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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2017
On June 28, 1915, the British consul general in Batavia, W.R.D. Beckett, received a telegram from Admiral Martyn Jerram in Singapore with the urgent news that the Maverick, an American-made steamship, was headed for the Dutch territory of Anjer (Anyer) near the Sunda Strait in west Java. The Maverick, Jerram believed, was loaded with arms and ammunition, which were intended for transshipment to India to fuel the revolutionary movement. Beckett immediately notified all of the British vice consuls in Dutch territory to keep a sharp eye out for the vessel or any information pertaining to it. The next day, he wrote a letter to the Dutch General Secretary in the East Indies, notifying him of the ship's expected arrival and adding that the ship had been chartered in San Francisco by a German and was owned by a German firm. Most important, he wrote, “she is believed to have on board large quantities of rifles and ammunition which she shipped from an American schooner off the coast of Mexico.” Beckett requested that the Dutch place a strict watch on its ports and asked authorities to keep him informed regarding its whereabouts.
The Dutch authorities acted immediately on this threat. Governor General A.F.W. Idenburg and Vice Admiral F. Pinke were both concerned about the implications such a plan would have on Dutch neutrality if weapons of war were exchanged in its territories. Not only that, following on the heels of a May 31 letter from Beckett conveying a rumor that Germans in the East Indies were attempting to arm the German merchant ship Roon for an unspecified purpose, Idenburg could not completely dismiss the idea that the weapons supposedly aboard the Maverick were intended to arm Germans living in the colony for an eventual takeover of the Indies rather than for Indian revolutionaries. Idenburg and Pinke instructed authorities in all Dutch ports to keep a close eye on moored German ships and then sent Dutch ships out to search for the Maverick.
After a series of misadventures, the Maverick did indeed end up in the Dutch East Indies port of Tanjung Priok, where it was detained for the duration of the war.
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