Möwe captures the Appam

On 15 January 1916 the German auxiliary cruiser Möwe stopped the British passenger ship Appam in the Atlantic. The liner was returning from West Africa to England and, according to the later findings of an American court, was about 130 nautical miles from Funchal on Madeira, in the direction of the Canary Islands. She was the raider’s biggest prize of her first cruise. Instead of sinking her, Möwe’s commander decided to send her with prisoners to the United States, which soon gave rise to a celebrated dispute over neutrality.

The raider’s prize

Möwe had been at sea for several weeks. On her way south she had laid mines off the coast of Scotland and in the Bay of Biscay, and from 11 January she had been stopping ships on the route from Europe to South America and Africa. According to the British official history of the war at sea, by 13 January she had captured five freighters; one of them, the Corbridge with a cargo of coal, she sent to a secret rendezvous off the coast of Brazil, and she sank the rest. On 15 January she also sank the steamer Ariadne, and then she came upon the Appam.

The Appam, a ship of about 7,800 GRT built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast in 1913, belonged to a subsidiary of the Liverpool shipowner Elder Dempster and served the West Africa route. She was carrying cocoa, palm oil, tin and other colonial goods, 16 boxes of bullion and about 170 passengers. Among them were colonial officials with their families, including the Governor of Sierra Leone, Sir Edward Merewether, as well as several Germans being carried as prisoners. The crew numbered about 160. The ship had a small gun on her stern, but when Möwe fired a warning shot across her bows, Captain Henry Harrison forbade the use of the gun and the wireless. The Germans boarded without resistance.

The prize crew

Möwe’s commander, Korvettenkapitän Nikolaus zu Dohna-Schlodien, had more and more prisoners from the sunk ships on board and needed room to house them. That same night the bullion was transferred from the Appam to the raider. Command of the captured ship was taken by Leutnant der Reserve Hans Berg with a prize crew of about twenty, reinforced by German prisoners who had been freed and armed. Explosive charges were placed on the bridge and in the engine room, and Berg announced that he would blow up the ship in the event of a mutiny. For two days the Appam stayed close to Möwe. On the evening of 16 January the raider fought the armed freighter Clan Mactavish, which tried to escape and fired back, and on 17 January the crews of the sunk ships were transferred to the Appam. Together with the people from the Appam herself, this came to several hundred.

Berg received a written order from Dohna-Schlodien to bring the prize to the nearest American port and keep her there. The ship sailed without lights, and the British were not allowed to look at the compass. Meanwhile in Britain the Appam was considered missing, and when an empty lifeboat was found, it began to be feared that she had gone down with all her crew and passengers.

A case for America

On 31 January the Appam reached the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, and on 1 February she anchored in the roads of Hampton Roads in Virginia under the German flag. The appearance of a ship believed lost was a sensation, and for the British the first sign that a German raider was again at work in the Atlantic. The American authorities freed the prisoners, while the Germans invoked the Prussian–American treaty of 1799 and claimed the right to keep the prize in port. The shipowner sued for the return of the ship. The federal court in Virginia in July 1916, and the Supreme Court in March 1917, ruled that bringing a prize into a neutral port without a warship and keeping her there violated the neutrality of the United States. The Appam was returned to her British owners.