(From the statement of Captain John S. Lynch of the Lewes Coast Guard Station)
I and my crew launched our power lifeboat and started for the steamer. Before I could get to the steamer I saw the pilot boat towing in the steamer’s skiff. The pilot boat let go of the skiff right off the Capes, and the occupants of the skiff started to row for shore. I called to them and they stopped. We went alongside, and I told them I would take the man ashore and save them the trouble. So he got into our boat.
I then run off and picked up Captain Wingate, whose boat is a rowboat, and we went alongside the steamer. I asked for the Captain of the steamer, and they told me he was going ashore in the sail pilot boat, so we run alongside the sail pilot boat, and I asked the Captain of the steamer to come along with me. He says, “I will not. Not with that man in your boat. He’s got five guns on him!” I then told him that I did not care how many guns he had as I was not afraid of him and he requested me to take the man ashore myself. Then this man Ernest Schiller began to throw his guns overboard: Schiller throwed one gun overboard, Captain Wingate, who had come aboard my boat throwed two overboard, and C. A. Jenkins throwed another one overboard, Schiller having thrown them into the bottom of the boat. He, Schiller, throwed a lot of cartridges overboard, and when we came ashore we searched him and took the balance of the cartridges which he had on him and throwed them overboard. I then brought him up to the Customs Office and left him there.
(From “Schiller’s” statement)
I am willing to go back to New York ... immediately, and confess my guilt. I swear on oath that there are no bombs placed on the ship, to my knowledge. I simply made that statement to the Captain as a bluff.
Thus this venturesome Russian, Hodson by birth, Schiller by preference, and German by conviction, who single-handed captured a steamship, returned to New York, thirty-six hours after he had left port. He walked the plank to the United States Penitentiary at Atlanta for life, for “piracy on the high seas.”
VI
ALONG THE WATERFRONT
I
Sugar and Ships and Robert Fay
Anyone familiar with the waterfront of a great port can appreciate its difficulties as an area to be policed. One of the busiest sections of the community during the daytime, it is little frequented at night. In districts where you find few people you will rarely find lights, and where there are no lights you may well expect crime. The contours of the shoreline are irregular, following usually the original margins of solid ground lining the natural harbor, and for every thoroughfare which can pass as a street there are a dozen or two alleys, footpaths, shadowy recesses and blind holes. Locks and keys and night watchmen will protect the land side of the piers, but from the water side entrance to any pier is easy, concealment still easier, and flight no trick at all.
If New York harbor in 1914 had presented the aspect of the same harbor of twenty years before, I could hardly estimate the confusion which would have resulted from the coming of war. But there is probably no port in the world which handles New York’s volume of shipping with greater orderliness—I speak now from the standpoint of “law and order” rather than of the terminal facilities of the port. Its waterfront was physically clean and its longshore population, thanks to a competent police force, manageable. And yet, as Shakespeare said, “there are land rats and water rats—”