[1] See Note B,Appendix.
Sailors since Magellan, by Joe, have talked about the storms around Cape Horn. Sea stories usually have something about the tough times rounding the Cape. I had seen those storms myself when I had sailed in the forecastle, and as a naval officer I had many a time told tales to my brother officers of gales and tempests I had witnessed in an old windjammer rounding Horn. But our trip this voyage was to be the most unusual of all. If the storms held us back, the cruisers would be almost certain to catch us. We had sailed south in fine time, and if we made a quick passage round that boisterous tip of South America, we might slip into the wide Pacific and continue our raids.
Well, we ran into the dirtiest weather off the Horn, gales and hurricanes. Why, there were days when even with our motor running we could make no headway at all. It took us three weeks to beat our way through the gales and around the point. By that time, the cruisers lay there in wait for us, not just one or two, but a whole half dozen of them.
Ordinarily, a sailing ship tries to hug Cape Horn as closely as it can, keeping quite near land. If you veer too far to the south, you run into icebergs. Navigating among icebergs with the wind whistling through your rigging is enough to give any skipper the chills. So the storms had held us up, and now our best chance probably would be to steer as wide a course to the south as possible, whether safe or not. The mountains of ice were there, and a hurricane was blowing. But we considered the ice the lesser of two evils. The British watch to the far south was bound to be less vigilant than up nearer the Cape. We must try to sail around them. So, ho for the Antarctic!
On our way through the blockade, we had steered into the Arctic. Now here we were heading into the Antarctic.
To make it pleasant, by Joe, the weather, which had been quite decent to us on the way south, changed in order to give us a regular Cape Horn welcome. It turned into a veritable hurricane. Nevertheless, we were determined to carry as much sail as possible. Risky, but we had to take chances in the hope of getting through. As the tempest increased, not even theSeeadlerdared carry more than a rag or two of lower sail. With this we tried to hold our way. Through the mist we saw a great wall. It came moving toward us. A vast wall of white, an iceberg. The wind was driving this white spectre through the water, and we had to veer off in order to avoid collision.
To the north were the cruisers, and here, but a few hundred yards away, an equally relentless enemy bearing down upon us, as though determined to turn us into the arms of our pursuers. A shout to the helmsman. Determined as we were to go no farther north, we knew we could do no more than hug the Antarctic ice field.
The mountain of ice nearest us seemed coming closer and closer—nine times as much ice below the water as above. As every schoolboy knows, if a berg looms up two hundred feet above the waves, its base extends eighteen hundred feet below the surface! How far its sharp hard edges and spurs may extend on either side you never can tell unless one of them rips open your hull. The best way to avoid running into a spur is to turn and run the other way. An iceberg carries neither lights, lighthouses, buoys, nor sirens. She is a cold, calculating, merciless Circe, and the wise mariner gives her a wide berth. Some of us thought the berg was six thousand feet long while others thought it much more than that. We were so near it that we could hear the clattering and squawking of the thousands of sea gulls that swarmed around the ice mountain. In the wild, heaving sea, the berg rolled like some mammoth ship. There were cracking sounds as the heaving ice strained and split. Once, under the stress of the movement, one whole vast corner broke off with a tremendous rending and tearing. The block, as big as a skyscraper, crashed into the sea, and before it could start off on a cruise of its own the waves dashed it into the berg with a noise like thunder, and this continued time and again as the parent berg drove its husky offspring before it.
Suddenly, there came an even more ominous scraping sound. TheSeeadlerquivered, and our blood fairly froze. We had grazed a submerged snout of ice. In such a sea, there would have been no chance to launch lifeboats. Although we had not staved in our hull, nevertheless, the ship had sprung a leak. No matter who was captain. Everybody to the pumps. I took my place with the sailors in the hold, and we all fought to keep the water in check. The brush with the ice was a warning. We veered a bit more to the north, and with pumps working madly, passed the berg. The wind wrenched us, the waves struck us hard, but we kept on, beating our way to the Pacific and pumping.
"Cruiser ahoy!"
I saw through the storm a 23,000-ton auxiliary cruiser. I believe it was theOtranto, a converted passenger liner, fast and well armed, capable of blowing us out of the water before our little gun could throw a shell halfway to her.
"Hard aport," I shouted.
The ship shook as the helm was forced over, and the wind nearly turned us bottom side up. Storm or no storm, we were all dead men if that cruiser ever caught us.
"Set all sails."
We must risk it and run with all our canvas before the hurricane, and perhaps, somehow, we knew not how, in the shelter of the storm, we might be lucky enough to evade the cruiser.
Only men who have been to sea in windjammers can imagine what it is to set sail in a hurricane. The canvas whipped as though a devil had taken hold of it. The masts bent under the force of the wind as it blasted against the sails. The ship and its rigging creaked and groaned as though crying out against the sudden strain.
"The cruiser is coming," Leudemann shouted in my ear. "She is making straight for us."
"More sail on, by Joe," I sang out to the men aloft.
Never mind the hurricane. To the south we go. We'll bury ourselves in the Antarctic ice before we let them catch us, if the wind doesn't snap off our masts.
So, with the combined force of the gale and our 1,000-horsepower motor, we scudded southward. Suddenly, a flooding rain broke over us, a providential squall if there ever was one. It was like a gift of heaven. It blotted us out from the cruiser, just like the squall that rescued the raiderMoewe.
"It is the hand of God," I shouted. "Our hour hasn't struck yet."
Under cover of the squall, we got away from there as fast as we could go, and after a few hours we felt certain we had given our pursuer the slip. In reality, we had not been pursued at all. The cruiser hadn't even seen us, and our lookout had been sharper than hers. We learned this from later reports. The ironical thing now would have been for us to have impaled theSeeadleron an iceberg in that mad sprint southward. But luck was with us again. The storm blew itself out.
Still, we were not out of the danger zone. Days went by before we were safely out of that boisterous region and spreading our wings on the broad expanse of the Pacific. Cruisers were still watching for us, and we had to keep a constant lookout. Our problem now was how to put them off the scent.
TheSeeadlercarried twenty lifeboats and a corresponding equipment of life preservers. These were much more than enough for our crew. We had taken ten of them off captured ships to accommodate our prisoners in case of necessity. Now we threw all these extra lifeboats overboard, taking care that on each boat and each life preserver was paintedSeeadler. Our hope was that some of them would be picked up, and that the report would then be sent out that we had gone down off the Horn. That was exactly what happened. Two days later we picked up a wireless. It carried the news that a coastguard cutter had found one of our little boats. Later, two more were picked up. Then three. All along the coast of South America we were now given up for lost. The cruisers abandoned the chase and steamed north.
This left the way clear for us, and now we sailed out to continue our adventure on the greatest of all the seven seas.
Fourteen days after rounding the Horn, we picked an interesting and rather puzzling wireless out of the air:
Seeadlergone down with flags flying. Commander and part of crew taken prisoners and on their way to Montevideo.
"What's that?" I thought. "By Joe, Johnny Bull is telling a whopper."
