A Steel Prinzess Stranded in Cebu
/This November 11 commemoration of Armistice Day in Europe (Veterans Day in the US or the formal end of WWI, and, last April-May, the strange sight of scores of empty cruise ships sitting stranded in Manila Bay—the largest gathering of giant ships in the bay since the famous Battle of Manila Bay of 1898—recalled a little-known historical footnote of how the Philippines in 1917, the farthest outpost of the USA at the time, got involved in WWI.
In April-May this year when 18 cruise (and other) ships sat in Manila Bay, quarantined due to the Covid pandemic. The ships, having dropped off their large Filipino crews in Manila, were in a holding pattern in until their next sailing orders came through.
That story involves a steel prinzess, a German ship with a long and colorful history, called the SS Prinzess Alice, also stranded not in Manila Bay but in Cebu in 1914. But first, the global stage setting in which this little-known bit of history played out.
In 1910-1920, the Philippines was settling in as the USA’s Far Eastern presence, the westernmost shore of America’s Manifest Destiny. The USA (and its other far-flung territories won from Spain—Puerto Rico and Guam), initially maintained a neutral stance in the European hostilities, until formally joining the war in April 1917.
Because of this early neutrality, all US ports provided “safe harbor” for any (mostly civilian) ships of the combatant European countries (i.e., France, Germany, Great Britain, Austro-Hungary) who did not want to risk being sunk in the Atlantic and other seas of combat. Since the French and British navies primarily ruled the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean naval theatres of war, it was mostly German and Austro-Hungarian merchant ships which sought shelter in the neutral American (and Portuguese) ports.
On the morning of August 4, 1914—one day after Germany declared war on Russia—a 706-ft. long German liner, the SS Kronprinzess Cecilie, appeared in Bar Harbor, Maine, like a homeless puppy seeking shelter from the storm. Just a week before, the Cecilie had departed New York for Europe on July 25, with a full complement of 1,400 passengers, 900 crew and nearly $15 million in gold and silver bullions destined for banks in Europe. But on July 29, the day after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, four days into her transatlantic voyage and about a day outside British waters, the Cecilie mysteriously turned around and headed back to North America, with barely enough coal to make it back.
The SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie in Bar Harbor, Maine, on August 4, 1914 in the Cunard funnel-livery colors of black-and-red, hoping to pass for the SS Mauretania.
The Cecilie’s passengers, on learning of the turn-around, nearly mutinied. But there was nothing they could do. The Cecilie steamed westward in total radio silence, not wanting to give away her location to British and French frigates already prowling the sea lanes. For four days, no one knew where or what happened to her. In addition, the captain tried one more desperate gambit to get his ship safely back to US waters. He ordered his crew to paint over the ship’s yellow funnels to match Cunard’s black-and-red livery in the hopes of passing for the Mauretania, a better known British four-stacker.
The Cecilie did get to Bar Harbor safely and, after some machinations, sat out the war years on the US East Coast. The returned passengers had to find other ways to get back to Europe, or entirely abandon their plans since war had become a full-blown reality across the Pond. The Cecilie’s saga illustrates the circumstances under which a much smaller, more innocuous German ship in the Far East, the Prinzess Alice, ended up seeking shelter in the far-off port of Cebu.
The Alice first came into service in 1900 as a 10,900-ton mail carrier called the SS Kiautschou, built by the biggest ship line in the world at the time, Hamburg-Amerikanische Paketfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG for short) for Germany-Far Eastern mail and cargo routes. Kiautschou was the German colony/concession in northern China then. Today, it is known as Quingdao.
In 1904, the SS Kiautschou was traded to North German Lloyd (NGL), the second largest German ship company for five other freighters. The Kiautschou was renamed the SS Prinzess Alice by NGL for a granddaughter of English Queen Victoria, who had just become the new bride of a German prince, William Teck of Wurttemberg. For that first decade of the new century, even with the change of name, the new Prinzess Alice still carried 450 passengers, mail and cargo on her Far Eastern routes including Quingdao, Yokohama, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila, Bangkok, Calcutta and Batavia (now Jakarta).
