Count Felix Von Luckner, the most romantic and mysterious figure
of the World War, with powerful hands tears a telephone book
into four parts.

COUNT LUCKNER,
THE SEA DEVIL

By LOWELL THOMAS

ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC,
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE
& COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE
COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

CONTENTS

I. [We Meet a Flying Buccaneer]
II. [Felix Runs off to Sea]
III. [Saved by an Albatross]
IV. [Salvation, Kangaroos, and Fakirs in Australia]
V. [Wrestling Champion of Sankt Pauli]
VI. [The Tragic Cruise of the "Cæsarea"]
VII. [The Beach Comber's Adventure with the "Panther"]
VIII. [Pitfalls for the Sailor, and the Canary That Spoke Low Deutsch]
IX. [The Runaway Comes Home]
X. [From Pig-Sty Cleaner to Kaiser's Protégé]
XI. [In the Cameroons and the Fairy of Fuerteventura]
XII. [Fake Norwegians for a Pirate Cruise]
XIII. [Running the British Blockade in a Hurricane]
XIV. [We Capture the "Gladys Royal" and the "Lundy Island"]
XV. [Raiding Along the Equator, and an Interrupted Honeymoon]
XVI. [Windjammer vs. Steamer]
XVII. [The Last Cruise of the Poor Old "Pinmore"]
XVIII. [The Life of a Modern Buccaneer]
XIX. [How We Made Our Prisoners Walk the Plank]
XX. [The Battle of the Falkland Islands]
XXI. [Racing the Enemy Around Cape Horn]
XXII. [Raiding the Pacific]
XXIII. [Shipwrecked in Southern Seas]
XXIV. [Castaways on a Coral Atoll]
XXV. [Let's Go Raiding Again!]
XXVI. [From the Society Islands to the Cook Islands in an Open Boat]
XXVII. [Through a Sea of Floating Brimstone to Fiji]
XXVIII. [Caught by the British at Wakaya]
XXIX. [Jailed in Fiji While the Others Escape to Easter Island]
XXX. [The Escape from New Zealand to the Smoking Isle]

COUNT LUCKNER,
THE SEA DEVIL

COUNT LUCKNER
THE SEA DEVIL

I
WE MEET A FLYING BUCCANEER

It was on a flying field in Central Europe that I first saw the "Sea Devil." We were on our way from London to Moscow by air, and had come as far as Stuttgart with stops at Paris and Basle. While waiting for the mechanics to tune up the big Fokker monoplane in which we were to cover the next stage to Berlin, we lunched in the little tea room on the edge of the flying field, kept by the widow of a German pilot killed in the war. Suddenly, through an open window, from off to the east in the direction of Munich and Ulm, we heard a familiar drone, and a moment later a silvery monoplane darted from a billowy cloud bank, the rays of the afternoon sun glistening now from one wing and now from the other. In a series of sliding swoops, with motor off and noiseless except for the whistle of the propeller, it dropped gently on to the turf and sped across the field.

Uniformed aërodrome attendants ran over, leaned their spidery metal ladder against the glistening duraluminum fuselage, and opened the cabin door. Two passengers descended, a giant of a man and a dainty slip of a woman. The former, who climbed down first, was tall, of massive frame, with huge shoulders, and altogether one of the most powerful-looking men I had ever seen. After him came the little blonde, who looked for all the world like a fairy who had arrived on a sunbeam. Putting her slipper to the top rung of the ladder she jumped into her escort's arms.

What a voice that man had! It boomed across the flying field like a foghorn or the skipper of a Yankee whaler ordering his men aloft.

As they came toward us, he walked with a rolling seaman's gait. In his mouth was a nautical-looking pipe, and his jovial weather-beaten countenance suggested one who goes down to the sea. He wore a naval cap cocked over one eye, and a rakish light brown chinchilla coat, called a "British Warm."

Every pilot and mechanic on the field stopped work and saluted the couple. The mariner who had dropped from the sky saluted in all directions after the cheery but somewhat perfunctory manner of the Prince of Wales. One could see that he was accustomed to doing it, and presumably was someone of more than local fame. He even saluted us, as they passed into the little restaurant, although he had never set eyes on us before and we had not saluted him. But the newcomer seemed to take the whole world, including strangers, into the compass of his rollicking friendliness. We were still sitting on the veranda when they came out and drove off for Lake Constance. He called, or rather bellowed, "Wiedersehen, wiedersehen," to everybody, as he squeezed into the door, and the frame of the limousine bent under his weight. The man simply radiated personality, and turning to the commandant of the Stuttgart Plug Platz, who stood near me, I said:

"Who is that?"

"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.

Then came his golden chance. Shortly after Jutland, he was commissioned to perform the audacious feat of taking a sailing ship through the British blockade in order to raid Allied shipping.