Now, when old John Bull tells a fib, you can bet, by Joe, that he has good reason for it. We tried to figure it out, and came to the conclusion that it had something to do with the scare we had created. The news that our prisoners had given out at Rio had sent Lloyd's rates skyward and caused many ships to lie in harbour until the danger from the German raider had blown over. The British, in order to bring Lloyd's rates down and to liberate all the shipping that had been tied up, took pains to spread a highly coloured report of our disaster dressed up with suitable imaginative trimmings to make it more convincing.
"Well, Johnny Bull," I thought, "we'll fix you."
Our wireless operator, a very capable fellow, worked out a scheme with me. "Sparks" sent out the following message purporting to come from a British ship:
SOS—SOS—German sub....
He cut the message short, as if interrupted, to make it seem as if at that moment the ship had been torpedoed.
After a suitable interval he sent out another call, this one merely reporting German submarines off the coast of Chile.
Did Lloyd's rates go up again? And did those ships that were getting ready to put to sea put back to their berths? Well, you can bet your boots they did. And we sent out other submarine warnings every so often just to keep our little joke alive.
These were all small injuries, but we had been sent out to harass the enemy, and this was one way of doing it. What more could you expect of a lone windjammer? And then, it's these injuries all added together that more often than not win the day. It was good sport for us, anyhow.
The wireless continued to be interesting. We picked up many messages from the cruiserKent,[1] which was right in our waters; in fact, much too close for comfort. Our course was northward, with the Chilean coast and the Andes almost in sight. We steered almost to the Galapagos Islands, and at Robinson Crusoe's island, San Juan Fernandez, we trimmed our sails and turned our bow west. We sailed for weeks on the broad expanse of the Pacific without sighting a ship. Except for the occasional crackle of the wireless, we were alone in the world.
[1] See Note C,Appendix.
Our wireless antennæ kept us in touch with the latest phase of the international situation. Nor was it particularly pleasant on those long idle days at sea to sit and meditate on the fact that the United States was going into the war against us. We sailors knew better than some of our people at home the tremendous power of the great republic of the West. There were closeted statesmen and generals who might talk as they pleased about the American lack of military preparedness and the impossibility of American troops being mustered and sufficiently trained in time to be of any service in the critical hour of the war. We sailors had travelled. Many of us had been in the United States and had served on American ships. All fine technical points aside, we had had opportunity to sense the might of the North American giant with its numerous and virile population and its incalculable wealth. With such strength behind it, even an awkward, poorly aimed thrust was enough to push almost anyone over.
We caught one radio dispatch that caused us to sit and gaze hopelessly into the sky. It told of the famous Zimmermann note. What madness had dictated that extraordinary state paper, which proposed to Mexico that she join Germany in the war and receive in return a slice of American territory including Texas? I had served as a soldier in the Mexican Army, and knew something of its probable prowess in a war. A few American regiments on the Rio Grande could hold back the Mexican Army as easily as I can hold a child. And did our statesmen think the Mexicans were such fools? The folly was one that could only enrage the people of the United States and make the Mexicans laugh. We of the German fighting forces could only curse the luck that had given our country such diplomacy. All it succeeded in negotiating was new enemies and fewer friends.
The American declaration of war came as a blow expected, but hard nevertheless. Some of the more pessimistic of us could spell the doom of Germany in it. It altered the position of our buccaneering expedition somewhat, too. It reduced the number of neutral ports into which we might sail. It also increased the number of cruisers we had to look out for. However, neutral ports did not enter into our calculations much. All ports really were hostile, anyhow. Neutrals would limit us to a short, inhospitable stay, the wireless stations near by would broadcast our presence, and the cruisers would come flocking. The American naval ships didn't mean much either. They would doubtless be kept, nearly all of them, to guard the Atlantic shipping lanes for the passage of American troop transports and leave what patrol of the Pacific was necessary to the British and Japanese. The principal change of circumstance for us was that now we could take American prizes.
We steered across the Pacific past the Marquesas, far to the south of Hawaii. We made the waters near Christmas Island our cruising ground. There, near the equator, the eastbound and westbound routes for sailing ships crossed. We sailed backward and for ward, crossing the equator two and three times each day.
We captured three American ships in these waters, theA. B. Johnson, theR. C. Slade, and theManila. Our prisoners numbered forty-five men, one woman, and a pet opossum. The captains were not half so astonished and bewildered as the former captains when we unmasked ourselves as a buccaneer. They knew that the sailing ship raider was abroad. So we were deprived of some of our former amusement of astounding and befuddling officers and crews by suddenly hoisting the German flag, unmasking our cannon, firing a machine gun into their rigging, and similar pleasantries. Everything went off according to routine.
On one occasion we ran into a most intricate complication. We had expected the complications of war and piratical strategy. That was part of the game. But at the time to which I refer we were faced with a new and tender complication, a romantic complication.
"He's got his wife along," Boarding Officer Preiss informed me.
He referred to an officer of one of the ships. Indeed, we had noticed a woman aboard the captured ship.
The officer in question presently introduced me to his helpmate, and a knockout she was, pretty, petite, and—well, just a bit roguish.
"By Joe," I thought, "the sailors of these days are marvellous fellows. Where do they get these swell-looking wives? When I was in the forecastle, it was different."
In those days, an officer's wife was something to run away from, usually fat, usually savage, and always sloppily dressed. I thought of all the windjammer captains under whom I had sailed, and I couldn't think of one who had a wife that looked like a chorus girl. Well, times do change! There was the captain we had captured in the Atlantic who had such a pleasant little bride, and now here was this officer and his sprightly beauty.
I guess I can also add myself to the list. Here I am, skipper of a peaceful windjammer now, taking my three-master theVaterlandaround the world, and I have my wife along. I have already described Irma, the fairy princess of my green island in the Canaries. Yes, sailors' wives have improved in looks these days.
Aboard theSeeadlerwe greeted the pretty little lady with great cordiality. Our former fair company had been so pleasant that we anticipated another similar brightening of the dull monotony aboard. The monotony was indeed broken somewhat! But in a decidedly different way than we had expected. The officer had not been long aboard before he took me aside and made an awkward and somewhat embarrassed confession. He had been thinking things over.
"Count," he said, "in your reports you may say something about my having my wife along."
"Yes," I replied.
"Well, by Joe," he continued, "I wish you wouldn't say anything about it. Don't say anything about my having a wife along. My real wife might find it out, and then there would be hell to pay."
"Oho," I exclaimed, "so that's the way the wind blows, eh?"
"I said she was my wife," he continued lamely, "because I thought it might help to save her from your sailors. But I don't want my wife to find it out."
"All right, sir," I said, "I won't report it, and I won't let my officers or crew know anything about it. That will be best. Treat the girl as your wife. I will keep my mouth shut, and you keep your mouth shut."
It was a difficult point of morals aboard ship. If the sailors found out that the girl was not the officer's wife, but only a kind of stowaway, they would lose all respect for her, and there was no telling what they might try to do. Sailors are not angels, but usually, in fact, a lot of rogues, but they are highly respectable. They have a very fine code of honour, and a woman who is off the line is simply off the line to them. Certainly, I did not want them to know that the officer's wife was not the officer's wife.
