Stories of the Ships

by Lewis R. Freeman

"I learned a good many things in those few hours I spent in the Emden of the way of the Hun officers with their men, and the 'cat-o'-nine-tails' I have told you of were not the worst.

"A rather decent sort of chap, who said that he had learned his English working on a Scotchman's farm in Argentina, took me to a doorway leading to a flat from which a ladder had descended to the engine-room and stokeholds. Across that doorway was lying the body of an officer, which nobody seemed to have taken the trouble to move. He was the Gunnery Lieutenant, the chap said, and had been driving up stokers at the point of his revolver to serve a gun whose crew had been knocked out when he was killed. The officer's body was somewhat scorched by lyddite, but from the line of the burns it looked as if they were made after he fell.

"What looked to me very much like a bullet wound in the side of the head struck me at once as the likely cause of his death. 'Did one of his own men shoot him?' I asked; but the chap—seeing a young officer who, I later learned, was Prince Franz Joseph Hohenzollern, a relative of the Kaiser, approaching—only shrugged his shoulder and raised his eyebrows and walked away. I didn't like to ask about the incident after the men were prisoners on the Sydney, but just the same there has never been any doubt in my mind as to what occurred.

"Most of my time on the Emden was put in standing by on the quarterdeck in case there was any signalling to be done, and this gave me a good chance to get a line on a little ceremony which had been carried out there just after she sent her flag down.

"We had seen them burn that flag, but just what other things went into that fire we never knew exactly. The nature of some of them, however, I began to surmise when I came upon charred fragments of Bank of England notes lying about among the wreckage and sticking in the cracks of the warped deck. Several coins which I picked up turned out to be English shillings and German marks. I noticed that some of our lads were pushing the search with much energy whenever they had a chance, paying especial attention to the cracks between the charred planking and the deck. When fire-blackened gold sovereigns began to make their appearance in the Sydney, and kept appearing even after we had been for months in the West Indies and South Atlantic, I understood the reason for their energy.

"When the prisoners were searched on board the Sydney several of them were found to be in possession of English sovereigns (one of them gave the Paymaster a bag containing over a hundred for safe keeping), which they claimed to be their own. It was not until they had been disembarked at Colombo that it turned out that one of them had confessed that among other things thrown into that fire on the quarterdeck of the Emden was all the treasure she had seized from the British merchant ships she had sunk during her career as a raider. This included sixty thousand pounds in gold sovereigns and an unknown amount in bank notes. The latter were consumed, and the gold, after the bags had been burned away from it, was swept into the sea. It was in this way that the few stray coins picked up lingered behind in the gaping cracks opened up by shells bursting in the enclosed spaces under the quarterdeck."

At this juncture a messenger came to summon my young friend to the signal bridge, but he lingered at the door long enough to say that he had fully made up his mind to go back to North Keeling Island after the war and have a try at raking up some of that scuttled treasure.

"There's no sand where she was lying, sir; only hard coral reef that ought to catch the coins in the holes and prevent them from being washed away. My only fear is that the coral may grow over and cover it up before I am free to get out there. Do you know how fast a coral island grows, sir?"

I replied that I was not sure about it, but that I seemed to have some kind of an impression that the coral insect couldn't erect much more than a thirty-second of an inch of island a year, adding that I didn't think that a few inches of coral could make much difference with a big heap of gold like that in any case.

"Perhaps not, sir," he assented; "but all the same I'm hoping that it won't have had time to grow even one inch before the war's over. The stuff's no use to a chap unless he can have it while he's young."