The Seeadler maintained a destructive career for months, ranging the South Atlantic and Pacific, dodging cruisers and sinking merchant vessels. She scuttled twenty-five million dollars' worth of shipping, and wrought incalculable damage by delaying hundreds of cargo vessels from venturing out of port, and raising the rates of marine insurance. After a cruise as full of excitement and thrills as the voyages of Captain Kidd and Sir Francis Drake, the Count's raider was wrecked on the coral reefs of a South Sea isle. From then on, the Sea Devil and his crew adventured from atoll to atoll in the far-off Southern ocean, passing from one surf-beaten shore to another in open boats or in ships they contrived to capture.

We were sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, one evening, when again I saw that magnificent nautical figure. A mutual friend introduced us, and that evening my wife and I listened to great stories of the sea, told with a manner of inimitable vigour, sailor-like jollity, and dramatic inflection. After that, we met often, sometimes on board his trim schooner the Vaterland, on which he was setting out to sail round the world, and again at my home near New York, where the Sea Devil and his countess came. On these occasions, I got the complete story of his life and his buccaneering experiences on the most adventurous cruise of our time.

The Count is a born actor; in fact, I verily believe him to be the finest actor I have ever seen. If he had not run away to sea, what a career he might have had on the stage! But his inborn flair for pantomime was only to be heightened by life at sea. Sailors are vigorously expressive men, full of mimicry, and blustery actors of parts. You seldom see a sailor with the phlegmatic stolidity that you find in lumpish landlubbers. When the Count tells you he raised a marlinespike, he jumps to the fireplace, seizes a pair of tongs, and illustrates with it. When he tells how he knocked a man cold in Fiji for spitting in a sailor's face, he acts out the whole affair.

As a sailor, he had spent long years before the mast under the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. So he told his tale to me in racy sailor's English. He has one amusing peculiarity of speech. Nearly every other word is the expletive, "By Joe!" In explaining this, he remarked that the language of the sea consists principally of a blistering string of oaths. He said these oaths had become so much a part of him after seven years before the mast that for a long time afterward he was unable to express himself without using sulphury profanities. Of course, this caused him much embarrassment and trouble when he returned from his long voyages and attempted to qualify as a naval officer. It caused particular consternation when, after his years at sea, he returned to the bosom of his stately and highly respectable family. In fact, he had to submit himself to a long and rigorous course of self-discipline to extract the blazing nautical oaths from his common speech. He achieved this in his English diction by a resort to the expression, "By Joe." Whenever one of these hair-raising oceanic apostrophes came leaping on to his tongue, he had trained himself so well that it automatically changed itself into "By Joe." This habit still clings to him as a salty reminder of fo'c'sle days.

At the time when Count Luckner was raiding the seas, I had been thrown in contact with the most picturesque adventurer that the World War had brought forth—Lawrence of Arabia. Here, in the Sea Devil, was his naval counterpart. They were the two great adventurers of the two respective sides during the World War. While Colonel Lawrence, mounted on a ship of the desert, led raids across the sands of Araby, Felix von Luckner scoured the seas in a windjammer. Lawrence led Bedouins on fleet Arabian horses and racing camels, romantic people travelling in the most romantic way known to land. The Sea Devil commanded sailors before the mast on a sailing ship, romantic people travelling in the most romantic way known to the sea. In each, adventure climbed close to its highest summit.

Lawrence was a man slight and frail, diffident, silent, and soft-spoken, who might have been taken offhand for the most bashful of youths, a most erudite scholar, an archæologist whom the war caught practising his profession among the antiquities of Assyria and Babylon. War and its forays must seem the last degree removed from this studious and utterly cerebral spirit. One could find no greater contrast to him than in this brawny sea rover with the booming voice and blustery manner, who raided the seas from Skagerrak and Iceland to Fiji and the Marquesas.

The ex-Kaiser, the ex-Crown Prince, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, Von Tirpitz, and sundry others of our late enemies, have given us their personal accounts of the part they played in the World War. But none had a tale to tell like Count Felix von Luckner. With me the story lies close as a companion piece to the story of Lawrence of Arabia, and I pass it on to you in the words of the Sea Devil and, I hope, with something of the tang of the sea.*

* The reader will notice that in Count von Luckner's narrative, the precise chronological order of events is occasionally not observed. The map used as lining paper in this book shows the route of the Seeadler and the names and dates of ships sunk, and other events in their chronological sequence.

II
FELIX RUNS OFF TO SEA

Take a windjammer out as a cruiser? Sneak through the blockade and go buccaneering on the high seas?

"By Joe!" I thought, "that's something."

It was a romantic thing all right in this day and age, when the sailing ship is getting to be something of a relic of the fine old times, the heroic age of the sea. But it wasn't because I had read a lot of sea stories and had become fascinated with the old world of rigging and canvas. I had been there myself, had been there good and proper.

