I shouted the command, and the drum beat "clear for action." A section of the rail could be lowered and raised as a gun shield. It dropped clattering and revealed the muzzle of the cannon. Up with the German flag and fire, one across her bows.
It was the Seeadler's first shot against the enemy.
What's that, by Joe? Nothing happened, no movement on deck, no slowing down of the ship. Then a flag went up the mast, the British flag. It was like the fantastic things that happen in a dream. I thought I must be asleep. Another shot across her bows. She suddenly changes her course. Hello, she wants to get away. A shot over the stern, another over the smokestack, and now she hove to.
A boat was in the water rowing toward us. We all put on our best manners, and I welcomed Captain Chewn aboard the Seeadler. What did we want of him, he asked, so bewildered that he stuttered. "Well, first a friendly chat," I replied. He was an old salt with a scraggly gray beard. I liked him right off. His ship was the Gladys Royal, bound from Cardiff with five thousand tons of coal for Buenos Aires. I told him that, much as I disliked sending any ship to the bottom of the sea, nevertheless, we must sink the Gladys Royal.
"Oh, no," he argued, "we are bound for a neutral port and won't harm anything. It will be bad for me to lose my ship, and I have a wife and children at home."
"Do you believe, Captain Chewn, that, under the same circumstances, a British naval officer would show any mercy to a German ship?"
He made no reply.
We now got an explanation of the queer behaviour of his ship that had so puzzled us after our first shot. Captain Chewn, an old-timer at sea, simply thought we were trying to compare time in the old traditional way, by firing a blank mortar. He had raised his flag to serve as the mortar shot on his side. He would afterward lower it to give the exact moment. That is the way in vogue to-day. But when our second shot was fired, the cook on the Gladys Royal saw the shell strike the water and thought we had sighted a submarine and were firing at it. He gave the alarm, and the captain started to zigzag. It was only after the third shot that they saw our cannon pointed at them and the German battle flag at our masthead.
"By Joe," and the captain pounded the rail with open admiration, "you fooled me bloody well. It was the damnedest trap I ever saw."
I sent a prize crew aboard the Gladys Royal with orders to have her follow the Seeadler. I wanted to wait and blow her up after nightfall. Cruisers might be roaming somewhere in these parts, and it would be unwise to run the risk of attracting their attention with the sound of an explosion.