Count Luckner, the Sea Devil

by Lowell Thomas; Graf von Felix Luckner

"That? Why that's the Sea Devil."

"And who may the Sea Devil be?"

"Why, the Sea Devil is Count Luckner, who commanded the raider Seeadler. The young lady is his countess."

I remembered the Seeadler vaguely as a sailing ship that had broken through the British blockade and played havoc with Allied shipping in the Atlantic and Pacific during the latter part of the war. Certainly, this Sea Devil looked the part of a rollicking buccaneer. I thought the age of pirates had vanished with the passing of Captain Kidd and the Barbary Corsairs, but here was one of the good old "Yo-ho, and a bottle of rum" type.

My wife and I continued our aërial jaunt across Europe, via Berlin, Königsberg, and Smolensk, to the capital of the Bolsheviks, but later on, while flying back and forth across Germany on our way from Constantinople to Copenhagen and from Finland to Spain, whenever we dropped down out of the skies in Germany we heard more of this Sea Devil. That first encounter with this modern buccaneer had aroused my curiosity, and each new yarn that I heard made me keen to see more of him. Incidentally, we found that he and his dainty countess were doing almost as much flying as we were, although entirely within the borders of Germany and Austria. Cities were declaring half holidays in his honour, and apparently this Sea Devil was more of a popular hero than even the great Von Hindenburg. As for the youth of Germany, they fairly idolized him, and crowds of boys met him at every aërodrome.

There were other German sea-raiders during the World War that most of us remember far more vividly than we recollect the Seeadler. They were the Emden, the Moewe and the Wolf. But these three were either modern warships or fast auxiliary cruisers, while this giant count with the foghorn voice and the sea legs had run the blockade in a prehistoric old-fashioned sailing ship. That, together with an almost unbelievably adventurous personal story, made romance complete. Added to which we discovered that he had the unique and enviable reputation of disrupting Allied shipping without ever having taken a human life or so much as drowning a ship's cat.

Upon returning home from his buccaneering cruise the Count of course received a score of decorations, and his own government signally honoured him in a way that has rarely happened in German history. He was presented with a cross that places him outside the scope of German law. Like the kings of old, he "can do no wrong"—at any rate, not in his own country. He was even called to Rome and decorated by the Pope as "a great humanitarian."

When we encountered him at Stuttgart, he was on a sort of triumphal tour of Germany, exhorting the youth to prove worthy of their inheritance, and in cheery seaman's language he was telling the boys and girls to keep up their courage, "stay with the pumps, and not abandon the ship." They in turn seemed to look upon him as a modern Drake or John Paul Jones.

Upon our return from Moscow, we learned more and more of this Count Felix von Luckner: that he was a member of an old and famous military family, a descendant of a Marshal of France, who had run away to sea as a boy, and then served for seven years before the mast, roaming the wide world o'er under an assumed name as a common jack-tar, suffering the beatings, starvation, shipwreck, and other hardships that the sea visits upon its children. We heard how during his turns ashore he had even joined the Salvation Army in Australia, had become a kangaroo hunter, a prize-fighter, a wrestler, a beach-comber and a Mexican soldier, standing on guard before the door of Porfirio Diaz's presidential palace. Long since given up as dead, he had been listed by the Almanack de Gotha as missing.

Then, one day, after he had fought his way up from a common seaman to the rank of an officer of the German Navy, he returned to his family. A series of life-saving exploits had brought him fame, with the result that he became the protégé of the Kaiser. As an officer aboard the Kron Prinz, the finest ship in the Imperial Navy, he had survived the Battle of Jutland.