The reason I was assigned to the command of the Seeadler was because I was the only officer in the German Navy who had had actual experience with sail. I was born Graf Felix von Luckner and was now a lieutenant commander, in the Imperial Service, but I had spent seven years of my early life as a common jack-tar before the mast. The fo'c'sle was as familiar to me as charts are to an admiral. That was why this windjammer cruise of war meant so deuced much to me, why it hit so close and was so personal.

I cannot make that part of it clear without telling you something of my early life at sea, a thing or two about the old days when sailing before the mast was all they say—and more. It's a yarn about shipwreck, storm, and cantankerous captains. So, sit yourself down there, by Joe, while I light my pipe and weigh anchor.

My first mental picture of life at sea dates away back to the time when I was a little fellow living in quiet, charming old Dresden. I saw a bill of fare from the liner, Fuerst Bismarck. By Joe, there were fine delicacies on it. I read it until my jaws began to move. So that was how people feasted at sea? Ah, then, how wonderful it must be to be a sailor. Perhaps, some day, I might become the captain of a great steamer where they had meals like that. The more I thought of it, the better I liked the idea, and from then on I had my mind set on going to sea. I read of the voyages of the wily Odysseus and of Sindbad the Sailor. On the river near our home I built a boat of an old box and christened it the Pirate.

"Oceans, straits, and gulfs are all very fine, but of what concern are they to a Von Luckner?" asked my father. "You are to be a cavalryman."

You see, my great-grandfather had started the cavalry tradition among us Von Luckners. They had tried to make a monk of him, and had put him in a monastery. But he didn't like that job, and among his fellows at the monastery he was called "Luckner libertinus." When he was thirteen years old, he ran away and joined the army of the Turks, in a war against the Austrians. In those days, the cavalrymen all had boys to feed and look after the horses, carry munitions, and clean rifles. So, while still a mere lad, my great-grandfather became a professional soldier, a soldier of fortune. After he had learned a lot about the Turks, he left them and joined the Austrians. That was when he was fifteen years old. Later on, he joined the Prussian Army, as a lieutenant of cavalry, under Frederick the Great.

On board the Cæsarea, the skinflint captain and part of his crew,
Phelax Leudige standing fifth from the left.
The wreck of the Cæsarea.

Finally, he formed his own regiment, which became famous throughout all Europe as "Count Luckner's Hussars." They had their own specially designed brown uniforms, and as mercenaries they fought in any war that came along. In those days, it was the custom for soldiers to fight for whoever could afford to pay them. The King of Hanover was in the habit of buying regiments, and my great-grandfather sold him his on the condition that it was still to be known as "Count Luckner's Hussars." The King broke his word. So my warlike ancestor went to the King's castle, boldly charged him with treachery, then took off his mantle and tunic covered with the decorations that the King had given him and threw them into the open fire.

"Henceforth I will fight against you," he shouted.

The runaway sailor came home at last, but not until he had worn
the Kaiser's uniform with honour. He dropped the name "Phelax
Leudige," and after completing his studies and examinations saved
five lives, became famous, and was promoted, to the rank of
Lieutenant-Commander in the Imperial Navy.

Shortly after this, he joined forces with the King of France, and then, during the French Revolution, he continued to serve the new French government as the commander of the Army of the Rhine. When the Marseillaise was written, it was dedicated to him because he happened to be the commanding general in the region where this immortal song was composed. After winning a number of important victories in Belgium, he was made a Marshal of France.

When the campaign was over, he led his army to the outskirts of Paris, and then, accompanied only by his aides, he went into the city to demand the back pay that was due to his soldiers. But instead of getting it, he was treacherously seized and sent to the guillotine. You see, it was cheaper to kill him than pay him. Although always a Royalist at heart, he was above all a soldier, and fought faithfully and valiantly for any monarch or government willing to hire his famous regiment. All our histories tell of him and his gallant deeds.

From then on, all Luckners became cavalrymen. It seemed to be in the blood. My grandfather, an officer, was accidentally killed while on a hunting expedition. My father fought in all the wars from 1848 down to the World War. In 1914, when he was ninety, he wanted to join up again. He insisted that he was still able to do patrol duty, because his eyesight was unimpaired and he was still a horseman. When the general staff refused his request on the ground that he was too old, he was very angry.

"It is because I am so old that they should take me," he said. "Let me serve as an example to the younger soldiers. I have fought in many wars, and will be living proof to them that the surest way to live a long and healthy life is to be a soldier."

Ships, harbours, the seven seas had nothing to do with a Von Luckner. My father scoffed at my talk of becoming a sailor, so I never spoke to him any further about it. He tried to tell me what a fine cavalryman I would make, and asked me to promise that I would wear the Emperor's uniform with honour.

Now, in Germany, unless you had a good education, there was no hope of your ever becoming an officer. And the courses were stiff. Instead of studying, I preferred to read your American Indian stories, especially those of James Fenimore Cooper. I knew the names of many of your famous Indian chiefs, and as a youngster I dreamed of voyaging to America to hunt buffalo.

