"The cruiser is coming," Leudemann shouted in my ear. "She is making straight for us."
"More sail on, by Joe," I sang out to the men aloft.
Never mind the hurricane. To the south we go. We'll bury ourselves in the Antarctic ice before we let them catch us, if the wind doesn't snap off our masts.
So, with the combined force of the gale and our 1,000-horsepower motor, we scudded southward. Suddenly, a flooding rain broke over us, a providential squall if there ever was one. It was like a gift of heaven. It blotted us out from the cruiser, just like the squall that rescued the raider Moewe.
"It is the hand of God," I shouted. "Our hour hasn't struck yet."
Under cover of the squall, we got away from there as fast as we could go, and after a few hours we felt certain we had given our pursuer the slip. In reality, we had not been pursued at all. The cruiser hadn't even seen us, and our lookout had been sharper than hers. We learned this from later reports. The ironical thing now would have been for us to have impaled the Seeadler on an iceberg in that mad sprint southward. But luck was with us again. The storm blew itself out.
Still, we were not out of the danger zone. Days went by before we were safely out of that boisterous region and spreading our wings on the broad expanse of the Pacific. Cruisers were still watching for us, and we had to keep a constant lookout. Our problem now was how to put them off the scent.
The Seeadler carried twenty lifeboats and a corresponding equipment of life preservers. These were much more than enough for our crew. We had taken ten of them off captured ships to accommodate our prisoners in case of necessity. Now we threw all these extra lifeboats overboard, taking care that on each boat and each life preserver was painted Seeadler. Our hope was that some of them would be picked up, and that the report would then be sent out that we had gone down off the Horn. That was exactly what happened. Two days later we picked up a wireless. It carried the news that a coastguard cutter had found one of our little boats. Later, two more were picked up. Then three. All along the coast of South America we were now given up for lost. The cruisers abandoned the chase and steamed north.
This left the way clear for us, and now we sailed out to continue our adventure on the greatest of all the seven seas.
Fourteen days after rounding the Horn, we picked an interesting and rather puzzling wireless out of the air: