Five Months on a German Raider / Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf'

by Frederic George Trayes

AT SKAGEN: GERMAN PRIZE CREW OF THE IGOTZ MENDI UNDER GUARD, AWAITING INTERNMENT.

With what joyful and thankful hearts did we reach home, once more to be united with our relatives and friends, who had long mourned us as dead. The shipping company had long ago abandoned all hope, the Hitachi had been posted missing at Lloyd's, letters of condolence had been received by our relatives, and we had the, even now in these exciting times, still unusual experience of reading our own obituary notices. We shall have to live up to them now! We heard from the Nippon Yushen Kaisha in London that the Japanese authorities had sent an expedition to look for the Hitachi. The expedition called at the Maldives, and had there found, in the atoll where we had first anchored in the Wolf's company, a door from the Hitachi splintered by shell-fire and a case of cocoanut identified as having been put on board the Hitachi at Colombo. The natives on this atoll could have told the expedition that at any rate the Hitachi was not sunk there, as they saw the Wolf and her prize sail away at different times. The Hitachi's disappearance was attributed to a submarine, though it was not explained how one managed to operate in the Indian Ocean!

We also heard in London that the Captain of the Hitachi committed suicide before the Wolf arrived in Germany.

No comment need be made on the German procedure of dragging their prisoners month after month over the oceans. Such a thing had never been done before. The Germans had had opportunities to release us, but had taken none to do so, as they had evidently determined not to allow any account of the Wolf's cruise to be made known. They might have put the Hitachi prisoners on the Maldives and left them there to get to Colombo as best they could, the Germans taking the ship; they might have sent the prisoners on the Igotz Mendi to Colombo or Java after they had taken what coal they wanted. As the Spanish Captain said, they had a right to take his contraband, but not his ship. But a question of right did not bother the Germans. Many times they promised him to release his ship, never intending to do so. Whenever they were asked why they did not release us when we thought it possible, they always advanced "military reasons" as the excuse. "That," as I said to the Captain, "covers a multitude of sins." The Commander of the Wolf had personally assured the married couples on the Matunga that they would be kept no longer than two months. But they were kept nearly seven. Some men had been kept prisoners on the Wolf for more than a year.

It was hard enough on the men, but infinitely worse for the women. One had been eight months, one seven, and others five months in captivity on the high seas, often under the worst possible conditions. But they all played their part well, and kept cheerful throughout, even when it appeared they were certain to be taken with their husbands into Germany.

Every man is liable to think, under such conditions, that he is in a worse case than his fellow-captives, and there were certainly examples of very hard luck amongst us. Mention of a few cases might be of interest. The American Captain had abandoned his sea calling for six years, and decided, at his wife's request, to make one more trip and take her to see her relatives in Newcastle, N.S.W. They never got there, but had eight months' captivity and landed in Denmark instead. Many sailors had left the Atlantic trade after encounters with the U boats in that ocean, only to be caught by the Wolf in the Pacific. One of the members of the Spanish crew had been a toreador, but his mother considered that calling too dangerous and recommended the sea as safer. Her son now thinks otherwise; perhaps she does too!

The Captain of a small sailing ship from Mauritius to West Australia, in ballast to load timber, saw the Wolf when a day off his destination. Not knowing her, he unwisely ran up the Red Ensign—a red rag to a bull, indeed—and asked the Wolf to report him "all well" at the next port. The Wolf turned about and sunk his little ship. Although the Captain was at one time on the Wolf almost in sight of his home in Mauritius, his next port was Kiel, where it is to be feared that he, an old man of seventy, was the reverse of "all well."

One of our fellow-prisoners had been on the P. & O. Mongolia when she was sunk by one of the Wolf's mines off Bombay. Later on, on the Hitachi, he was caught by the mine-layer herself! But he defeated the enemy after all, as he escaped on the Igotz Mendi! One of the seafaring men with us had already been torpedoed by the Huns in the Channel. Within a fortnight he was at sea again. The next time he was caught and his ship sunk by the Wolf off New Zealand. He also escaped on the Igotz Mendi, and when last seen ashore was dying to get to sea again, in a warm corner, so he said, so that he could "strafe the Huns" once more. They had held him prisoner for eight months, and he had some leeway to make up.

There was, too, the case of the Australians taken prisoner on the S.S. Matunga. The women and military doctors had certainly escaped on the Igotz Mendi, but there were taken into Germany from the Matunga three military officers and three elderly married civilians over military age. They were going but a week's voyage from their homes (July 1917); but, torn from their homes and families, they were to languish for months in a German internment camp. Neither must be forgotten the old captains and mates and young boys—some of the latter making their first sea voyage—taken into captivity in Germany, where they have probably been exhibited as illustrating the straits to which the war, and especially the U boat part of it, has reduced the glorious British mercantile marine. Our young men friends on the Hitachi, and the hundreds of prisoners, some of them captured more than a year before from British ships, were all taken into Germany, there to remain in captivity till the war was over.