My father hired a tutor to cram me with book knowledge, but after six months that worthy went to him in despair and said:

"It is no use; the boy doesn't learn. There is a devil in him."

Next they put me in a private school in the country, thinking that association with other boys would fill me with ambition to learn. Instead, I learned how to fight. Although only ten years old, I was a husky young devil, fond of sports, and ready for anything that would provide a thrill. My father thought the teacher was too soft for me, so he sent me off to another school, where the teacher was a strong man and something of a ruffian himself. By Joe, how that man used to pound me! My father also gave me many lickings, and I considered he was entitled to do so. But this other man? Well, I stood it from him just once. Then, when the second beating came, I ran away. For eight days nobody knew where I was. I lived in the fields like an animal, eating apples and other fruits. Then they found me. My poor father was ready to give me up as hopeless, but I still had a true friend, my grandmother. She told my father he had been far too stern with me, and said to him: "Give me the boy, Henry. A little kindness may still make a good lad of him."

"You are welcome to try," responded my father, "but you will only spoil him the more."

Well, Grandmother had the right idea. She made a bargain with me. There were thirty-four boys in my class at school, and in my studies I always stood thirty-fourth.

"My lad," she said, "study conscientiously and I will give you fifty pennies every time you advance a place. I will continue doing this until you are at the head of the class!"

I couldn't figure right then how much I stood to make. I never was much at arithmetic. But I guessed it would be considerable, and I considered Grandmother a good fairy.

I studied with all my might. The next examination came, and others were ahead, but not I. I was in despair. My grandmother encouraged me, and I studied still harder. Another examination came, and I moved up four seats! She gave me two hundred pennies, and I felt like a millionaire. But at the following examination I dropped back two seats. She was not discouraged with me and said she hardly expected me to go ahead without a few rebuffs. I was afraid she would demand a rebate for the places I had lost, but she did not. I now saw myself clear of all financial difficulties. By going ahead with an occasional dropping back, my income would be endless.

I turned into quite a despicable swindler, but it was not out of pure avarice. I had formed the idea of breeding rabbits and had set my eye on a fine rabbit sire that would cost me several marks. To get the sum needed I would have to be promoted several seats which, I reasoned, could be easily done, especially with occasional slidings back. But I had bad luck and got no more promotions. What was to be done? I needed the money. So I told Grandmother that I had been promoted two places. I got the pennies. Another week I told her I had gone ahead three places; another week one; and still another week four. The intricacies of finance and greed led me to a series of fake promotions that soon landed me at the head of the class. I had the cheek to put on that I had gained that honour.

Of course, Grandmother was happy and very proud of the success of her policy of kindness with me. One day, she happened to meet my school superintendent and could not resist expressing her elation.

"And what do you think of our Felix? Here he has progressed to the first place in his class by that simple method of mine of giving him fifty pennies for every form he moves up. I tell you, there is nothing like kindness. It takes a grandmother to handle a boy."

In utter astonishment, the superintendent replied:

"What, Felix in first place? That's some misunderstanding. So far as I know, Felix is in thirty-fourth place."

My grandmother rushed home and began to overwhelm me with reproaches. It happened that she had two bulldogs, one thirteen and the other fourteen years old. They suffered from asthma. The wheezing dogs started a commotion in the next room. That diverted her attention from me, and she bustled out to see what was the matter. When she returned, her flare of temper had subsided, and she merely said laconically and finally that she was through with me. "In you there is a devil," she cried.

She did not tell my father of the adventure, for fear it would make her ridiculous. All he knew was that, when Easter came, I was promoted on probation, with the accompanying suggestion that it would be best if I left school. So he sent me to a school in Halle, a city of Prussian Saxony, and engaged a private tutor to coach me in addition.

The end of my school days now came speedily. My father, perhaps taking a leaf out of my grandmother's book, resorted to a promise. If I were promoted, I would be allowed to visit my cousin, who lived on an estate in the country, a thing that I wanted very much to do. When the examinations came, my father was away. He had left me with the tutor, who was to permit me to depart for my cousin's estate if I gained the promotion. As usual I flunked the examination, and came home angry and sullen. The tutor met me, eagerly asking whether I had been promoted. I bit my lips and lied impudently. I said I had been promoted, but that the superintendent was away and had not been able to sign my report, which would be mailed later. The tutor, delighted that his coaching had been so successful, gave me immediate permission to leave for my cousin's.

I took my father's big boots, his water boots, his little coat, his trousers, his sport shoes. I was big for my thirteen and a half years, and they would fit me. My brother and I each had a savings bank. I had eighty marks in mine. He had one hundred and ten marks in his. I took my savings and forty marks of his. I would repay him later.

I was away. Where? If I had a devil in me, surely it must be a sea devil, because I now dreamed of nothing but the sea. I had promised my father to wear the Emperor's uniform with honour. I would not return home until I wore the Emperor's naval uniform, and with honour. I was firm in my decision about this.

