One of those phrases of mysterious power which appear and disappear in history, leaving nothing quite the same as before, “continuous voyage,” was a concept invented by the British in the course of an eighteenth-century war with the French. It meant that the ultimate, not the initial destination of the goods was the determining factor. Prematurely buried by the Declaration of London before it was quite dead, it was now disinterred like one of Poe’s entombed cats with similar capacity for causing trouble. The War Office had been advised that foodstuffs shipped by neutrals to Holland were going
...more
