84
" Intended to sound the alarm and raise England’s level of naval preparedness, the story was entertaining, and frightening, but was widely deemed too far-fetched to be believable, for Captain Sirius’s behavior would have breached a fundamental maritime code, the cruiser rules, or prize law, established in the nineteenth century to govern warfare against civilian shipping. Obeyed ever since by all seagoing powers, the rules held that a warship could stop a merchant vessel and search it but had to keep its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port, where a “prize court” would determine its fate. The rules forbade attacks against passenger vessels. In "
― Erik Larson , Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
88
" In an article about the warning, the paper quoted Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner, as saying that in the danger zone “there is a general system of convoying British ships. The British Navy is responsible for all British ships, and especially for Cunarders.” The Times reporter said, “Your speed, too, is a safeguard, is it not?” “Yes,” Sumner replied; “as for submarines, I have no fear of them whatever. "
― Erik Larson , Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
89
" A British journalist, Sydney Brooks, writing in the North American Review, gauged America to be just as isolationist as ever. And why not, he asked? “The United States is remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors or any neighbors at all of anything like her own strength, and lives exempt in an almost unvexed tranquility from the contentions and animosities and the ceaseless pressure and counter-pressure that distract the close-packed older world.” While easy in concept, neutrality in "
― Erik Larson , Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania