that the Appam either be taken out of port or returned to her owners, and that the German prize crew be interned.

First decisions

On the people, the Americans decided quickly. On 3 February Hamilton went aboard the Appam with Berg and the counsellor of the German embassy, Prince Hatzfeldt, and on behalf of the Secretary of State demanded the release of everyone who wished to go ashore, except the prize crew. On 4 February all the British, military personnel included, left the ship with their baggage, and on 10 February they sailed for England in the liner Baltic. Thirteen civilians, twelve Germans and one Austrian, who had been given arms during the voyage, were allowed ashore from 11 February.

The dispute over the ship herself lasted much longer. On 16 February the British owner filed suit in the federal court in Virginia, and on 2 March Lansing informed the Germans that the 1799 treaty applied only to prizes brought in by warships and gave no right to an indefinite stay. The Appam case dragged on until March 1917 and ended with the ship being returned to the British.