Count Luckner, the Sea Devil

by Lowell Thomas; Graf von Felix Luckner

"Thirty," he announced, repeated it once, and muttered several other numbers between his teeth.

He pulled my coat halfway down my back, thus hindering my arms. He remarked that the light was poor, and turned me so that my back was toward the outer door. I could hear a creaking that told me someone was moving behind that door. I noticed on the floor below the lower part of the table a disorderly pile of old clothes which looked as though they might be sailors' togs. The gentleman took off my belt and laid it on the table. Attached to the belt was my knife case. It was empty. I wondered where my knife might be. I remembered having it that morning. I had peeled potatoes with it. My blood froze as between empty bottles on the window sill I saw a chopped off human thumb with a long sinew attached. The gentleman was about to let down my trousers, which would have kept me from running.

I jerked my coat back into place, knocked the man down with a heavy blow, grabbed my empty knife case from the table, kicked open the nearest door to the open, and jumped out, shouting for Nauke. He appeared, still munching his piece of cake. We ran out into the plantation and threw ourselves down among the cane. There was the sound of a whistle and of galloping horses and running men. They were hunting for us along the roads. We groped our way among the fields, and, after losing our way several times, finally reached the beach.

We looked up an English-speaking policeman and told him our story. He shrugged his shoulders and said it would take a special force of detectives to discover how many sailors had mysteriously disappeared on the islands. Our captain merely remarked that we deserved a good thrashing for going ashore. We sailors on the ship laid a plan to take the plantation by storm on the following Sunday, and gathered our weapons for the raid. But on Friday a quarantine was proclaimed, due to some infectious disease that was spreading, and the raid was off. In later times, I often inquired about the strange circumstance, and heard tales of white sailors disappearing on the islands, but never a solution of the mystery.

On board the Golden Shore was a lad named August from Winsen on the Luhe, in Germany. He and I talked over the ever-beguiling idea of serving a master no longer, but of being our own masters. We knew that fishing was considered good on the western coast of North America, and we determined to go into business for ourselves as fishermen. The Golden Shore took her course to Seattle, and there we were informed that the fishing was best around Vancouver. At Vancouver we looked things over and came to the conclusion that the ideal thing would be to live in a boat and hunt and fish by turns. That would be a state of perfect independence. We used what money we had to buy a rifle. Now all we needed was a boat.

At the fishing village of Modeville, a number of sailboats were moored off shore. They belonged to Indians and half-breeds, whose camp fires we could see and whose savage dogs barked out fierce alarms. It was about dusk. Cautiously, we launched one of the canoes on the beach and paddled out to one of the sailboats that had taken our fancy. We got aboard quietly and cut the anchor rope. The boat was set lightly for drying. There was only a slight breeze, and we drifted very slowly. Somebody ashore saw the boat drifting. A canoe came paddling out in leisurely fashion. We gave the sail a hoist to get up more speed. The men in the canoe noticed this at once. They yelled and paddled hard. We were in a fix. But as we passed out of the lee of the high mountains, we got a windfall, the sail bellied out, and the boat scudded swiftly along. From the shore they fired at us with rifles, but we were away.

We sailed to Seattle, and there the sailors of a German boat gave us a supply of food and some white lead with which to paint our boat. We hunted and fished and got along, and then grew tired of it. We were honest lads, and tried to return our boat secretly to Modeville. We were caught and haled before a Canadian judge. He was lenient and put us on probation for a few weeks.

That was my first adventure at piracy.

In Vancouver I signed on the four-masted English ship, the Pinmore, on which I was now to make the longest uninterrupted voyage of my life. It took us two hundred and eighty-five days to sail from San Francisco around the Horn to Liverpool. We had rations for a hundred and eighty days, and sea water got into our water tanks. We lay in calms for long periods on our way south, and then were held back by long-continued storms off Cape Horn.

It was as though that ship harboured a devil. We did not meet a single craft that we could ask for provisions. None of the rain clouds that went drifting past came near enough to provide us with water. Between the half rations and the brackish water in our tanks, six men died of scurvy and beri-beri, and the rest were so ill with these dread diseases that their abdomens and legs swelled up as though with dropsy. We used only the storm sails. None of us was able to climb into the rigging. When at length we sighted England off the Scillys, the last portion of peas had been distributed, and when the tug hove up to us in St. George's Channel we all cried, "Water, water!" We drank all the water that we could hold, and still we were thirsty. Our bodies were dried up. I was a fortnight in hospital.