Further investigation showed that he was dressed in his own trousers, socks, pants, and vest—and nothing more. His boots, shirt, and waistcoat had gone.
"Good heavens!" he thought, as the full significance of his position came home to him like a flash. "I've been shanghaied. Yes, I remember, a fellow called me about a telegram."
Slowly he raised his arm and, bringing his hand back, very gingerly rubbed his skull. There was a raised bruise that felt as large as a duck's egg.
"Sandbagged!" he decided. "The rival crowd is one up. Well, I suppose I'll be able to find out now who the fellows are. Wonder why they singled me out for their unwelcome attentions."
As a matter of fact it was a case of mistaken identity. On that momentous Saturday night one of the crew of the Zug—ex. Geier—who was a past master in the art of speaking colloquial English, hailed from the wharf-wall, fully expecting that Sir Hugh Harborough was one of the two persons on board the Titania. The pseudo messenger was not alone. Skulking behind a rusty and condemned ship's boiler were three powerful men, one armed with a length of rubber pipe filled with sand, and the others holding ropes and a gag in readiness should the persuasive methods of the loaded india-rubber pipe fail.
Unsuspecting and quite unprepared for foul play, Villiers was struck down from behind. There was no need to gag and bind him. Quickly and silently the four men carried their victim to a slipway, where a boat lay in readiness. It was quite a simple matter and almost devoid of risk. The night was dark, and even had there been any of the crews of the neighbouring vessels about, the statement that it was only a drunken man being taken off to his ship would have allayed suspicion. But, unseen and unchallenged, the emissaries of Kristian Borgen conveyed their senseless victim on board the Zug.
Kristian Borgen was waiting to receive them in the tramp's dingy state-room. Save for his own assertion and the fact that he spoke Swedish fluently and possessed credentials (forged, no doubt) from Stockholm, there was nothing Swedish about him. He was a Hun, and a Prussian at that. His real name was Kaspar von Giespert, and he had been an Unter-Leutnant of the German light cruiser Dresden. He knew the story of the Fusi Yama's sunken gold, having heard it from a brother-officer serving on board the Nürnburg, but he was not at all sure of the actual position of the wreck. The Dresden escaped the fate that overtook her consorts in the engagement with Sturdee off the Falkland Islands, but afterwards met with an ignominious end by being sunk by her own crew at Juan Fernandez—Alexander Selkirk's famous island. On the approach of a British cruiser, von Giespert was interned by the Peruvian Government until the end of the war, and upon being released promptly returned to Germany with the object of fitting out an expedition to search for the lost gold.
There were serious difficulties in his path. The partial surrender of Germany's mercantile fleet had made it an impossible matter to procure a ship in any German port. As a Hun, von Giespert knew that "his name was mud" in almost every important seaport on the Atlantic and Pacific shores. A nation cannot "run amok" and institute a policy of "sink everything without trace" and then expect to be treated on a pre-war footing by the States whose flags she has wantonly flouted and insulted. So von Giespert, quick to realize that as a German he was "down and out", had no qualms about renouncing, temporarily at all events, his nationality and becoming Kristian Borgen, a Swede. And as such he found little difficulty in taking up his abode in Southampton, whence he could control his latest mercantile enterprise with comparative ease.
He had succeeded in getting a picked crew of twenty-two German seamen—men who in pre-war days had served in the British Mercantile Marine, where frequently 75 per cent of a crew sailing under the Red Ensign were either "Dagoes" or "Dutchies". And these men could all speak English as spoken on shipboard, and most of them, with the Hun's versatility in learning languages, were equally at home with Swedish.
Von Giespert had a firm hold upon his band of desperadoes. For one thing he paid them well and made fair promises of a substantial share of the treasure, if and when it were recovered. Anyone possessing capital could do that, but von Giespert, being a Hun, went further. The men he picked carefully from the crews of certain U-boats whose record of piracy was of the blackest—men who had carried out infamous orders with alacrity when they thought Germany was winning, and who had not hesitated to mutiny and assault their officers when they discovered the long-hidden truth that all was lost.