HAPAG
registered '''' at
Hamburg. Her
code letters were RMSN. On 20 January 1903 she left Hamburg on her maiden voyage, which was to
Rio de Janeiro. Later that year she sailed from Hamburg to
Mexico, on a direct service that did not call at ports in the
West Indies. In August 1904 HAPAG announced that from 1 October '
and ' would serve its route between
Genoa in
Italy and
New York via
Naples.
Steerage fares from New York would be $15 to Naples and Genoa, and $16 to
Trieste in Italy and Fiume in
Austria-Hungary (now
Rijeka in
Croatia). By 1905 the route included a call at
Palermo in
Sicily, on westbound voyages only. By 1906 her route was between Genoa and
Buenos Aires in
Argentina. By 1910 '''' was equipped with
submarine signalling and
wireless telegraphy. At the end of 1910 she started serving
Philadelphia. '' On 15 April 1912 she was in the North
Atlantic when her
chief steward photographed an iceberg. He wrote that "On one side red paint was plainly visible, which has the appearance of having been made by the scraping of a vessel on the iceberg." At the time, no-one aboard '''
was aware that on the night of 14–15 April RMS Titanic'' had
struck an iceberg and sunk. By 1913 '
s wireless call sign was DDZ. By 1914 she and ' served a North Atlantic route between Hamburg and Philadelphia, sometimes with an intermediate call at
Emden. On 3 August 1914 Germany declared war on
Belgium and
France, and the next day the
United Kingdom declared war on Germany. '''' was in
Falmouth, Cornwall at the time. Her
Master was advised to put to sea, but he chose to keep his ship in Falmouth, where the
Admiralty seized her. ==Allied career==