I was all excited when I stepped off the train in Hamburg. Here was the great seaport town, and here was I, a lad going to sea. In the railroad station I saw a large sign advertising the Concordia Hotel with the prices of accommodations listed, from fifty to seventy-five pfennigs a cot. That seemed a little high to me, but never mind. A porter took my baggage. I was well dressed, and he treated me with a good deal of respect. When I directed him to the Concordia, he looked at me.

"So you are one of those fellows driving out to sea?" He changed instantly from polite German to common, vulgar, Low German in addressing me.

I had stumbled on the sailors' favourite hotel, but sailors didn't seem to be held in much respect by porters.

When I got to the Concordia, I soon discovered that sailors do not frequent palatial hostelries. It was a "rear house," situated in a back yard. Here in America you would call it a "sailors' flop." I asked the clerk for a cot, for seventy-five pfennigs. He showed me into a room where there were six cots. I remonstrated that, when I paid the highest rate, I didn't want to sleep in a room with five other people. He laughed and replied that if I was not satisfied with five companions he would give me a fifty-pfennig room with forty-nine companions. I chose the five.

My first evening I spent along the famous Hamburg water front, Sankt Pauli, known to sailors the world over. There was the gigantic "Vanity Fair," or White City with all its lights and excitement. Here I saw all manner of seafaring folk, from Malays to West Indians. In front of some of the amusement halls stood African Negroes in weird costumes.

At the shipyards, where I offered my services as a cabin boy, I was told that, since I was only thirteen and a half years old, they would have to have a written permission from my father before they could engage me. So I decided I had better address myself directly to captains aboard their ships. When I went to the part of the harbour where sailing ships rode at anchor, I found it an immense basin with a forest of masts, and the vessels moored at considerable distance offshore.

While gazing longingly at them and wondering what to do next, I came upon an old man and got into conversation with him. He was a salt-bitten tar. For thirty-five years he had sailed before the mast. Now, in his old age, he operated a little ferryboat. So I asked him to row me out to one of the ships. The old tar handled his jolly-boat with amazing skill. Never before had I seen anyone scull. As I gazed up at the lofty masts all around us, old Peter told me that sailors had to climb these in storms when it was impossible for a greenhorn to hold on.

I went aboard several ships, but the captains also insisted on my showing them permission from my father. After I had been turned down, old Peter saw that my spirits were at low ebb. When I admitted to him that I had run away from home, it seemed to touch the sympathy of the old wanderer. But when I told him my father was a landowner and a count, he looked at me in awe.

"A count? Why, that ranks next to a king!"

He could hardly get over it—a count's son running away to become a sailor before the mast! The tragedy of it made him take such an interest in me that we instantly became warm friends, and he asked me to come and share his humble quarters. From then on, for a week, I spent most of my time with old Peter Boemer.

"For thirty-five years, for my whole life," he pleaded in his broad Hamburg dialect, "I was a sailor. What have I now? All I am is captain of this little rowboat, carrying people for a few pfennings a trip. Go back to the Count, your father, and when he gives you a licking for this, thank him for every lick."

I must go home. He was certain of that. He must persuade me to go home. But the idea of notifying my parents never occurred to him. That would be squealing, and squealing is not a virtue among sailors. I saw him every day for a week, and notwithstanding all of his unanswerable arguments, still I refused to go home. At last he saw that it was hopeless to plead with me any longer, so he agreed to help me get on a ship without having any papers.

He got me a post as cabin boy aboard the Niobe, a craft the memory of which grows more vivid with the passing of the years. Then he insisted upon seeing to it that I was properly outfitted for the sea. Under his direction, I expended the last of my money for warm underclothing, oilskins, a sheath knife, tobacco, and a pipe. I was very proud of the pipe. He took me to his room high up in a dingy house on a dingy street. Suspended from the ceiling was a stuffed flying fish. On a wall hung the painting of a ship on sail canvas. I was filled with admiration when Peter told me he had painted it himself. In a cage was a parrot, as old and dishevelled as Peter. He had brought it from Brazil, and it spoke only Portuguese. On the bureau were Chinese curios and other souvenirs of long voyages.

"And this is my sea chest," he said, as he hauled forth an ancient weather-beaten but staunch box, and emptied out of it various examples of his own weaving and knitting.

"Every sailor needs a sea chest," he continued. "It is watertight and will float. For thirty-five years it travelled with me around the world. It is yours now, by Joe, and I hope it will serve you as well as it served me."

That old sea chest was destined to serve me well as long as I had it. I lost it when I ran away from the lighthouse at Cape Leeuwin, Australia.

He put me aboard the Niobe, that never-to-be-forgotten argosy, showed me to my bunk, and fixed my mattress and bolster.

"You are born a count"—he shook his head—"and you become a sailor. Count and sailor don't go together. It is like a Paris shoe on a Russian peasant's foot. You are Count Felix von Luckner no longer. You must change your name."

