The next two victims of this sort of warfare were the steamships _Flaminian_ and the _Crown of Castile_, one of which was sunk by the _U-28_, and the other by an unidentified submarine on April 1, 1915. They went down off the west coast of England with no loss of life, though the _Crown of Castile_ was torpedoed before her crew could get off. The _Flaminian_ had tried to get away, but had to stop under fire from deck guns on the submarine. The shells did not hit her in vital spots, however, and it was necessary to send a torpedo into her hull to sink her.
The ease with which submarines had been able to bob up in unexpected places and to sink British merchantmen, in spite of the patrols maintained by British warships, caused the captains of merchant vessels to petition the British Government to be allowed to arm their vessels on April 1, 1915. This was not granted, because their being armed would have made the steamship legitimate prey for the submarines, nor was any attention paid to the demand made by the British press that the crews and officers of captured German submarines be treated, not as prisoners of war, but as pirates. Reprisals on the part of the Germans was feared.
Beachy Head on the 1st of April, 1915, was again the scene of two successful attacks on merchantmen by submarines. On that day the French steamship _Emma_, after being torpedoed, went to the bottom with all of the nineteen men in her crew. The same submarine sank the British steamer _Seven Seas_, causing the deaths of eleven of her men.
In order to indicate the amount of harm which the submarine warfare caused British shipping, the admiralty on April 1, 1915, announced that though five merchantmen had been sent to the bottom and one had been only partially damaged by submarines during the week ending March 31, 1915, some 1,559 vessels entered and sailed from British ports during the same period.
Efforts were made to damage the base, from which many of the German submarines had been putting out at Zeebrugge, with aircraft. On the 1st of April, 1915, the British Government's press bureau announced that bombs had been dropped, with unknown success, on two German submarines lying there, and that on the same day a British airman had flown over Hoboken and had seen submarines in building there.