Sale of the Dacia

The British chronology of the war records under 6 January 1915 that the German steamer Dacia, interned in the United States, had been sold to an American citizen, Edward Breitung. The deal itself had been concluded in December, but only at the beginning of January did the ship receive American registry and the affair become widely known. Around what seemed an ordinary sale of an old freighter a diplomatic dispute flared up between Washington and London.

A ship from Port Arthur

The Dacia belonged to the German shipping company HAPAG, known as the Hamburg America Line. She was a steamer of about 3,500 gross register tons, a dozen or so years old, which before the war had carried cotton from Gulf of Mexico ports to Germany. At the turn of July and August 1914, as war broke out, she took refuge in Port Arthur, Texas. Putting to sea under the German flag would have meant almost certain capture by British cruisers. Dozens of such German ships were lying in American ports at the time.

The opportunity was spotted by Edward N. Breitung, a businessman from Michigan, the son of a German-born congressman, from whom he had inherited mining and timber interests. The war had driven up freight rates, especially for carrying cotton, and ships were scarce. An act of 18 August 1914 allowed foreign-built ships to be registered under the flag of the United States. In December Breitung’s agent agreed with HAPAG to buy the Dacia for 165,000 dollars. The money was paid on 16 and 21 December, on condition that the ship received American registry. Breitung intended to send her at once with a cargo of about 11,000 bales of cotton from Galveston to Bremen.

London objects

Britain regarded the transaction with suspicion from the start. Under Article 56 of the Declaration of London, the transfer of an enemy ship to a neutral flag after the outbreak of war was void unless it was proved that it had not been made to evade the consequences of war. In a memorandum of 2 January, which reached the State Department on 5 January, the British embassy pointed out that the ship had been bought for roughly a third of her value, that the buyer had not previously been engaged in shipping and that the Dacia was to sail for a German port. London reserved the right not to recognise the change of flag.

The Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, replied that the US government recognised such transactions if they were concluded in good faith, but could not guarantee the ships protection in advance. On 13 January he asked the British to let the Dacia, now officially bound for Rotterdam, through as an exception, because without this voyage the cotton owners would go bankrupt. The Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, wrote back on 21 January that Britain would buy the cargo or carry it to Rotterdam in another ship at its own expense, but would send the ship herself before a prize court. He regarded the Dacia as a test case. If he let her through, other interned German ships might pass under the American flag. The dispute overlapped with the growing tension over British control of neutral trade and with the debate in Congress on the government’s bill to purchase merchant ships, in which the British saw a threat of a similar kind.

Voyage and seizure

Breitung did not give up. At the end of January the Dacia, with her cargo of cotton, left Galveston, and in mid-February she set out across the Atlantic from Norfolk. On 27 February, at the entrance to the English Channel, she was stopped, however, not by a British but by a French auxiliary cruiser, which escorted her to Brest. Many works point out that this solution spared London another direct clash with American public opinion. The French prize court found that the change of flag had been intended to let the ship avoid capture and continue trading with the enemy, and ordered the Dacia confiscated. The Allies promised the cotton owners payment for the cargo, in line with Grey’s January undertakings.