In 1913 and 1914 Alexander Stephen and Sons built a pair of sister ships at its yard in Linthouse, Glasgow, for KHL.

[8][9] After she called at Vigo, Spain, the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Highflyer stopped Tubantia, put a boarding party aboard her,[9] and escorted into Plymouth.

The New York Times reported that on 17 October Tubantia ran aground on the coast of Kent while en route from Buenos Aires to Rotterdam.

[11] In December 1915 the Overseas News Agency in Berlin claimed that the British authorities had seized all the mail and parcels from South America aboard Tubantia.

[12] The US expressed concern that the British had seized items from two Dutch ships in transatlantic service between the Netherlands and the US – Nieuw Amsterdam and Rijndam.

The British Foreign Office replied by stating that contraband intended for Germany — which included four packages of rubber, and seven containers of wool — had been found among Tubantia's mail.

2033 which had been assigned to the small, coastal submarine UB-13,[Note 1] German authorities presented a forged log from UB-13 that showed her nowhere near Tubantia at the time of the attack.

They claimed UB-13 had fired that specific torpedo at a British warship on 6 March, ten days before Tubantia was sunk.

[16] The US Minister to the Netherlands, Henry van Dyke, writing in Fighting for Peace in 1917, called this explanation "amazing" and derided it: This certain U-boat had fired this particular torpedo at a British war-vessel somewhere in the North Sea ten days before the Tubantia was sunk.

But the naughty undisciplined little torpedo went cruising around in the sea on its own hook for ten days waiting for a chance to kill somebody.

To help divert the public anger against his country, German diplomat Richard von Kühlmann began a coordinated campaign to spread rumors of an impending British invasion of the Netherlands.

The rumors caused some panic in the streets, and the Dutch government declared a four-day emergency from 30 March to 2 April.

[18] Despite denials and rumor-spreading, Germany nevertheless offered compensation in the amount of £300,000, Tubantia's original cost.

[15] In 1924 two sets of salvors contested the salvage rights to the wreck, each wishing to try to recover £2 million of gold coins that she was reputed to be carrying.

The winning party, Royal Naval Air Service veteran Sydney Vincent Sippe, spent three years and £100,000 trying to access the gold, but abandoned the attempt after concluding that it was too dangerous for divers to recover it.