One of my prisoners turned out to be an acquaintance of the officer of the ... I told him that the officer of the ... had his wife along, and introduced him to the girl. He laughed so hard he nearly fell over. He wanted to tell the joke all around. It was awkward for a moment, but I got the two men aside and talked earnestly to them.
"We must be gentlemen in this matter," I said. "She is a girl. We are men. We must protect her. The sailors must not know about it. You must both give me your word of honour that you will keep mum and tell nobody."
They both promised.
Everything went all right until this other prisoner took a shine to the girl, too. It was funny business. She kind of liked him. I kept an eye on the whole affair and saw what was happening. Here was more worry and trouble. I took the two men aside and said to them:
"I don't care what arrangements you two fellows make with your fair playmate, but it has got to be kept quiet. The sailors must think that she is the wife of the officer of the ... and that ... is only a friend."
They made some kind of change, I believe. I never could figure just how it was. I never was much good at mathematics or at figuring out anything, for that matter. At any rate, they kept it quiet. The other prisoner was married, too, and he didn't want anything of the complicated romance to get around either.
I had come to expect my prisoners to be good company. Our former Captains' Club had been one of the most delightful social organizations ever formed. These two sentimental swains, however, were not much good for comradeship. It was difficult to get together with them for a pleasant chat or game of cards. They were always thinking about the girl, and, although they were acquaintances in captivity, their feelings toward each other had become slightly strained. There is something about the air down there in the South Seas, I guess.
One of the captains made up for the companionship that had been lacking. He was a fine fellow. He was jovial and intelligent, and a thorough seaman if there ever was one. We became fast friends and had many a long and sympathetic talk about the war.
Weeks passed, and we did not see another ship. The idle days became very boresome. It was broiling hot, and we had little exercise. Our water turned stale, and we had no fresh provisions. Our prisoners did not find their stay with us so pleasant now, but we could not find a vessel on which to ship them. One decided that he could not stand it any longer, He wanted to put his feet on land at any price. He came to me with a strange idea. Would I not land him on a desert island and leave him there a castaway? Anything was better than shipboard. But the principal part of his plan was more subtle. He would be reckoned dead at home, and his people would collect his insurance money. Perhaps I would be so kind as to make it seem certain that he was lost. Yes, no? On the island he could live as a Robinson Crusoe, a kind of existence which he fancied would be quite agreeable. Unfortunately for him, I felt obliged to decline. I was not interested in swindling insurance companies.
We amused ourselves by playing with the sharks. The landlubber can scarcely imagine the hatred the sailor feels for those bloodthirsty monsters. We had a particular grievance against them. A swim now and then would have provided us with needed baths and would have been a pleasant and vigorous diversion from the endless monotony of cabin and deck, our wooden prison. Many a time I looked down into the cool, refreshing element, and a shark would idle beneath my gaze, as though waiting for me there. The sailors passed the time by angling for the voracious monsters. They would catch a couple, tie their tails together and throw them back into the water. The sharks, unable to agree on the direction of their mutual movement, would have a great tug of war. The sailors thought the plight of their loathed enemies quite comical.
Or they would take a large shark, tie an empty and watertight barrel to his tail, and heave him over. The fish would dart downward, but the barrel would stay relentless at the surface. Now would ensue a desperate struggle which we could follow by watching the gyrations of the barrel. The sharks displayed an excellent eye for chunks of bacon with hand grenades in them. When the bomb went off in the creature's stomach, pieces of shark would go flying in all directions.
We had been in the Pacific for five months now, and had sailed 35,000 miles. With our stale water and the lack of fresh food, scurvy was breaking out among our men, and then beri-beri, which "turns the blood to water." Limbs and joints were swelling. We imperatively needed fresh water and food and a rest on shore. But where could we go? All the islands of the Pacific were in the hands of the French, British, and Japanese. We certainly felt it keenly, now that the whole world was against us. There was no inhabited place that would welcome us. It made us feel very lonely.
"Well," I said to my boys, "we will pick out some nice deserted island where there will be no hand raised against us and no wireless to call the cruisers, and we will get water and some kind of vegetables and maybe shoot some game and have a fine shore leave. Then, after we have rested up, what ho, boys, and away for more adventure."
Buccaneering in the Pacific, with only three ships sunk in five months, seemed much too unprofitable. I planned that, after a brief sojourn on some peaceful South Sea Isle, we would sail for the Antipodes. Then we would destroy the English whaling station and oil tanks at South Georgia, sink a few ships, capture one on which to ship our prisoners, and, if we got away safely, continue our cruise in the prosperous waters of the Atlantic.
Our first plan was to sail direct to one of the larger Cook Islands. But we gave that up for fear of finding a wireless station there that might give us away. We did not want to move east of our present longitude, for that would have taken us against the trade wind and compelled us to use our motor. It was necessary to save the engine as much as possible and not have it wear out on us. We hoped we would need it for further captures and escapes. Mopelia, one of the Society Islands (some geographies include it in the Scilly Isles), seemed about right for our purpose. It was a French possession, and, so far as we knew, uninhabited. It was one of those isles of the South Seas so fantastically beautiful and so awkward for the sailor to approach. Only seldom does he find one with a decent anchorage, and nowhere in the world are the winds and currents more treacherous.
On the morning of July 29th, we sighted Mopelia, and steered toward it. Words fail me when I try to describe its beauties. From the blue ocean rises a mass of green palms. The sunlight glows in the green. It somehow even seems to turn the sunlight green. Against the dark blue of the sea and the light blue of the sky, the sunlight seems to be drawing the green island out of the water, and the soft south wind carries the scent of flowers far out to sea. It is the greeting of the island, and we inhale it deeply.
Here was a typical coral atoll—the kind you dream about. A circular reef studded with waving palms and within the reef a lovely, placid lagoon. The coral shore was snow white, and, with the sun's rays reflecting from it, it looked like a sparkling jewel set in an alabaster ring, like emeralds set in ivory. There were coral terraces below the water. The shallower ones were white or pale green, and as you peered deeper into the water you saw every conceivable tint of green and blue, sea green, emerald green, blue green, azure blue, sapphire blue, navy blue, violet.
As we sailed nearer and nearer that alluring coral shore, we saw flowers among the palms, flowers of all colours, and immense numbers of orchids. The hues of the flowers were reflected in the water over the white coral that deepened and turned green. Within the circular reef the lagoon seemed fully as deep as the sea outside, only at perfect peace and smooth like a mirror. It would have made a perfect anchorage for us, save that it had one entrance so narrow that only a small boat could pass through it.
A strong current ran through the opening. We cast our anchor on the coral and tethered our ship to it with a long cable. The pull of the current kept her far enough offshore. I was afraid, for a while, that a shift of the wind might blow her on the reef, but we saw, after a while, that she had dragged anchor. If the current were strong enough for that, why surely it would be strong enough to keep her from blowing ashore. Leaving several men aboard as a watch, we went on land for a glorious shore leave, sailors, officers, prisoners, and all.
