the British blockade of Germany futile up to March 1915.
Under its rules food, cotton and all conditional contraband could
not be touched so long as they were discharging at neutral ports
such as Rotterdam or Copenhagen. One saving clause had been
added in an Order of Council of Aug. 20 1914, which permitted
some latitude by rendering such cargoes liable to capture if
there were sufficient evidence of enemy destination. Unfortu-
nately even this safeguard was swept away by a British Order in
Council of Oct. 29 1914 which restricted seizure of conditional
contraband to goods consigned to " order " or without a named
consignee, a regulation which promptly produced a vast crop of
dummy neutral consignees and rendered the blockade ineffective
for five months. No further action was taken against food-stuffs,
and for five months a succession of ships streamed daily through
the Downs, bound for Holland and Scandinavia with food and
cotton for Germany. Four cargoes only were placed in prize,
whereupon the prize court in London proceeded to sweep all the
veneer of rules away and adjudged that a " named consignee "
must be a bona fide and not a dummy consignee (British and
Colonial Prize Cases, the " Rijn, " June 6 1917).
The judgment has an important general bearing, for it con- stitutes a justification from the naval point of view of the estab- lished system of adjudication by a qualified court, where general principles are applied to particular cases in the light of experience and common sense, compared with a system based on a code operated by busy officials under a burdened Secretary of State.
It was not until March n 1915 that the blockade was tightened up by a new British Order in Council, under which all goods with enemy destination or of enemy origin became liable to seizure, and it was not till July 7 1916 that the broken shards of the dis- credited Declaration of London were finally swept out of the way. It was not a code but machinery that was wanted, and by March 1915 the machinery was beginning to take shape. The part played by the British navy consisted in the interception and examination of ships, which was under the purview of the Trade Division (Capt. Richard Webb) of the Admiralty. A British Contraband Committee, with representatives of the Admiralty (Capt. Horace Longden and Lt.-Comm. W. E. A. Arnold Forster), Foreign Office and Board of Trade, had been set up in 1914 to decide whether a ship or cargo was to be sent in for adjudication. Its necessary adjunct, a War Trade Intelligence Department to collect and collate information of ships and cargo, was established somewhat later. The code disappeared, and each cargo was dealt with on its merits.
The British naval work directly associated with the blockade fell under two heads the work of the blockade squadrons at sea and the service of naval control. It was the function of the block- ade squadrons to patrol the avenues to the ocean, intercept neu- tral craft and send them into port for examination. This was the task of the loth Cruiser Squadron, one of the hardest tasks of the war and one which has received perhaps too scanty a meed of praise. The squadron consisted at first of Edgar class cruisers, but being unable to stand the terrific seas of the North Atlantic they were withdrawn and their place taken by large armed mer- chant cruisers (18 in number, in Nov. 1914) under the command of Rear-Adml. Dudley de Chair (succeeded in 1916 by Vice-Adml. Sir Reginald Tupper). In the South the conditions were different. The configuration of the coast, the fear of minefields and des- troyer patrols off Dover resulted in all traffic being shepherded willy-nilly into the Downs; and this practically dispensed with the difficult task of interception. The practice of performing the search of ships in harbour was an innovation, and it remains one of the outstanding lessons of the war that " visit and search " (if the search involves an effective examination of the cargo) cannot be effectively performed at sea, partly on account of the complexity and difficulty of the work under modern conditions, partly on account of the danger of submarine attack. Ships were accordingly sent into harbour to be searched, and though the dispatch of neutral ships into harbour was undoubtedly a con- siderable extension of the universally recognized right of visit and search, it was an extension inherent in the circumstances, for without it the search would have become ineffective and the
right null and void. The practice, however, involved some nice legal points, such, for instance, as whether a ship sent into a har- bour by force majeure to be subjected to visit and search comes under the full force of municipal jurisdiction and of port regula- tions which would have subjected a huge Norwegian liner to quarantine for a case of smallpox on board.
The patrol lines of the loth Cruiser Squadron stretched at first from Norway to the Shetlands (250 m.), but as the sub- marine menace extended they were moved to the westward and lay sometimes between Iceland and the Hebrides, sometimes between the Shetlands and Faroes (160 m.), and the Faroes to Iceland (160 m.). The average weekly number of ships inter- cepted in 1915 was about 66, of which some 15 to 20 were sent weekly into Kirkwall with an armed guard. It was the duty of the officer of the armed guard merely to ensure that the ship was steering a proper course, and he did not interfere in any way with the ordinary navigation or administration of the ship.
Little has been written of the work of the loth C. S., but its dangerous nature can be gathered from the number of its ships lost by mine and submarine. In 1915 its losses amounted to four. The " Viknor " (Comm. E. O. Ballantyne) was lost with all hands, off the coast of Ireland (Jan. 13), probably on a mine; the " Clan Macnaughton " was supposed to have foundered (Feb. 3); the " Bayano " was sunk by U27 on March n off Galloway; the " India " by U22 off the coast of Norway on Aug. 20. The " Alcantara " (Capt. Thos. E. Wardle), which sank the raider " Greif " on Feb. 29 1916, belonged too to this squadron, whose name was a household word in the blockade. The institution of the white-list and black-list, which gave an indication of a ship's nature, and the issue of green clearances to neutral ships sailing from British ports, facilitated the work of interception; and by March 1915 nearly all the more important neutral lines had agreed to call at Kirkwall or the Downs in order to avoid the delay of being intercepted far out at sea and losing time in putting back.
In 1915 the number of vessels intercepted by the loth C. S. was 3,098, of which 743, or 24%, were sent into Kirkwall; the remainder, including 817 fishing vessels and 408 British and Allied ships, were allowed to pass. During the same year 19 ships succeeded in evading the patrols, of which only eight were of real consequence, a comparatively small number in view of the long northern nights full of wind and frost and snow.
The port of control and detention in the North was Kirkwall, which provided a large enclosed harbour where ships could be safe from the sea and the enemy. The average number of ships calling and sent in was some two or three a day in 1915, but in the latter part of 1916, when Dutch traffic began to go north for a time, it rose to five or six.
The Downs (Comm. W. Moorsom and Capt. Walter Tomlin) was far the largest control station, and had the really immense task of dealing with three-quarters of the neutral trade of north- ern Europe. All the Channel traffic up and down had to be shep- herded through, and here some 10 to 15 neutral ships had to be examined daily. The manifest was taken off, sent ashore, sum- marized (no light task in the case of big Dutch East Indies cargo ships) and telegraphed to the Contraband Committee. The ship outside the hold was searched for contraband and German mail- bags, and some of the items in the hold were examined and com- pared with the manifest. To examine and search a large liner and the luggage of some 500 passengers took 10 officers and 20 picked men the best part of 18 hours. German women were searched by lady searchers and allowed to go on. Meanwhile the manifest was examined by the Contraband Committee in the light of the knowledge they had of ships, cargoes, consignors and consignees, and instructions sent to clear the ship or to send her in to discharge all or a portion of her cargo, or to detain her till guarantees were received. The ordinary period of detention for ships eastward bound was one to three days, for ships westward bound a day or less. A smaller control station at Falmouth re- lieved the Downs of a portion of its burden.
The power of naval interception, visit and search, was in itself a powerful form of pressure, for neutral shipping companies in
