All German and Austro-Hungarian consulates received orders to coördinate their own staffs for war service. Germany herself supplied the American front with men by wireless commands to all parts of the world. Captain Hans Tauscher, who enjoyed the double distinction of being agent in America for the Krupps and husband of a noted operatic singer, Mme. Johanna Gadski, chanced to be in Berlin when war broke out, reported for duty and was at once detailed to return to the United States and report to von Papen, as Wilhelmstrasse saw the usefulness of an ordnance expert in intimate touch with our Ordnance Department and our explosives plants. Two German officers detailed to topographical duty, who had spent years mapping Japan, and were engaged in the same work in British Columbia, jumped the border to the United States, taking with them their families, their information and their fine surveying and photographic instruments, and in the blocking out of the country which the wise men in the East were performing, were assigned to the White Mountains. Railroads and ships to the Atlantic seaboard bore every day new groups of reserve officers from the Orient and South America to New York for sailing orders.
They found von Papen already there. He established a consultation headquarters at once with Boy-Ed in a room which they rented in the offices of G. Amsinck & Co., at 6 Hanover Street. From that time forward, New York was to be his base of operations, and it was at that moment especially convenient to von Bernstorff's summer establishment at Newport.
The naval situation at once became active. In the western and southern Atlantic a scattered fleet of German cruisers was still at large. The British set out eagerly to the chase. Security lay in southern waters, and the German craft dodged back and forth through the Straits of Magellan. From time to time the quarry was forced by the remoteness of supply to show himself, and a battle followed; in the intervals, the Germans lay perdu, dashing into port for supplies and out again to concealment, or wandering over seldom traveled ocean tracks to meet coal and provision ships sent out from America.
Captain Boy-Ed received from Berlin constant advices of the movements of his vessels. On July 31, Dr. Karl Buenz, the American head of the Hamburg-American Line, had a cable from Berlin which he read and then forwarded to the Embassy in Washington for safekeeping. Until 1912 Buenz had had no steamship experience, having been successively a judge in Germany, a consul in Chicago and New York, and minister to Mexico. When at the age of 70 he was appointed Hamburg-American agent, one of the first matters which came to his attention was the consummation of a contract between the Admiralty Division of the German government and the steamship line, which provided for the provisioning, during war, of German ships at sea, using America as a base. This contract was jealously guarded by the Embassy.
Dr. Karl Buenz, managing director of the
Hamburg-American Line
The cablegram of July 31 called on Dr. Buenz to carry out this contract. There was consultation at once with Boy-Ed for the location of the vessels to be supplied, merchant ships were chartered or purchased, then loaded, and despatched. The first to leave New York harbor was the Berwind. There was hesitancy among the conspirators as to who should apply for her clearance papers—documents of which Dr. Buenz protested he knew nothing. They finally told G. B. Kulenkampff, a banker and exporter, that the Berwind was loaded with coal, and directed him to get the clearance papers. He swore to a false manifest of her cargo and got them. The Berwind carried coal to be sure—but she also carried food for German warships, and she was not bound for Buenos Aires, as her clearance papers stated. Thus the United States, by innocently issuing false papers, made herself, on the third day of the war, a party to German naval operations.
The steamship Lorenzo dropped down the harbor, ostensibly for Buenos Aires, on the following day, August 6, cleared by a false manifest, and bearing coal and food for German sailors. On these ships, and on the Thor (from Newport News for Fray Bentos, Uruguay), on the Heine (from Philadelphia on August 6 for La Guayra), on the J. S. Mowinckel and the Nepos (out of Philadelphia for Monrovia) and others Boy-Ed and Buenz had placed supercargoes bearing secret instructions. These men had authority to give navigating orders to the captains once they were outside the three-mile limit—orders to keep a rendezvous with German battleships by wireless somewhere in the Atlantic wastes.
The Berwind approached the island of Trinidad and Herr Poeppinghaus, who was her supercargo, directed the captain to lie to. Five German ships, the Kap Trafalgar, Pontus, Elinor Woerman, Santa Lucia and Eber, approached and the transfer of supplies started. It was interrupted by the British converted cruiser Carmania. She engaged in a brisk two-hour duel with the Kap Trafalgar which ended only when the latter sank into the tropical ocean. The Berwind meanwhile put the horizon between herself and the Carmania.