What would we find? We wanted water and fresh food. When we got inside of the lagoon, we found to our astonishment that it was a breeding place for turtles. There were hundreds of them in the water and on the shore, huge fellows weighing two or three hundred pounds. The water was full of beautiful fish. I recognized the moray, a fish like the eel, which is a great delicacy and will provide you with a substantial meal, too. It weighs from fifteen to twenty pounds. They say the Romans used to feed their slaves to this fish. There were big lobsters without claws that promised to be the best of food. The atoll was alive with birds, hundreds of thousands of them, with nests and eggs everywhere. They were so tame that one of my boys whom I sent to collect enough eggs for an omelette returned, saying:
"I didn't get an egg. The birds were so tame and trusting that I hadn't the heart to disturb them and take their eggs."
Nor was the island without human inhabitants. We found three Kanakas, Polynesians who had been left there by a French firm to catch turtles. They were greatly frightened when they found that we were Germans. The French had told them frightful tales about theBoches. We, however, quickly made friends with them. They were much relieved when they found that we did not intend to injure them, and when we made amicable overtures, they were only too glad to respond.
First, my boys ran hither and thither to satisfy their curiosity about this strange island. Then they quickly settled down to useful occupations. Some set about catching fish and lobsters. Others gathered birds' eggs. A few brought armfuls of cocoanuts. Three boys turned a big turtle on its back and pulled it along with a rope. There were wild pigs on the island. We shot a couple. Soon the boat put out to the ship loaded deeply with a huge collection of epicurean delicacies. That night the mess was fit for the table of a royal palace—turtle soup with turtle eggs, broiled lobster, omelettes of gull's eggs, roast pork, and, for dessert, fresh cocoanut.
For days we lived a delightful poetic life, dining in a way that millionaires could not afford. We smoked quantities of fish and pork and stowed it away. We found fresh water on the island and refilled our tanks. Our traces of scurvy and beri-beri disappeared, and we were rapidly getting ready to continue our cruise and work of havoc in Australian waters.
On the second of August, we made ready to leave the ship for another day ashore. At nine-thirty I noticed a strange bulge on the eastern rim of the sea. I called my officers' attention to it. At first we thought it a mirage. But it kept growing larger. It came toward us. Then we recognized it—a tidal wave such as is caused by submarine earthquake and volcanic disturbances. The danger was only too clear. We lay between the island and the wave.
"Cut the anchor cable. Clear the motor. All hands on deck."
We dared not raise sail, for then the wind would drive us on the reef. So our only hope of getting clear of the island was our motor. The huge swell of the tidal wave was rushing toward us with breakneck speed.
The motor didn't stir. The mechanics were working frantically. They pumped compressed air into the engine. We waited in vain for the sound of the ignition. Now, right at the critical moment, our motor had failed us, just as it had so often failed us before. By this time, the tidal wave was only a few hundred yards away. We were lost. To our frightened eyes it looked like a whole mountain range of water. It must have been thirty or forty feet high. It came rushing with a roar that drowned out our voices.
A gigantic, violent hand seemed to grasp the ship. The wave swung her on high and threw her forward. It flung us crashing on the coral reef. Our masts and rigging went over, broken like matchsticks. The shattering impact of the ship smashed the coral, and pieces flew in all directions like shrapnel from an exploding shell. The swirling water seized great pieces of coral and whipped them around, beating them against the ship. TheSeeadlerhad heeled over until her deck was almost perpendicular. The water swept over the deck, and the swirling eddies bombarded us with chunks of coral. I clung to an iron post near the lower rail. The rail saved me from the tons of shattered coral that were hurled up by the blow of the falling ship. In a moment, the wave had ebbed away, leaving us high and dry. It had passed over the circling reef and the lagoon, though not over the main part of the island. And on its way it had swept hundreds of thousands of birds' nests into the lagoon.
I arose, scarcely knowing whether I was alive or dead, and stood alone with one foot on my slanting deck and the other on the rail. For a moment, I thought I was the only one saved.
"Boys, where are you?" I shouted weakly.
"Here," came the reply, "still standing like an oak."
My men and the prisoners had taken refuge in the bow, and had been sheltered by the rail, as I had been. Not a one was injured. For that at least we could be thankful. For that and not much else. TheSeeadlerwas a total wreck. The jagged coral was rammed deep into our hull.
We stand like an oak! I adopted the reply of my sailors as our motto henceforth. We were castaways on this coral atoll in one of the loneliest and least-visited reaches of the South Pacific. Everything lost, but "we stand like an oak."
The last German colony! We founded it on this beautiful, isolated coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific. The Imperial German flag of war flew from the top of the tallest palm. I was the viceroy, by chance and not by desire, of course, and my sailors and our prisoners were my subjects. The only visiting nationals from elsewhere were the three Kanakas, the turtle catchers. "The White King of the Society Isle of Mopelia," my mate facetiously called me. One of the Yankee captains put it differently. He called me "the Sea Devil King of the South Seas." And he caustically described our lovely isle as "a poisoned paradise." Everybody was good-humoured, despite our hard luck.
But our little South Sea colony passed its first nights uneasily. For sleeping places, we slung hammocks between the palms. At intervals, a cocoanut would fall from a height of fifty or sixty feet and go whizzing close by a man's head. While our fellow countrymen back in the cities along the Rhine were complaining about the night raids of the French and British bombing squadrons, we had our bombing problem also. It didn't make much difference whether you were bumped off with a falling cocoanut or a falling bomb. The result was all the same. After one whizzed by your ear, you would very likely go down to the open beach to quiet your nerves. Then if you tried to sleep there, the land crabs would soon convince you that the beach was no place for a weary war veteran either. Patrols of fighting marine crabs would raid that beach every night. After being chased out by the crabs, you would go back to your hammock and lie awake wondering when the next aërial cocoanut bombardment would commence. So life during those first days on our tropic isle was not all skittles and beer or orchids and cocoanut milk. You can bet we worked hard getting up huts! Luckily, there were no casualties from either crabs or cocoanuts. We cleared a large space for our village, and built huts out of timbers, sailcloth, and palm leaves. The first one up was a queer-looking thing, but our architecture improved with practice. Our prisoners, who were all Americans, helped us a great deal. They understood the art of pitching tents. They built a special town for themselves, and gave the streets such names as Broadway, State Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, and the Bowery. In time we contrived to arrange quite decent dwelling places. We had plenty of furnishings. From the wreckedSeeadler, which remained perched forlornly on the coral reef, we took everything we could carry. We even built a chapel, took the Bible from theSeeadler, and from parts of the wreck we built a fine altar and crucifix. Of course, we also installed our wireless set ashore in order to keep in touch with passing ships and events happening out on this side of the world. Nor did we neglect to take ashore a heavy arsenal of arms and ammunition, including rifles, Luger pistols, hand grenades, and dynamite. In short, we had a perfect little town with everything except a calaboose. Some of our men who had romantic tendencies constructed "country homes" for themselves a few hundred yards away in the jungle. Then we named the place Seeadlerburg, Sea Eagle Town.
There were gull's eggs everywhere along the shore, but the birds were brooding now, and most of the eggs we collected had half-formed little gulls in them. We got around this by clearing a large section of beach and throwing the old eggs into the lagoon. Then the gulls flocked back and laid more eggs, and thus a supply of fresh eggs was assured.