The Prinzess Alice docked in Cebu, 1914-17; it then became USS Princess Matoika, then the SS President Arthur, and finally the SS City of Honolulu. (U.S. Navy)
In late July 1914, as war spread across Europe, the European powers and their colonies in Asia and Africa were all be swept into the conflict. The Alice neared her destination of Hong Kong with £850,000 of gold from India. Rather than face seizure by British authorities there, the Alice, like the Cecilie, diverted to the neutral American Philippines, depositing the gold with the German Consul in Manila. (If that gold shipment did not reach its intended destination via the consul, then the matter would most certainly have been addressed in the post-war reparations talks.) By early August, with the war in Europe in full swing, arrangements were made for the Alice to intern in Cebu, a relatively quieter and cheaper port than Manila, in the interim.
For nearly three years (1914-17), so long as the war raged in Europe, the Prinzess Alice quietly sat docked in Cebu. Most of the original German crew had already been sent home and only a rotating skeleton crew remained behind to maintain and service the ship.
While the circumstances of Alice’s arrival in Cebu were not quite as dramatic as the Cecilie’s, the Alice set itself up for imminent seizure once the US declared war on its mother country, Germany, by the time America entered the war. Likewise, 90 other Imperial German and Austro-Hungarian civilian ships which sought shelter in US ports faced the predicament. The night before the US entered the war on April 6, 1917, hundreds of US government agents served papers on the “guest” Central Powers’ ships and seized them the following day as “instant war booty.”
As soon as the proper seizure papers had been served, the Alice was made ready to sail to Olongapo. There she would be refitted as a US ship and was renamed the USS Princess Matoika.
Its new name, Princess Matoika, was a source of controversy. Some speculated it was after a Philippine Muslim royal family member or even a Japanese princess; instead, it turned out to be the Algonquin spelling of Pocahontas of the Powhatan tribe. The Matoika became the last seized ex-German ship to be commissioned for the USA. Under a new name, she eventually made her way to San Francisco.
One little-known Philippine-US naval fact: it was the overnight swelling of the US fleet by 91 merchant ships of varying shapes and kinds that immediately allowed many Filipino men already in the US mainland to quickly join the US Navy. This was before larger waves of Filipinos were recruited in the 1920s and 1930s as farm workers. While the majority of able-bodied American men were being drafted and trained for the Army, the US Navy also immediately needed several thousand raw recruits with little or no naval experience to man the newly seized ex-German vessels and maintain them at ports. For Filipinos, this sudden need would provide the gangway into the US Navy.
Fate After the War
Even though still a US Army ship in 1920, the SS Matoika did Olympic duty in July of that year when she carried the US team across the Pond to Antwerp, Belgium, for the 1920 Summer Games. The less than ideal circumstances under which the Olympic team—the best of US youth--was transported, gave rise to what has become known as the “Mutiny on the Matoika.” For her final trip for the US Army, she returned to New York in September 1920, carrying some of the returning Olympic team members along with the remains of 1,284 US soldiers.
When US Army ownership expired in 1921, she was recruited for cruise service from New York to Genoa, Italy. In 1922, she was turned over to the newly formed United States Lines, and moved back to the Pacific for passenger service under a new name, the SS President Arthur, in honor of the 21st U.S. president. That made the ex-Prinzess Alice/Princess Matoika-turned-President Arthur (then later, the gender-neutral City of Honolulu) as the second “trans-gender” ocean liner in history. The first was also the German-made SS Imperator, which became the SS Berengaria as part of the war reparations extracted from Germany by the Allies.
For a little over a year (1925-26), the SS President Arthur became the flagship of the newly formed American Palestine Line, and would provide service between New York and Haifa in Palestine. The ship made three round-trip voyages between New York and Palestine. But fires and financial difficulties caught up with the new enterprise, and the ship was returned the United States Shipping Board. However, the Arthur had the distinction of being the first ocean liner to fly the new Zionist flag at sea and the first one in history to have female officers serve on board.
In 1926, the ex-Jewish Arthur was acquired by the Los Angeles Steamship Company, and so she came back to the Pacific for cruise service between California and Hawaii. She was renamed the asexual SS City of Honolulu. She plied the Pacific route without incident from 1927 until May 1930 when her Deck B caught fire. Docked in Honolulu, she was deliberately sunk in the pier because Honolulu did not have adequate harbor fire-fighting resources and, with 16,000 barrels of oil in its hold, there was the great fear that one horrendous fireball might result. When things were under control, she was pumped out and refloated but was declared a total loss. She was floated back to Los Angeles and laid up for another three years in San Pedro.
