File No. 763.72111G27/24

The German Ambassador (Bernstorff) to the Secretary of State

[Translation]

No. A 2453]

Mr. Secretary of State: In reply to your excellency’s kind note of the 12th instant and with reference to Acting Secretary of State Lansing’s letter of the 16th instant, both about the internment of the German S. S. Locksun at Honolulu, I have the honor to say the following:

Acting Secretary of State Lansing informed me in his above-mentioned letter of the 16th instant that the S. S. Locksun had been interned because she had served as a tender to H. M. S. Geier, had thereby assumed the character of a belligerent, and was to be considered as part of the equipment of a war vessel. To this I wish to say that there is, so far as I know, no international law or stipulation in existence which imparts the character of a warcraft, i. e., of a “part of a warship” to a tender on account of her accompanying a warship. The situation in times of peace also proves this. Where there is a likelihood of the warship being unable safely to get along on her own resources, there is the necessity of sending tenders along. This is rather often done in times of peace without causing such tenders to be considered and treated on that account as “parts of the warship concerned,” or in the light of international law even as warships.

Granting, however, that such vessel could actually be considered as a “part of a warship,” then there could be no doubt that its part as a coaling and supply ship would come to an end at the very moment the warship is interned and she would then cease to be “part of a warship.”

Besides, if it be enough, as stated in the above-referred-to note of the 16th instant, to stamp a steamer as a warcraft that she did supply a war vessel with coal or provisions, then the S. S. Locksun’s case in no wise differs from that of the tug F. B. Dalzell, which, as I had the honor to inform your excellency by my note of the 21st ultimo, carried victuals and information to the English warship Essex from the port of New York.1

Accept [etc.]

J. Bernstorff
  1. Post, p. 658.