Our American prisoners were nearly all cheery fellows. Some of them fitted in with the new life better than my men. They seemed to know all about the art of fishing, and taught us Germans things we had never dreamed of. They were accustomed to what in the States, along the Gulf of Mexico, is called spearing eels. They fastened iron barbs to shafts of wood and with these speared big fish in the coral lagoon. They also showed us a clever way of catching fish on a grand scale. They took some forty men and boys and, just as high tide was turning, formed in a line about fifty yards offshore. Then the line came splashing in, driving the fish before it toward shore, just as the natives round up tigers for a rajah in India. Many of the fish floundered into shallow water, and a few minutes later were left stranded by the receding tide. You see, the water, as it backed offshore, left large pools on top of the irregular coral reef, and there the fish were trapped. Sometimes we caught five or six hundred pounds a day, and it was exciting sport.
One night, while we were sitting around our fire, we heard a scratching sound. It seemed to come from everywhere. We looked and found a lot of crabs with big claws. They were hermit crabs. We caught several and put them in boiling water to cook. Meanwhile, the crab invasion continued, and more from behind kept pushing the rest forward. We tried the ones we had cooked, and they were delicious. They were as good as the best lobster.
"By Joe," I said, "boys, let's get busy."
We spread out a large sail and filled it up with crabs, like a sack. We must have had several thousand of them. For days we lived on them, until most of us couldn't look a crab in the face. We had 'em boiled, broiled, and in soup. Then that invasion of these hermits passed as mysteriously as it had come, and we never saw them again. But the turtles were always with us. We caught a number of them and kept them in a coral basin at one end of the lagoon.
The wild pigs on the island provided us with more fun and more food. They fed on cocoanuts, which is the best kind of fodder to make good pork. These animals were said to be the descendants of swine brought to the South Seas by early explorers long ago. They are found on many islands, and New Zealand is a regular paradise for them and for the hunter who likes to chase wild pigs. After generations of living on cocoanuts, they had changed a lot and had developed a special kind of tusk and jaw.
There were snipe on our island, too, and we hunted them with great success, thereby varying our sea food and pork diet. Using cocoanut shells for fuel, we smoked what flesh and fish we could.
By way of vegetables, we had cocoanuts, and bread made of cocoanut flour, which the Kanakas taught us to prepare, and hearts of palms. This latter is one of the rarest of delicacies, and outside the tropics only multimillionaires can afford it. The price, when you get palm hearts in Europe, is higher than that of Russian caviar. For the most part, it is reserved for castaway sailors and buccaneers like ourselves. It is the core taken from the very tip of the cocoanut palm, right where the new leaves form. For each heart, weighing about ten pounds, a noble palm has to be sacrificed. The taste is between that of hazel nuts and asparagus, only finer and sweeter than either.
But I must tell you more about that invasion of hermit crabs. It caused the first and only fatality in the course of all our adventures. My dog Schnaeuzchen had all of the prying, curious nature of the dachshund. The island, with its teeming life, was an endless source of wonder to her. She investigated everything, forever had her nose sniffing somewhere or other. The swarming hermit crabs, which covered the ground almost like a carpet, sent her into a perfect spasm of astonishment. She jumped and barked and yelped. She cocked one eye and studied the strange creatures, and quite obviously did not like their looks. They crawled on all sides of her, and she was filled with bewilderment and fright. She was furious with them, but kept nimbly out of their way. Finally, however, the pugnacity of her dachs nature got the better of her, and she felt she must attack something. A particularly large and villainous-looking crab excited her ire. She leaped upon it to devour it. The crab raised its great, ferocious claws to strike at her. Schnaeuzchen gave a strange yelp of fright, and rolled over in a spasm. She kicked convulsively for a few moments, and then was still—dead. Poor little Schnaeuzchen! The exotic life of the South Seas had been too much for her. She was only two years old, and on the island she had for the first time found an opportunity to give vent to her passion for hunting. We gave her a fine grave, and planted a cocoa palm on it. Her comrade, Piperle, looked around disconsolately for her and was sad for a long time.
Piperle had an adventure with the birds. He undertook one day to invade one of the densely populated rookeries. Somehow or other, he contrived to antagonize the birds. I suppose he tried to raid a nest. The angry gulls swarmed above him. One seized one ear. Another seized the other. Several struck at his eyes. One hung on to his tail. Piperle howled and struggled. It was at this point that one of our men saw him execute an intelligent bit of strategy. There was a clump of underbrush near by. He struggled toward it, taking the birds with him. He dragged himself into the brush and thereby shook off the birds. He returned to camp a sadly mishandled dog, and never went near any of the rookeries again. From then on he confined his courage and daring to chasing the wild pigs at night, which he did with a prodigious barking and yelping. The pet opossum that our prisoners had carefully rescued from the wreck picked up an excellent living on the island, and came into the messroom every night, asking for water.
If our new home teemed with useful, edible creatures, it was not lacking in pestilential forms of life, either, these both of native origin and imported from ships. A thousand kinds of insects were everywhere. If you awakened thirsty at night and reached for your glass of water, you were likely to find that it contained more cockroaches than water. You had to reconcile yourself to getting up in the morning and finding your toothbrush alive with ants. The ants were particularly pervasive. We could only guard against them by putting the legs of tables, chairs, and other articles of furniture in cups of water. We slept at night to the ceaseless shuffle of rats, huge insolent fellows, running about on the tops of our tents. Piperle waged war against them, but the odds were too great. It would have taken a whole regiment of terriers to end that plague.
Flashing birds of paradise flew from palm to palm. Gorgeous humming birds with green and yellow breasts darted among the branches. With every flower there seemed to be a great butterfly. The whole island was aglow with butterflies. They floated on wide, beating wings of greens, violets, and reds.
Once, in the middle of the night, I was awakened by a small, sharp, repeated sound—knick, knick, knack. It was the opening of tropical flowers. I went outside and there I saw the lovely Queen of Night, which blossoms by the light of the tropical stars. It is a great, gorgeous bloom, eight or ten inches across. There were thousands of them. Scores of glowworms, far brighter than any we know, hovered above each, eager to catch the magnificent perfume that the opening Queen of Night gives forth. In the darkness I could see the flowers only by the light of the glowworms. On every side were these eerie nocturnal lights, a dancing lamp of gathered glowworms illuminating each flower. In that unearthly gleaming, like a kind of moonlight only stranger, the odorous petals shone with the ghostly nuances of their naturally flaming colours, white, crimson, sapphire blue, violet blue. In the South Seas, the flowers have little scent by day, while the sun shines on them. At night, when the dew falls, perfume awakens. It is truly a perfumed night. And the nostrils of man are excited by the rich and almost oppressive blending of odours. The Queen of Night gives off the perfume of vanilla. Mingled with it comes the scent of hyacinth, orchid, mayflower, and heliotrope. Sweet-smelling breezes blow, and above is the tropical sky with its clustered flashing stars and gorgeous Milky Way. Hanging above the horizon is the far-famed Southern Cross.
My "subjects" somehow managed to get along on terms of general amity. Our American prisoners took no exception to my mandates handed on to them by Leudemann, my prime minister. They said that, since they had been treated so well aboard theSeeadler, they wanted no other command over our colony. The two captains and their lady had made mutually satisfactory arrangements among themselves, and, so far as we knew, there was no unpleasant incident, although, for the purposes of my tale, it would have helped a lot if they had fought a duel with swords or cocoanuts or chunks of jagged coral on the shore of our tropic lagoon.
