Engineer Lieut.-Commander K. Shiraishi, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, is speaking, his immobile face—so that I may complete my sketch—as rigid as that of the little Buddha which I can see behind him. He has shared a berth with the Captain, and tells me that on the night of his disappearance he left the cabin, “and he come not back.” He had slipped quietly overboard—“in the dark and among the ice”—thus embarking on a final voyage, new and strange.
“All night we hear the ice grinding past the ship,” said my Lieut.-Commander, without the flicker of an eyelid. “In the dark—and among the ice!”
Returning to my hut, by a literary coincidence not uncommon, I opened Joseph Conrad, and read in “Il Conde”: “He put the tip of his finger on a spot close under his breast-bone, the very spot of the human body where a Japanese gentleman begins the operation of the Harakiri, which is a form of suicide following upon dishonour, upon an intolerable outrage to the delicacy of one’s feelings.”
Captain Meadows, of the Tarantella, the first steamer sunk by the Wolf, was a man of Herculean build, and quite apparently, and as befitted the skipper of a ship named as his was, he had led the German Commander something of a dance. Every morning, until he was caught in the act, the Captain used to empty the water from his bath into the sea, and with it a bottle giving the bearings of the Wolf, and some account of her depredations. Even when the time came that two or three German sailors flung themselves suddenly upon him, he succeeded in “mailing his letter,” and when he received a vehement reprimand he made retort that if the Commander thought it necessary to shout even louder he might use his megaphone!
CAPTAIN OF THE “TARANTELLA.”
The Wolf apparently employed a hydroplane with great effect in locating her prey, and in evading capture. The Captain of the Matunga showed me a snapshot—from which I made a sketch—of the last moments of his sinking ship.
Clinging to Office
However unwillingly officers may have come to Carlsruhe, there was always a certain loathness to leave for another camp, on the principle, doubtless, that it is better to “bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of.” There was something hugely diverting in the tenacity with which prisoners clung to whatever shred of office or appointment they could lay claim to. The members of the Cabinet cannot be more reluctant to leave hold of their portfolios than were the Gefangenen to pack up their portmanteaux.