Then and there I rechristened myself, took the name of my mother's family, and called myself Phelax Luedige. Under that name I sailed the seas for seven years.

My last gift from old Peter was a motto. Putting his hands on my shoulders he said:

"My boy, always remember, one hand for yourself, and one for the ship."

By this he meant that, when aloft, I must hold on with one hand and work with the other. But the motto had a wider meaning than that. In every channel, sea, or backwater of life—one hand for yourself and one for the ship.

I stood at the rail while the tug towed the Niobe out of the harbour. Old Peter, with his marvellously skilful stroke, sculled alongside the slowly moving vessel all the way out past the piers of Sankt Pauli.

"My boy, God speed you," he shouted. "This is as far as I can go. I will never see you again. It's hard on old Peter to see you go away."

I wanted to shout something in return, but tears were streaming down my cheeks.

Peter had carefully packed my sea chest, and when I opened it I found his picture right under the lid. Across the bottom he had scrawled, "Don't forget your old Peter."

The low coast gradually melted into the haze. Years were to pass before I should return to my homeland and to the friend who had helped me get to sea.

III
SAVED BY AN ALBATROSS

The Russian full-rigged ship Niobe, bound for Fremantle, Australia, was an old craft, dirty and mean. I have seen many another like her, but she was a classic. Her captain, too, was something of a classic. When old Peter spoke to him about taking me, although I had no permission from my parents, he replied:

"I will take him provided he doesn't want any pay!"

I didn't want any pay, but should have preferred a more agreeable-looking shipmaster. He had a sour, sallow face with a long goatee, half Mephisto, half Napoleon III. He hated Germans.

I knew no Russian. The others knew no German, except the captain. He knew it brokenly, just enough to abuse me. The helmsman spoke a little English. I had learned a few words of English in school. I never did learn Russian. That language has always been a puzzle to me. During the long trip of eighty days on the Niobe I was among people whose talk between themselves, and nearly all of whose speech addressed to me, I couldn't understand.

I discovered the helmsman's knowledge of English the first day out. I was delighted to find that here was at least one sailor with whom I could converse. He asked me questions. What was my father?

"A farmer," I replied.

"Well, then," quoth he, "it will be just the right thing if I appoint you chief inspector."

That sounded important, and I walked a little stiffly as he led me down the deck. We came to a pig pen where there were half a dozen large and particularly filthy porkers. The chief inspector's office was that of cleaning the pig sty.

"And besides," the helmsman added cordially, "I will appoint you superintendent of the starboard and larboard pharmacies." I promptly discovered that in the language of the sea a pharmacy was a latrine.

In cleaning the sty, I was not allowed to let the pigs out. I had to go in there with them, and it was very narrow quarters. The unspeakably dirty animals rubbed against me constantly while I laboured with pail and brush. The sewage was so deep that it filled my shoes. I had only two pairs of trousers. Soap and water were not to be wasted. I grew filthier than the pigs. And then there were the "clinics."

Everyone kicked me because I looked like a pig and smelled like one. They called me "Pig." For food I had to go around and eat what the sailors left on their plates. They said that was the way pigs were fed. For breakfast, instead of coffee and rolls, there was vodka with stale bread to soak in it. I got the leavings of this. The salted meat, of which I got the scraps, was so strong that I could scarcely force it down my throat. I often thought of that bill of fare from the Fuerst Bismarck, which had lingered in my thoughts. I had made a mistake there, by Joe.

I was afraid of the masts. I dreaded the thought of going aloft. But I said to myself that I must get used to it. So I climbed desperately every day, a little higher, a little higher, always practising. Finally, one day, I got to the crow's nest, halfway to the top. I thought that was fine. I felt so proud I called down for the others to see where I was.

"Any old sea cook can get that far," the helmsman shouted back scornfully.

That hurt me and made me all the more determined to learn how to go aloft as the sailors did. I kept trying, and I watched the other apprentices skipping nimbly high up in the rigging.

We had a storm rounding the Cape of Good Hope, followed by a heavy swell. All the sails had been reefed except the storm sail, and we were ready to set the main topsail. Eager to show how much I had learned about going aloft, I climbed up to help unfurl the canvas. I forgot old Peter's advice: one hand for the ship, the other for yourself. The sail, filled with a sudden gust of wind, blew out like a balloon. I fell. I grabbed hold of the gasket, the rope that holds the sail to the yard, but it burned through my hands. I dropped ninety feet on to the braces, the ropes that hold the yard. If I had struck the deck, I would have been killed. At that moment the ship heaved with a swelling wave, and I was thrown out into the sea.

The Niobe was tearing along with a speed of eight knots. I came up astern. The wash in her wake swirled me around, but I could see a sailor throwing me a life preserver. I couldn't find it. The waves were too high. I sank, and when I came up I saw the ship a long, long distance away, it seemed. I threw off my heavy oilskins and sea boots, although there seemed little use trying to save myself by swimming. Even if they did put out a lifeboat, they would never be able to find me in that heavy sea.