The three Kanakas proved to be thoroughly good fellows and helped us in many ways. We got along with them in pidgin English at first until one of them picked up a little German.
In the middle of the camp we made a sort of plaza. TheSeeadler'sbatteries furnished electric light for it, and there we gathered every night. We still had plenty of champagne and cognac left from the capture of the champagne ship. So, in the cool of the evening, we sat out there on the edge of this equatorial Potsdammer Platz sipping drinks out of wine and brandy glasses, just as we might have at the Adlon in Berlin. There was plenty of pipe tobacco, and Dr. Pietsch had taken care to rescue from the wreck a store of his endless cigars. The wind blew, the stars shone, and the orchestra alternately played German classics from the operas and American ragtime melodies. Ah, yes, this last bit of the once glorious overseas German Empire wasn't such a bad little paradise at all. We castaways out there in the solitude of the South Seas felt as though we were the only people left in the world, like Noah and his family on Mount Ararat.
But after about three weeks of this Garden-of-Eden-without-an-Eve existence, the monotony of it began to get on our nerves. Of course, there was the "wife" of the officer of the ... but she was far too busy to be interested in the rest of us. We hadn't been sent out to colonize the South Seas and take life easy. So we cast about for a way to go buccaneering again. Our first need was for a ship to take the place of our unfortunate three-master impaled out there on the coral reef. The Kanakas told us that a French sailing vessel visited the island every year to take away turtle meat. The best guess that they could make was that it would be another six months or so before she arrived. Well, after six months, we would have a ship. We could always fall back on that. But, by Joe, six months was a long time to wait. The war might be won or lost by then. And it was highly unlikely that any other ship would stray into those waters for Heaven knows how long. We all grew impatient. Few sailors are keen about remaining cast away on a tropical isle for long, and especially on an atoll as small as Mopelia. We felt the itch to get out to sea again. I was particularly anxious to set something stirring. Before long the tropical sun and lazy life would sap my men's vitality, and all they would be good for would be to loll around.
We still had our lifeboats, and the hurricane season was not on. So why not put to sea in one of them? We devised rigging and sails for our best lifeboat, mast, jib boom, main boom, gaff, stays, and back stays. We scraped, caulked, and painted her. She was not in any too good condition, and despite our labour she continued to leak a bit and needed constant bailing. Even in calm weather, we had to bail forty pails a day. We loaded her with provisions for half a dozen men over a long voyage. She was eighteen feet in length and only about fourteen inches above water amidship. Into this small space we stored water, hardtack, machine guns, rifles, hand grenades, and pistols. The only luxuries we allowed ourselves were a few tins of pemmican, a side of bacon, and an accordion. The music of the squealer was to be our solace during a cruise the length of which none could foretell. The great question was, could our tiny craft survive a storm? At any rate, she could sail, and that was something. We christened her theKronprinzessin Cecilie—without, however, painting her name on the stern.
Of course, everybody wanted to go, but there could be only six of us at the most. So I picked the men who seemed to be in the most vigorous health at the time, Mate Leudemann, Lieutenant Kircheiss, Engineer Krauss, Boatswain Parmien, and Yeoman Erdmann. This left the colony on the atoll in the hands of Lieutenant Kling.
Our overloaded cockleshell with a crew of six was the smallest auxiliary cruiser in the war. For cruiser we were, and we were setting out to capture a ship, sail back to Mopelia, pick up our comrades there, and continue our raid. To find and take a ship on the high sea was a doubtful proposition, but we might get to some of the other islands, not too well populated and guarded, and find a vessel at anchor. We could board her at night, overpower the captain and crew, and sail off with her. We planned first of all to visit the Cook Islands, some eight hundred miles distant, and if we found no ship there, continue on another thousand miles farther to the Fiji Islands, where there were sure to be ships loading with copra for the ammunition factories of Europe. We figured on making around sixty nautical miles a day, so that, if we had to go all the way to the Fijis, it would take us approximately thirty days. Thus we should be back with a ship in three months at most. We discussed our tactics thoroughly for the expected capture. We would steal aboard. Half-past three in the morning was the best hour. Men sleep their soundest then. A couple of us would go to the officers' cabins, the rest to the forecastle. We would show our pistols, disarm them, and herd them below. It would be good to sneak to their clothing first and take away their belts and snip the buttons off their trousers. Then, when you have them put on their clothes they stand, without belts, suspenders, or buttons, holding up their trousers. Thus they are helpless. We had a few bombs loaded only with powder, harmless, but capable of making a terrific noise. If there is any trouble, you throw one. It hurts nobody, but the terrible explosion creates a general panic. A couple of men with their heads about them can do wonders with dozens in a panic. Another good thing is to have a couple of fellows outside shout suddenly and make a great disturbance. That creates excitement and throws people off their guard. I said to my bo's'n:
"Don't hurt anybody unless you have to. We don't want to spoil our clean record by killing anybody. But, by Joe, if a captain or a watchman raises a rifle or a pistol, don't wait till he shoots. Get him first."
On a bright summer morning—August 23, 1917, to be exact—we all shook hands. There was no cheering, merely quiet, earnest words of friendship and good luck. It was the first time that we sixty-four seamen had parted since theSeeadlerhad set sail to run the blockade eight months before, and it was only now, at the moment of saying good-bye, that we realized how closely attached to one another we had become. We who were going could see a brooding question in the eyes of those who were staying behind:
"How will that overloaded cockleshell stand heavy weather?"
Never mind, we would probably find out soon enough. The understanding was that, if we did not return in three months, something had happened to us. They should wait for us until then. Afterward, Kling and his men were to get away from the atoll as best they could.
We sailed out of the lagoon, through the coral entrance, into the open sea. The hulk of theSeeadlerlay there helpless on the reef. The tide was high, and the breakers swept over the coral. She was a red brown now from rust and weathering. Each flooding billow raised her a bit, and then she sank back hopelessly with loud groans and creaks of despair on the coral bed. As we passed her she seemed to call over to us:
"Come aboard, I want to take you on your voyage. Don't desert your old friend."
And as a wave raised her it seemed as though she were struggling to get on an even keel again and come to us, only to find that the coral held her in a relentless grasp. Tears filled our eyes.
"Good-bye,Seeadler" I called; "perhaps we shall never see you more. And even if we do, you can never sail again. Nevermore will songs resound on your decks. Nevermore will you raise your sails and fly a flag from your masts."
A brisk wind carried us westward with a swelling of our sails. The happy island receded. The last German colony and the wreck of theSeeadlerslowly dropped out of sight over the rim of the horizon.
To-day theSeeadlerstill remains on the reef at Mopelia. After we had gone, Lieutenant Kling, afraid that the stumps of her mast might attract a passing warship, blew them out with dynamite. The explosion set a fire that burned away part of the woodwork. A quantity of ammunition still aboard blew up and cracked the forepart of the hulk. Afterward, when theSeeadler'shistory became generally known, the Harris-Irby Cotton Company of New York, which had originally owned the ship as thePass of Balmaha, investigated the possibilities of salvaging the ship. A party of engineers was sent to Mopelia. They reported that the ship was unsalvageable. In my cruise around the world aboard theVaterlandI shall stop at the island and survey what once was my tropical domain. And again I shall board the oldSeeadleron which we sailed and raided. So, until then, old ship!Auf wiedersehen!
