19
termination lessened, his determination to preserve American friendship [through restraints on the blockade]
similarly weakened.”
89
The Order in Council of 29 October 1914. By the third month of the war, German trade under her own
flag was nonexistent, but her receipt of contraband via neutral countries continued largely undiminished. The
Entente had asserted a right to confiscate much of this trade, but had seized little of it because her agents had
been unable “to penetrate the thick curtain of disguise, which still sheltered the transactions of Germany’s
transit trade.”
90
The recently formed British committee for the restriction of enemy supplies determined in
October that the amount of goods reaching Germany in this way was actually increasing. Furthermore,
neutral states like Holland and Denmark were importing quantities of certain important products, such as oil,
gasoline, and copper that far exceeded their average consumption, causing the committee to suspect that
these goods were being re-exported to Germany.
91
The British, while still treading carefully so as not to upset
relations with the US unduly, decided to take a different tack in order to intercept this burgeoning trade.
As the BEF desperately fought off German attacks in the First Battle of Ypres, London issued a
second Order in Council revising the terms of the blockade. This proclamation was deceptive because it
claimed to revoke the doctrine of continuous voyage as applied to conditional contraband bound for the
enemy, but actually introduced new principles to restrict neutral trade with Germany. Specifically, two
significant changes were instituted. First, the Order stated that the British would presume that any vessel
carrying conditional contraband to a neutral port where those products lacked a consignee, were consigned
“to order” of the shipper, or were consigned to an individual in enemy territory were bound for the enemy
and thus liable to capture. The British had observed an increase in the number of cargoes consigned “to
order,” which meant that the shipper of the goods could do whatever he wanted with these products after
they arrived at the neutral port, such as sell them to a German merchant for further shipment to Germany.
The declaration thus shifted onto the owner of the goods the responsibility for proving that the ultimate
destination of a cargo was not the enemy, and relieved British officials of the onerous task of establishing this
fact themselves.
Second, in Article 2 of the Order Britain proclaimed the right to designate a neutral country an
enemy base of supply if it could be shown that the enemy was drawing supplies for his army through that
country. In other words, Britain threatened to treat a neutral country supplying Germany’s armed forces as if
it were a part of German territory. This measure would allow Britain to seize shipments of conditional
contraband headed for these ports and compel the shippers to present evidence that the cargo was not on its
way to the enemy. This provision of the declaration, therefore, while ostensibly dropping the principle of
continuous voyage as applied to conditional contraband, allowed the British to reinstate it whenever they
“knew of the existence of a brisk neutral trade with the enemy in these articles.”
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If British authorities
actually followed through on the threat embodied in Article 2, the affected country’s shipping would be
detained en masse, creating inconvenient delays, stoppages, and shortages. The threat of such a trade
interruption was a prod used by the British to induce Germany’s neutral neighbors to enter into negotiations
to voluntarily restrict their export trade with Germany. The rationing agreements that resulted, discussed
below, became a key ingredient to the successful disruption of German trade.
Britain’s control over Germany’s effort to provision itself through neutral ports was further increased
when the Admiralty declared the North Sea to be a war zone on 3 November in response to German mine-
laying activity. The German Navy first laid mines on 5 August, when the Konigin Luise deposited a minefield
20-30 miles off the British coast. The British Foreign Office protested this move on the 10
th
, accusing the
89
Vincent, Politics of Hunger, 38.
90
Bell, Blockade of Germany, 59.
91
Holland, for example, received shipments of 4,170 tons of copper in late September, whereas the country usually
imported only 1,000 tons during an entire year (Ibid., 52).
92
Siney, Allied Blockade of Germany, 27.
Convention