We added another Allied nation to our list of prizes when the Buenos Aires came bowling along. She was an Italian ship built in England, a fine vessel but filthy dirty. Everything was untidy from stem to stern. Her captain, a fat, unkempt man of about fifty-five with a bristly moustache and a month's growth of scraggly stubble on his face, came aboard the Seeadler carrying an umbrella! Can you imagine a skipper of a windjammer carrying an umbrella at sea? We couldn't, and my men all burst out in rude guffaws. I suppose he had it to protect himself during a hurricane, eh? I had once seen a photograph of the Italian commander in chief, Count Cadorna, carrying an umbrella. So we immediately dubbed our new skipper Cadorna. He was a genial fellow, full of good nature and fun. You should have seen his astonishment when he saw the fine quarters we provided for our captive skippers. He never did quite get over it. Apparently, he was better off as our prisoner than he had been before.
We sailed night and day. During the day we tacked south into the steady trades, and during the night we ran with the northeast trade winds. At nights, when we ordinarily could not see them (because in wartime they all sailed without lights even in the Pacific), we went in the same direction as the ships bound for America, so that none passed us, and it was up to us to catch them. During the day, with our zigzag tacking, we were pretty sure to come in sight of any vessel sailing along that shipping lane in either direction.
* * *
One night, our lookout saw a tiny flash of light astern. A ship was coming along behind us, and somebody on her had looked at his watch with a pocket flash. We kept along on our way. No doubt in the morning she would still be close to us. Dawn came, and there she was, a magnificent French barque, the La Rochefoucauld. We signalled her:
"Important news."
She hove to. The captain, who was on deck in his carpet slippers, saw our gun but thought we were the mother supply for a squadron of British submarines. Seeing that he was under some illusion, I decided to have a little fun with him. I called our captured sailors to deck in batches. First up came the Chinamen. They lined up along the rail so that the Frenchman could get a good look at them. Then I called the West Indian Negroes on deck. After them the white men. Now Chinese, now black men, now Caucasians—the captain of the La Rochefoucauld thought he must be having a nightmare. And a most disagreeable nightmare it was when he saw the German flag run swiftly to the tip of our mainmast. You should have heard him swear.
He climbed on to the Seeadler's deck a picture of wrath and despair. He still had on his carpet slippers, and had brought nothing with him. His name was Lecoq.
"Don't you want to send for your belongings, Captain Lecoq?" I asked.
"If I have to lose my ship, mon Dieu, I want to lose everything," he replied.
"You don't want to take anything with you?"