It has been something of a sport of recent years to cross the Atlantic and even the Pacific in a small boat, sometimes under sail and sometimes under motor power. Tiny craft have done it, and at best it is not a comfortable kind of voyage. In sporting events, your ocean-going small boat always had a cabin, or an imitation of one. That is what we should have had, but we were not so lucky, and, besides, the load we carried made existence aboard our lifeboat that had been converted into a cruiser a cramped affair indeed.
There was only one place we could trust to be dry, the buoyant air tanks at the sides of the boat. In these we packed our hardtack, a few pieces of clothing, photographic apparatus, and the all-important tobacco. It affected the buoyancy of our craft, but we had to keep some things away from the sea water. In the body of the boat were placed the water tanks, our large supply of weapons and ammunition, cordage for the rigging, and several spare sails. Canvas shields at the side, which could be drawn over at the top and be made to form some kind of tent, sheltered us somewhat from waves and dirty weather. Without these we should have been practically drowned. Four mattresses could be stretched on the bottom, where four men could sleep while two kept watch. As a concession to civilization, we had six pairs of knives and forks, six mugs, a coffee pot, and $5,000 in silver, gold, and paper, much of it in pounds sterling.
At six in the morning, the two men on watch filled the coffee pot and applied fire to it from a soldering lamp. With the slightest breeze and a rocking of the boat, it was impossible to bring the water to a boil. Then we were glad to get tepid coffee-bean soup instead of coffee. After toilets had been made with salty sea water, we squatted in the cockpit for breakfast of coffee and hardtack. Navigation was difficult in so small a boat. It was impossible to spread the charts out properly, and with the slightest carelessness the wind might take our priceless navigation papers overboard. We had to use the sextant and other navigation instruments in a boat that often pitched so much we could scarcely stand. The papers, charts, tables, logarithms, and so on, got sopping wet, and when we dried them in the sun they grew swollen and difficult to handle.
It was cool at night, but not unpleasant so long as our clothes were dry. The weather was fair, but an occasional whale would come alongside and douse us with the spray of his spout. Then, in our damp clothing, we felt the chill of the night. The days were broiling hot, but even while taking advantage of what little shade we had, we grew heavy and torpid. We had, above all things, to be careful of our water supply. We never dared drink enough to quench our thirst completely, and were, in fact, continually thirsty.
By way of amusement, we had readings aloud from the one book we had brought along, Fritz Reuter's comic story,A Trip to Constantinople, and at night the squealer wheezed and blared, and we whiled away the tedious hours singing old German folk songs.
After three days we sighted Atiu, the first island of the Cook group and a British possession. There was no ship in sight. Too bad, but perhaps a ship might be expected soon. Anyway, we had to make port and get fresh food. Aside from the danger of storm, if our voyage continued for any length, we feared most of all beri-beri and scurvy, which our diet of hardtack would inevitably bring upon us unless we varied it with fresh vegetables.
A crowd of natives, fine-looking Polynesians, watched curiously as our little craft drew up to the dock. Kircheiss and I went ashore and straight to the house of the British resident. He lay stretched out in his shirt and trousers on a Borneo long chair on his porch, and didn't even get up when we approached. He was a good-looking fellow, but lazy as the devil. The lassitude of the South Seas had certainly got him.
"My name is Van Houten," I began, "and this is my chief officer Southart."
The resident looked at me suspiciously. It was a true British mistrust. Ordinarily, your Englishman is the best of fellows, a pleasant chap to meet, a perfect host. But in wartime you had to admire them. They were on the lookout for everything. Their brains seemed made only of suspicions. Kircheiss, who spoke English better than I did, continued:
"We are Americans of Dutch birth. A few months ago we made a bet at the Holland Club in San Francisco that we would sail from Honolulu in an open boat via the Cook Islands to Tahiti and back to Honolulu. The wager is for twenty-five thousand dollars. Would you, my dear sir, kindly give me a certificate that we have been here in accordance with the terms of our bet? Also, we should like to lay in a supply of fresh water, canned goods, and fresh fruit."
The resident yawned, looked us over with a watery eye and replied:
"Well, a man must be a hell of a fool to go in for that kind of sport."
"Sure," Kircheiss said politely, "but, just the same, we should like to have the certificate. Won't you give it to us or tell us who will?"
"Oh, to hell with you, don't bother me. I've just had dinner and want to take my nap."
Even his British mistrust, with which he first regarded us, subsided into the indescribable something that comes over a white man who yields to the soft enervation of the tropics. He now looked at us merely as mad fellows who wanted him to do something too crazy to merit his consideration.
"Any news from the bloody war?" he asked. "Why are they so stupid as to carry on with this fighting business? In the end, it will only help these yellow races."
He continued like this and spoke highly of the Germans. Naturally, we did not express any pro-German sentiments.
"We simply must get this old bird to give us that certificate," I said to my comrade in Low German, pretending that it was Dutch.
"Yes," he replied in the same dialect, "it may come in mighty useful later on."
The resident, as he told us, had served in the Boer War, and should have known better, but he took our Plattdeutsch for the language of Holland. Presently he scribbled a note saying that we had called on him in the course of our sporting cruise.
"Any ships expected in port soon?" Kircheiss asked quite casually.
"How in hell do I know?" the resident responded wearily. "Everything goes to the bloody war, and we don't see anything around here but these Kanakas." He continued in this strain and cursed his boredom on the island.
The resident was still rambling on in his lazy monotone when along came a man who wore a cassock and had a beard down to his waist. He was a French missionary priest who was overjoyed when we saluted him with a few words of French. The resident and an English trader were the only two white men on the island besides himself, and neither talked any French.
"Allons, allons," he shouted, "by Joe, boys, you must pay me a visit."
And straightway he seized our arms and took us over to his mission house. There he poured out glasses of excellent wine.
"You are Americans," he cried, "you fight for la France? You are Hollanders? Ah, it is too bad that your country is not in the war with France. But I can see that you love la belle France."
With that he put on the gramophone a record ofLa Marseillaise, and had us sing it along with him, which we did with all our lungs. Since it had been written and dedicated to my great-grandfather, I didn't mind a bit. He chattered in French incessantly, in an ecstasy over having someone with whom he could talk his native tongue. He embraced us a dozen times and made us sit down to dinner. It was an excellent meal. The wine was particularly good. The conversation made us squirm a little. The good father was the best fellow possible, but patriotic to the very finger tips. He treated us to some choice denunciations of the Germans.
After another rendition of theMarseillaise, we took our leave.
"What will be your next stop?" asked the jovial missionary in parting.
"I think we will put in at Aitutaki," I replied. That was the nearest island and the next field of action in our hunt for a ship.
"Fine," exclaimed the priest cordially. "I have a friend there. You must call on him. Just mention my name. He will be delighted to see you. He is a Hollander, too."
