Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

Then, as suddenly as they had begun, the forays of the modern corsair ceased. The first belief was, of course, that the pursuing British had found her and sent her to Davy Jones. But as the weeks went by without any announcement to that effect, doubts crept in. Soon the British government, without making a formal declaration, revealed the untruth of this report by keeping its searching vessels at sea. It was the theory that the Karlsruhe had run up the Amazon or the Orinoco for repairs and rest. The expectation was that she would soon be at her old tricks again.

The battle and sinking story persisted in the British press, the wish being evidently father to the thought. On January, 12, 1915, for instance, the Montreal Gazette published an unverified (and afterwards disproved) report from a correspondent at Grenada, British West Indies, giving a detailed description of a four hour battle in which the raider was destroyed. This story was allegedly verified by the washing ashore of wreckage and the finding of sailors’ corpses. All moonshine.

On January 21, an American steamer captain announced having sighted the Karlsruhe off Porto Rico. On other dates in January and February she was also falsely reported off La Guayra, the Canary Islands, Port au Prince and other places. On March 17, the Brooklyn Eagle published a tale to the effect that the hulk of the raider lay off the Grenadines, a little string of islets that stretch north from Grenada in the Windwards. This report said there had been no battle. The cruiser had been self-wrecked or broken up in a storm. Again wreckage was said to have been found, but here once more was falsehood.

On March 18, the Stifts-Tidende of Copenhagen reported that the Karlsruhe had been blown up by an internal explosion one evening as the officers and men were having tea. One half of the wreck sank immediately, the report went on to say, while the other floated for some time, enabling between 150 and 200 of the crew to be rescued by one of the accompanying auxiliaries. The survivors, it was added, had been sworn to secrecy before reaching port—why this, no one can guess.

The following day, the National Tidende published corroboration from a German merchant captain then in Denmark, to the effect that the “crew of the Karlsruhe had been brought home early in December, 1914, by the German liner, Rio Negro, one of the Karlsruhe’s escort ships.”

Somewhat later, a Brooklyn man, wintering at Nassau, in the Bahamas, reported finding the raider’s motor pinnace on the shore of Abaco Island, north of Nassau.

To this there is little to add. Admiral von Tirpitz, then the head of the German navy, says in his memoirs just this and no more:

“The commander of the Karlsruhe, Captain Köhler, never dreamt of taking advantage of the permission to make his way homeward; working with the auxiliary vessels in the Atlantic, surrounded by the English cruisers, but relying on his superior speed, he sought ever further successes, until he was destroyed with his ship by an explosion, the probable cause of which was some unstable explosive brought aboard.”

It is obvious from this that the Karlsruhe was given the option of returning home, having gained enough glory and sunk enough ships to satisfy a dozen admirals. But the main fact to be gleaned from Tirpit’s statement is that an internal explosion was the thing officially accepted by the head of the German admiralty as the cause of her disappearance. And this is the most likely of all the theories that have been or can be proposed. But, that said, we are still a long way from any satisfaction of our deeper curiosity. Where and when did the explosion take place? Under what circumstances? Did any escape and return to Germany to tell the tale?

To these queries there are no positive answers. If the Karlsruhe was, as so often stated, accompanied by one or more auxiliaries or coaling ships, it seems incredible that all the crew can have been lost and quite beyond imagination that there was not even a distant witnessing of the accident. Yet this seems to have been the case. In spite of the report that a large part of the famous raider’s crew got safely home after the supposed explosion, I have searched and scouted through the German press and the German book lists for an account of the affair—all in vain. Not only that, but I am assured by reliable correspondents of the American press in Germany that nothing credible or authoritative has appeared. We have von Mücke’s book “The Emden,” published in the United States as early as 1917, and previously in Germany. We have the exploits of the Moewe, and we have the lesser adventures of the popular von Luckner and his craft. But of the famous Karlsruhe we have nothing at all, save rumors and gossip.