Lusitania puppet Kingdom of Northern Lusitania as one of the successor states to Portugal under the assumption that such a campaign would result in an easy French victory. The province was also the namesake of the North Atlantic Ocean Liner RMS Lusitania infamous for being torpedoed by a German Uboat in 1915. The ship’s owners the Cunard Line commonly named their vessels after Roman provinces with the Lusitania so being called after the Roman Iberian province to the north of the Strait of Gibraltar while her sistership RMS Mauretania was named after the Roman North African province on the south side
The Sinking of the Lusitania event outraged McCay, but the newspapers of his employer William Randolph Hearst downplayed the event, as Hearst was opposed to the US joining World War I. McCay was required to illustrate anti-war and anti-British editorial cartoons for Hearst's papers. In 1916, McCay rebelled against his employer's stance and began work on the patriotic "Sinking of the Lusitania" on his own time with his own money. The film followed McCay's earlier successes in animation: "Little Nemo" (1911), "How a Mosquito Operates" (1912), and "Gertie the Dinosaur" (1914). McCay drew these earlier films on rice paper, onto which backgrounds had to be