the first attempt to bring in a large number of illegal immigrants by sea happened when some 350 Jews sailed on the Vallos, a chartered ship, without the permission of the Jewish Agency, who feared illegal immigration would cause the British to restrict legal immigration. She arrived off the coast of Palestine on 25 August, and the passengers disembarked with the help of the Haganah, which received special permission to assist them. On 29 July 1939, the Colorado, flying under the Panamanian flag and carrying 378 Jewish refugees from Europe was intercepted by the British; the illegal immigrants were arrested and taken into Haifa. On 19 August, the Aghios Nicolaus, a Greek owned ship, transferred 840 immigrants to smaller vessels off the coast and sent them to shore. On 23 August, the Parita, carrying some 700 refugees on board, was deliberately beached at Tel Aviv by the passengers, the captain and crew having fled in a small boat. During World War II On 2 September, the Tiger Hill, a 1,499-ton ship built in 1887, was intercepted and fired on by Royal Navy gunboats off Tel Aviv, killing two passengers (Dr Robert Schneider and Zvi Binder); the ship HMCS Belleville beached on the shore with 1,205 immigrants on board; the Tiger Hill had sailed from Constanţa, Romania, on 3 August 1939, with about 750 immigrants on board and had taken on board the passengers from the Frossoula, another illegal immigrant ship that was marooned in Lebanon. On 16 September, the Rudnitchan transferred 364 Jewish refugees into five lifeboats outside the territorial waters of the Mandate and sent them ashore as illegal immigrants. On 19 September, the Noemi Julia, sailing from Sulina in Romania with 1,130 Jewish refugees from Europe on board was intercepted in the Mediterranean by a British warship and forced to Haifa port; fearing that they would be sent back, the illegal immigrants engaged in passive resistance; the British authorities brought them ashore and held them in a detention camp; they were released a month later. On 24–25 November 1939, a large group of immigrants traveled by train from Vienna to Bratislava and about 2 weeks later sailed from there on the riverboat Uranus down the Danube. At the Romanian border, the three smaller riverboats to which they had been transferred on December 14 on entering Yugoslavia were intercepted and the immigrants were forced to disembark at the old