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The Falaba crime, in which the German sailors were reported to have jeered at the drowning victims in the water, was followed by the sinking of the Lusitania. At that a wave of real anger swept through the Empire. Hate was begetting hate at last. There were violent riots in Great Britain and in South Africa.
Agreeable Germany! who sank the Lusitania; who sank five thousand British merchant ships with the loss of fifteen thousand men, women, and children, all murdered at sea, without a chance for their lives; who fired on boat-loads of the shipwrecked, who stood on her submarine and laughed at the drowning passengers of the torpedoed Falaba.
The quality of Wilson's pacifism was about to be put to the test. In March a British steamer, the Falaba, was sunk and an American citizen drowned; some weeks later an American boat, the Cushing, was attacked by a German airplane; and on the 1st of May, another American steamer, the Gulflight, was sunk by a submarine with the loss of two American lives.
Once more an incident in the naval warfare of the Great War was to involve diplomatic exchanges between the belligerents and the United States. The African liner Falaba, a British ship on her way from Liverpool to Lisbon, was torpedoed in St. George's Channel on the afternoon of March 28, 1915. She had as one of her passengers an American, L. C. Thrasher, who lost his life when the ship sank.
The events of the early spring, the bloody failure of British generalship at Neuve Chapelle, the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the sinking of the Falaba, the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes, all deepened the bishop's impression of the immensity of the nation's difficulties and of his own unhelpfulness.
From then on we had constant cases and crises with reference to the sinking of American boats by the German submarine. There were the cases of the Gulfflight and the Cushing and the Falaba, an English boat sunk without warning on which Americans were killed. On May sixth, 1915, Director Kriege of the Foreign Office asked Mr.
Oxen, sheep, goats, and a small species of poultry, with a few horses, are the chief domestic animals of the people of Soolimana. The wild beasts, of which there are a good many, are elephants, buffaloes, a kind of antelope, monkeys, and leopards. Falaba, which takes its name from the Fala-ba river, on which it is situated, is about a mile and a half long by one broad.
The American steamers Falaba and Gulflight were torpedoed without warning, in each case with the loss of one or two lives. Finally, the steamer Sussex, crossing the English Channel, was hit by a torpedo which killed many of the passengers. As several Americans lost their lives, once more the United States warned Germany that this must not be repeated.
The commander of the submarine brought his craft to the surface off the bow of the Falaba, and gave the captain of the steamship five minutes in which to put his crew and passengers into lifeboats. A torpedo was sent against her hull and found the engine room, causing a tremendous explosion.
The major had not, however, left Falaba two hours before the permission was rescinded, and he had to give up an enterprise which had justly appeared to him of great importance. A few days later he obtained leave to visit the source of the Rokelle or Sale Kongo, a river of which nothing was known before his time beyond Rokon.
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