The light cruisers HMAS Sydney and HMAS Melbourne joined squadrons of the Royal Navy in Bermuda where a naval station had been established as far back as 1815. The two Australian vessels were involved in patrol duties off the western coast of the Americas with alternate bases for rest periods in either Bermuda or Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Melbourne arrived on station in mid-December 1914 and her first patrol out of the Caribbean was to search the coastal areas of Venezuela, Colombia and Panama for the German raider SMS Karlsruhe and its attendant supply ships. The Sydney arrived on station on 6 January 1915 to take up similar patrols. The Karlsruhe had in fact sunk due to a boiler explosion on 4 November 1914 and the Royal Navy unknowingly continued to hunt for the ship for a further six months. The station’s other duties were to protect neutral American ports and to prevent escape of German-flagged vessels from those neutral ports into which they had sought shelter when war was declared. Patrol zones extended north to Halifax and south to the Para River in Brazil, including the Gulf of Mexico. The two RAN ships each spent more than 18 months on these patrols which were largely uneventful. Both ships were subsequently re-assigned to the British Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow, with Melbourne departing from the Americas in August 1916 and the Sydney following in September 1916.
