It was not intended that this third promise should be kept; there were other ways of evading the issue. The _Rappahannock_, a ship which sailed with a crew of 37, from Halifax, on October 17, 1916, was never heard of again, except in the wireless message by which the German Admiralty reported her destruction. The plan of sinking without a trace was first officially recommended by Count Luxburg, the German diplomatic agent in the Argentine; but the German Professor Flamm, of Charlottenburg, has also the honour of having proposed it in the paper _Die Woche_. ‘The best would be if destroyed neutral ships disappeared without leaving a trace, and with everything on board, because terror would very quickly keep seamen and travellers away from the danger zones, and thus save a number of lives.’ No doubt the _Rappahannock_ was ‘spurlos versenkt’; so was the _North Wales_, and so were many others meant to be. The German method, in 1916, was to torpedo the ship, and then shell the survivors in their open boats. This was done in the cases of the _Kildare_ and the _Westminster_, both sunk in the Mediterranean; but on neither occasion were the pirates successful in killing the whole of the crew, and their crime was therefore known and doubly execrated by the whole civilised world. None the less, they continued the hideous practice, and in the following eight months fired upon the helpless survivors of at least twelve ships, enumerated with authentic details in a list published by the _Times_ on August 20, 1917. On the whole, the year 1916 was a difficult one for the German people. The objections of America to the practice of piracy were becoming uncomfortably urgent; promises had to be made under compulsion, and the ‘joyful pride’ of the nation would have been much diminished if it had not been reinforced by two successes of a new kind. On March 17, 1916, the Russian hospital ship _Portugal_ was torpedoed off the Turkish coast in the Black Sea. She carried no wounded, but had on board a large crew and a staff of Red Cross nurses and orderlies. It was a clear morning, the ship was flying the Red Cross flag, and had a Red Cross conspicuously painted on every funnel; but she was deliberately destroyed, with 85 of those on board, including 21 nurses and 24 other members of the Red Cross staff. On November 21, a British hospital ship, the _Britannic_, was sunk in the same way. She was a huge vessel, and had on board 1,125 people, of whom 25 were doctors, 76 nurses, and 399 medical staff. The outrage was said by the Germans to be justified by ‘the suspicion of the misuse of the hospital ship for purposes of transport.’ This suspicion was wholly unfounded, and the submarine commander had taken no steps to enquire into the truth.