Above me hovered several albatross, those huge white birds that seem to think everything floating is for them to eat. They swooped down upon me. I was ready to sink, but still had enough strength to fight at them, waving with one hand and then another. A great white form swooped down. A bird's talons seized a human hand. And I in turn clutched at it. A drowning man grasps a straw, even a bird. The albatross beat the air with its wings, frantically trying to rise. I still kept my grip on its claw. The huge bird was keeping me afloat. Then the albatross began to strike at my hand with its beak. It hurt and wounded me badly. I have the scars on my hand to this day. Still I held on.

"Phelax," I said to myself, "you will never get back to your ship, but maybe another ship will find you if you don't let go."

The other albatross were flying above, circling around, watching the strange proceedings.

It seemed to me as though my hand had been torn away by the repeated striking of that beak. Then, all at once, a swell lifted me high above the other waves, and I saw a lifeboat coming. I let go of the albatross, and he was glad to get away, by Joe. He shot up into the air to join his companions. That bird had saved my life, and so had his friends. The sailors could never have found me had they not seen those birds hovering above me. They knew that I must be swimming there.

In the boat I said to myself that I supposed the captain would be happy to see me back again. When we came alongside, he stood up there above, pointing down at me.

"You, you ——! Come up here! I wish to —— you had stayed out there and that we were rid of you! Look, my sails are blown away, blown away."

In the commotion caused by my going overboard, he had lost two sails. I sat down there in the little boat with the blood flowing out of my hand and trembling. The sea was high, and the lifeboat danced up and down while the sailors made vain efforts to swing it over the davits. In a wild toss the boat rose as high as the ship's gunwales. I was so excited that I made a crazy jump, hit the deck, and was knocked unconscious.

A moment later, the boat was smashed against the ship's side. The sailors were pitched into the water, nine of them. For a while, it seemed that some of them would drown, and it was only after a struggle that the last of them managed to catch a rope and clamber on deck.

I lay stunned. The captain leaned over me and shouted in my face.

"You German dogs like to guzzle. Wake up and take some of this!"

He put the neck of a vodka bottle in my mouth and let the liquid fire trickle down my throat. Next day I was too sick to stand on my feet. The captain ordered me out of my bunk and to work. I tried but couldn't get up. Then he beat me, saying I was a drunken loafer.

Later I learned that when I had fallen overboard the quartermaster immediately called for volunteers to man the lifeboat. The captain, who had never dreamed of sending help to me, shouted to him, shaking a harpoon:

"If you lower the boat, you will get this harpoon in your belly."

As a matter of fact, they were not obliged to send a boat for me. A captain need not attempt the rescue of a man overboard if it is liable to endanger the lives of others of his crew.

The quartermaster, however, calmly walked away, got his volunteers, lowered the boat, went after me, and left the captain in a towering rage.

The shock of that experience brought on a sort of nervous spasm which made my hands shake. I was like that for four years, and even to-day I sometimes have nightmares and dream of falling from a mast, of the albatross, of the captain and the vodka.

I lay in my bunk and thought it over. I had been Count Felix von Luckner, of a titled, landowning family, descendant of a long line of military officers and of an illustrious Marshal of France. Now I was a mere cleaner of the pig sties and the latrines, fed like a pig on scraps left by others, cursed and beaten and considered by the captain to be carrion not worth saving from the sea. I said to myself:

"You put yourself in this fix, by Joe, and you've got to take your humiliation and punishment like a man."

So this was the life at sea? Certainly, it was not what I had expected. I wondered if I had made a mistake. Well, mistake or no mistake, I had promised my father to wear the Emperor's uniform with honour, and I would not go home until I wore the Emperor's naval uniform with honour. But how far away from me now seemed epaulettes and gold braid.

The Niobe did not put in at a single port on our way out. After we passed through the English Channel, until we reached Western Australia, we saw nothing save sky and sea, the sky light or dark, the sea in quiet or in storm. In fact, we only came in sight of land once. This was when we sighted an island somewhere off the African coast. I could see palms, rows of palms, and white houses with red roofs and green shutters. I stood at the rail and gazed. What joy it must be to walk and breathe on that green island. It seemed an abode of all happy things. I was sure that living there must be a fairy princess. I was very much of a boy, and I had been reared on German stories. I was wretched, and yonder was a land so fair. It must be the haunt of a fairy princess. I stood with my elbows on the rail and my chin on my hands and dreamed of her.

Singular that I should have then thought of a fairy princess. A few years later, I visited that same isle. By then I had become a naval officer of the Kaiser. I wandered all through its palm groves, remembering how once I had sailed past it, the miserable cabin boy of the Niobe, and had had visions of a fairy. This time I did indeed find a fairy princess there, and promptly lost my heart to her. We became engaged, and a little later she became the guardian angel of the raider in which I sailed the seas. She was a visitor on the isle, and her name was Irma.