A Hollander, too? And our knowledge of the Dutch language was so strongly salted with a German accent! In that case, when we got to Aitutaki we certainly would be anything but Hollanders, probably Norwegians.
Everywhere on the island were trees and fruits, cocoanuts, bananas, mangoes, and oranges. On the streets of the village, with its thatched huts, were South Sea beauties who wore wreaths of flowers and had dark, flashing eyes. They gazed with interest on the foreign sportsmen, the story of whose cruise on a bet had spread among the natives. We took aboard what provisions we needed and set sail for Aitutaki.
The weather turned miserable, by Joe. It rained every day, those drenching tropical downpours. Our sailcloth covering was not tight enough to hold the water out. The sea was heavy and continually washed into the boat. Often we bailed as many as two hundred and fifty pails an hour. Everything not stowed in the side tanks got wet. When the rain stopped for a while, the waves and spray kept things from drying. We were soaked to the skin and never did get dry. Our blankets and mattresses were dripping wet. When we lay in the sodden bedding, we were freezing cold, and could sleep scarcely at all. Often it was a relief to be called to go on watch. Then at least we could thresh our arms about and get warm. Cooking was almost impossible now, and we seldom ever got coffee anything like hot.
Once we saw a waterspout forming right before our eyes. A fine, whirling drizzle close to the water attracted our eyes. It revolved ever more rapidly, seizing wider masses of water. In the sky was a little black thundercloud extending downward in the shape of a funnel. The whirl of spray on the water ran up swiftly. The cone of the thundercloud stretched down to meet it. They came together and united. A roaring and sound of bursting, a tremendous suction of water, and sky and sea were connected by a whirling column. Gyrating and swaying, it moved in our direction. Our boat lay in a calm. Not a breath of air around us. Will this wandering giant strike us and break upon us, deluge and swamp us? Automatically Leudemann at the rudder tries to steer us. Without wind our boat cannot move, much less steer. But the roaring monster collapses with a deafening clap. Its mass of water falls upon the sea, and from it a circular swell spreads out. We rock uncomfortably and thank heaven. During our voyages among the islands we narrowly escaped several similar spouts.
After three days we found ourselves steering our way through the maze of reefs, very beautiful but perilous, that extend out in front of the landing place at Aitutaki. Again there was no ship in sight, but again one might be scheduled to arrive within some reasonable time. That was our hope. A crowd of natives gathered to watch us come in, also half a dozen white men, among whom was the British resident. He was a tall, lanky fellow who wore glasses, and looked a perfect picture of President Wilson. We found this resident to be full of the same British suspicion. Unlike his colleague at Atiu, he was in no wise lost in tropical indolence, but was active and shrewd. We saw that he entertained the liveliest doubts about us. Might we not be wandering Germans? Of course, he could not venture any forcible measures to investigate our case, such as searching our boat, for if we really were Germans we would doubtless be armed to the teeth, and in that case where would he be? He had no force to match ours. We tried our level best to quiet his suspicions by our offhand natural behaviour. We thought our sporting voyage explanation and our request for a certificate, such as we had got from the resident at Atiu, plausible enough. It was too bad that we could not use the other resident's certificate, but in it were written our supposed Dutch names, and now we were Norwegians.
The resident began by saying to us that we would no doubt be delighted to meet a fellow countryman of ours. This "countryman" turned out to be a Norwegian carpenter. We surmised at once that he had been instructed by the resident to talk with us and see whether we were really Norwegians. My Norwegian was bad, but Kircheiss spoke the language like a native. I kept severely out of the way, and let Kircheiss have a long, friendly talk with the carpenter. Kircheiss convinced his man that he was as Norse as the Vikings. The carpenter was delighted to meet a fellow countryman so jovial and, as Kircheiss represented, so wealthy. He promptly reported to the resident that we were the truest Norsemen alive and could in no wise be Germans.
Alfred Kling, second officer of the Seeadler, was left in command at Mopelia. A passing French schooner, the Lutece, saw the wreck, came near to investigate, and was captured. Then Kling and his companions re-named the schooner the Fortuna and set sail for Easter Island.Alfred Kling, second officer of theSeeadler, was left incommand at Mopelia. A passing French schooner, theLutece, saw the wreck, came near to investigate, and wascaptured. Then Kling and his companions re-named the schoonertheFortunaand set sail for Easter Island.
German prisoners in the internment camp on the little island in Hauraki Gulf. ~ The New Zealand prison camp motor launch in which the Count made his getaway.German prisoners in the internment camp on the little island inHauraki Gulf.The New Zealand prison camp motor launch in which the Countmade his getaway.
The resident, with his inscrutable President Wilson face, invited me to his house for dinner. I accepted. A British merchant named Low invited my lieutenant to his house. We suspected it was a dodge to separate us. Seemingly, the Norwegian's assurance had not fully allayed the mistrust of these uneasy Britons. Kircheiss and I made every excuse we could to keep together, but the hospitality was so pressing that we could not refuse any longer without practically giving ourselves away.
"Even if we are apart," I said to Kircheiss on the side, "we have our pistols and hand grenades, by Joe. We will keep our eyes open, and we can take care of ourselves single-handed. If anything looks wrong, we will fight our way to the boat."
At the resident's house, a fine stone structure, I had a much-needed bath and shave. When I rejoined him, the resident studied my smooth jaws.
"Why," he exclaimed, "you are shaved."
"Yes, thanks to you, and I feel a hundred per cent. better."
"But one doesn't shave on a sporting trip, does one?"
He did not believe in anything, that Englishman. He was a true sceptic.
We dined pleasantly enough. The resident talked a lot, although he did not seem to be naturally a talkative kind. He asked me many questions, which I answered cautiously. A native servant brought him a note, and he scribbled a note in return. After a few minutes, the servant brought him another message, and again he answered it. This happened several times.
"Important messages?" I asked.
"Oh, no," he replied hastily, "they are from my friend Low. He wants to arrange to have us all take coffee at his bungalow."
It was very queer. I was prepared, though, and thanked my stars for the pistol and hand grenade in my pockets. I learned later that their scheme was, in fact, to question Kircheiss and me separately. The purpose of the notes was to arrange questions to be asked of us, so that they might check up our separate answers to the same questions. These answers, it happened, had jibed fairly well, although not well enough to disarm suspicion altogether.
I thought it an imprudent time to ask when a ship might be expected, and hoped that some voluntary information on the subject might be vouchsafed. None was, however. I resolved to let the subject wait. People suspected of being a boatload of armed Germans might too readily be suspected of being interested in the arrival of ships.
When the time for leaving came, the resident told me that, if we would return on the following day, he would give us the certificate we desired, certifying that in the course of our sporting voyage we had called at the island of Aitutaki. The delay about the certificate was, of course, to detain us a day longer.
Away from this unsatisfactory interview, we encountered the Norwegian carpenter who informed Kircheiss that the natives believed we were Germans. The British had been recruiting soldiery among them for service in France, and for the purpose of getting recruits had stirred them up with a bit of war fever. The islanders therefore hoped that we were enemies so they could seize us. They planned to get our boat ashore and capture it. Upon hearing of this, I ordered that two men be on watch all the time, ready to repel any attack.