"The Imperial German Consul at Manila writes me:
"'Unfortunately the captured Hindus include Gupta, who last was active at Tokio. The following have also been captured: John Mohammed Aptoler, Rulerhammete, Sharmasler, No-Mar, C. Bandysi, Rassanala. Apparently the English are thoroughly informed of all individual movements and the whereabouts at various times of the Hindu revolutionists.'
"Please inform Chakravarty."
The name "Chakravarty" occurring in these two memoranda makes it necessary here to turn back the calendar to 1915, in order to outline another conspicuous Hindu-German activity. Not only were the East Indian students and sympathetic educators in America prolific in their verbal advocacy of revolt in India, but with German assistance they attempted at least one clearly defined bit of filibustering, which if it had been successful would have supplied the would-be mutineers in the Land of Hind with the arms they so longed to employ against the British.
The reader will recall the mention of a large quantity of weapons and cartridges which Captain Hans Tauscher had stored in a building in 200 West Houston Street, New York, and which he said he had purchased for "speculation." The speculation was apparently the project of Indian mutiny, which in the eyes of the Indian Nationalist party was to equal in grandeur the infamous mutiny of 1857. For those arms were shipped to San Diego, California, secretly loaded aboard the steamer Annie Larsen, and moved to sea. The plan provided for their transshipment off the island of Socorro to the hold of the steamship Maverick, which was to carry them to India. The two ships failed to effect a rendezvous, and after some wandering the Annie Larsen put in at Hoquiam, Washington, where the cargo was at once seized by the authorities. The Maverick sailed to San Diego, Hilo, Johnson Island, and finally to Batavia.
Count von Bernstorff had sufficient courage, on July 2, to inform the Secretary of State "confidentially that the arms and ammunition ... had been purchased by my government months ago through the Krupp agency in New York for shipment to German East Africa." On July 22, he wrote again, asking that the arms be returned as the property of the German Government, and offering to give the Department of Justice "such further information on the subject as I may have" if they cared to push an examination of the cargo. On October 5 he threw all responsibility for the movements of the Maverick upon Captain Fred Jebsen, her skipper—by this time a fugitive from justice—and stating "the German Government did not make the shipment, and knows nothing of the details of how they were shipped"—which was a rather shabby way of discrediting his subordinates.
It developed later that the arms were purchased—sixteen carloads of them—by Henry Muck, Tauscher's manager, for $300,000, made payable by von Papen through G. Amsinck & Co. to Tauscher. A part of the shipment was sent to San Diego; the balance was to have gone to India via Java and China, but never left on account of the protests of the British Consul. Instead, a number of machine guns and 1,500,000 rounds of ammunition were sold to a San Francisco broker who was acting as agent for Adolphi Stahl, financial agent in the United States for the Republic of Guatemala. When Zimmermann cabled to von Bernstorff on April 30, 1916 (through Count von Luxburg in Buenos Aires), "Please wire whether von Igel's report on March 27, Journal A, No. 257, has been seized, and warn Chakravarty," he had grave concern over the betrayal of German influences in the Hindu conspiracies. This was fully justified when a correspondence notebook of von Igel's disclosed, among other entries, the following transactions:
August 12, 1915—Captain Herman Othmer inclosed documents about the Annie Larsen and von Igel forwarded charter to Consul at San Francisco.
September 2—The embassy forwarded papers from San Francisco about the Annie Larsen and von Igel returned them.
September 7—The embassy sent a telegram from San Francisco about the Maverick.
September 9—The consulate, San Francisco, sent a letter for information and von Igel replied with a telegram about Maverick repairs.