One of the last photographs of the SS City of Honolulu as she was laid up in San Pedro (1930-33) before she was bought for scrap by Japanese shipbreakers.
Final Voyage
In 1933, she was sold for scrap to Japanese shipbreakers. On her final voyage from the US West Coast to Osaka—not without its engine problems, a Los Angeles Times report pointed out that she was manned by a “Filipino crew.” Somehow it was a fitting farewell salute to a German ship that spent three uneventful years a century ago in the quiet port of Cebu.
And that is the story of one plucky little ship, which started life named after a Chinese colony, then became a German princess, a Native American one, a US President and, back to being a Pacific city. Sailing under two flags, it linked the Philippines, the farthest American colony, to the Great War of Europe in 1917. It gave the Filipinos no inkling of the new horrors that would be unleashed twenty-four years later, beginning in December 1941.
While doing the research for the above story, I came across two other extremely interesting Philippine-German anecdotes:
1. How did Philippine radio stations merit the call letters “DZ”?
In 1947, the first post-WWII conference of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)—which body controlled the assignment of broadcast stations call letters—was convened to create some sort of world order in the call letters of many new independent nations like India, Pakistan, the Philippines.
In the Commonwealth era, radio stations in the Philippines were assigned the KZ prefix (together with all American radio stations west of the Mississippi). Francisco “Koko” Trinidad, one of the pioneers of Philippine broadcasting was the Philippine representative to that 1947 conference. He remembers asking to change the first two call letters of Philippine radio from the American KZ to RP, to stand for Republic of the Philippines. Trinidad wanted the world to know about the newly independent republic through the radio call letters.
Unfortunately, the ITU rejected the request for the RP call letters because of the enormous trouble it would take to secure the approval of the entire international body, and the necessary global changes that would follow. Instead, the ITU decided to assign the call letters DZ to the Philippines. DZ would have been assigned to Germany, however, as punishment for Germany using radio for propaganda to advance the Nazi cause, the broken-up German nation was deprived of its first choice of the preferred “D” (for Deustchland) for its postwar call letters. Thus, Germany’s loss was the new Philippines’ postwar gain.
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2. Finally, for the Filipino fans of Vegas legends Siegfried and Roy, one more strange Philippine-German shipping connection:
When Roy Horn (of the Siegfried & Roy Vegas phenomenon) passed away recently (RIP, herr Horn), this utterly strange and weird S&R-Philippine connection I came upon suddenly became quite poignant.
As young men from Germany, Siegfried and Roy began their partnership when both served aboard the SS Bremen in 1960. Siegfried worked as a steward on the ship while the younger Roy was a page. The Bremen, plying the Germany-Caribbean routes, began life as the SS Pasteur, a French liner from 1938.
Animal-illusionists Siegfried and Roy began their careers and partnership on the SS Bremen.
While Siegfried and Roy went on to become phenomenally successful animal illusionists in Las Vegas in the ensuing decades, the Pasteur-Bremen, through a change of ownership, became the Regina Magna, then the Saudiphil I, and the Filipinas Saudi. That was in 1977 when she had been acquired by the Philippine-Singapore Ports Corporation of Saudi Arabia and was used November 1, 1977 as an accommodation ship for Filipino workers in Jeddah, in the early days of Filipino OFWs in the Middle East.
In 1980, as the Filipinas Saudi I, she was sold for scrap (after all, the ship was already 42 years old—way past the average lifetime of most 20th century ships). While being towed to shipbreakers in Taiwan later that year, she suddenly rolled over on her port side and capsized in the Indian Ocean--the ungainly demise of a proud ship that for 41 years, like the SS Princess Matoika, sailed under five names but under six countries' flags.
The final, dramatic moments of the Pasteur > Bremen > Regina Magna > Saudi Phil > Filipinas Saudi somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
Myles A. Garcia
Myles A. Garcia is a Correspondent and regular contributor to www.positivelyfilipino.com. He has written three books: Secrets of the Olympic Ceremonies (latest edition, 2016); Thirty Years Later . . . Catching Up with the Marcos-Era Crimes (© 2016); and his latest, Of Adobe, Apple Pie, and Schnitzel With Noodles—all available in paperback from amazon.com (Australia, USA, Canada, UK and Europe).
Myles is also a member of the International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH), contributing to their Journal, and pursuing dramatic writing lately. For any enquiries: razor323@gmail.com
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