But my fairy princess was only a wild fancy as I stood at the rail of the Niobe. The dreamy bit of land with its graceful palms and pretty houses grew small in the distance as the wind bellied out the mainsail and swept us on toward Cape Verde. Finally, I was left gazing at a speck that vanished on the horizon. And still I remained motionless and in my trance, until a howl cracked my ears and a kick nearly split me in two.

"Get along there, you loafer," roared the captain.

But the latter part of the voyage was not so bad as the first. I was getting used to mistreatment, and was rapidly developing into a hardened seaman. The captain remained brutal, and so did most of the men, but there were several who grew kind toward me, among them the boatswain and the helmsman. So I began to experience some of that comradeship of the sea for which a sailor will endure many a hardship.

Finally, after eighty days at sea without touching at a single port, we sailed into the harbour at Fremantle. I had always thought of Australia as a land of kangaroos, of black aborigines with bows and arrows, and of bushrangers. But Fremantle turned out to be as commonplace and bleak a port as you could hope to see. However, I met some sailors off a German ship, and the sound of my native language and association with my countrymen made me happy. They took me to the Hotel Royal. They went there to drink beer and I to share their company. But the proprietor had a daughter, and I transferred my interest to her. She was what you call a bonnie lassie, and she listened to my chatter. After I told her my story, she urged me to desert from my ship. She even talked to her father about me and got him to take me on as a dishwasher. That was all right. Dish-washing had been perhaps the most elegant of all the jobs assigned to me on the Niobe. But I could not abandon old Peter's sea chest. So the German sailors helped me to smuggle it off the ship. The Niobe sailed presently. Luckily, the captain did not ask the police to find me, as he had a right to do. Maybe he considered himself lucky to get rid of me.

IV
SALVATION, KANGAROOS, AND FAKIRS IN AUSTRALIA

About the only amusement I could find in Fremantle was listening to the Salvation Army band. They had a hall where they had preaching and where bums and sailors stood up and told lurid tales of their experiences. Then they all sang songs. It was the songs I liked. I couldn't tell much about the words, but the tunes were lively and the big drum fascinated me. This music was altogether different from the music back home in our churches at Dresden. But what interested me most of all was that this Salvation Army post had a gramophone. I had never seen one before. I had come to Australia expecting to find a wilderness of kangaroos and savages, and here was this marvellous product of civilization.

"By Joe, Felix," I said to myself, "everything in the world is different from what you thought."

I couldn't shake off the notion that this gramophone was a hoax. I thought somebody hidden must be talking into that horn. I could not get near enough to investigate. The place was always crowded, and only those who "got religion" were allowed up front. So I persuaded a friend of mine from a German boat to keep me company, and we went up at a big meeting and offered ourselves for salvation. We gave testimony of our past sins and told what bad sailor lads we had been, and then we signed a pledge never to touch strong drink.

The gramophone was O.K., I found, and that made the Salvation Army O.K. with me. I became enthusiastic, somehow, or other, with the songs and excitement. I actually "got religion." I joined up, and they gave me a job putting moth balls in clothing donated by charitable people. At any rate, I no longer had to wash dishes, and here was an army in which I might become a lieutenant. I remembered how my father had wanted me to become a lieutenant in the German Army. Why not become a lieutenant in the Salvation Army instead? I used to daydream and build castles in the air like this while placing those moth balls in the piles of old clothes.

Since I was converted and saved and stood on holy ground, I felt I should tell the whole truth. So, one night at a meeting, I got up and testified and told my fellow soldiers of the Salvation Army that my right name was Count Felix von Luckner. That made a sensation. They immediately used me for advertisement. 'Halleluiah! We have saved a German count from perdition," they announced. "Before he came here he drank whisky like a fish. Now he is a teetotaller."

Well, by Joe, people came from all over town to see the reformed count.

They put me in a uniform and sent me out to sell the War Cry. I sold a lot. People didn't mind buying the War Cry from a count. I thought I could become a captain. It was no trouble to leave whisky alone, because I had never tasted it in my life. But I did like lemonade and ginger ale, especially ginger ale, which I thought contained alcohol because they offered it to me in the bars where I sold the War Cry and because it tasted so delicious. I thought I was putting something over. They got on to it in the saloons and had their joke with me.

"Count, have a ginger ale," they would call whenever they saw me, and I would wink and drink it down. I thought they were laughing because I had put one over, and I laughed too.

I got tired of it. I got tired of everything except the sea. I was a sailor, I reasoned, and the only lieutenant I could ever be was a naval lieutenant and the only kind of captain a ship captain. The Salvation Army people were very good to me. They said I was too young to be a sailor, but that they would get me a job somewhere near the sea. So they found me a job in a lighthouse. It was almost like being at sea, they told me. All day I could look out and see fair weather or storms with ships sailing at peace or rolling and heaving.

I became assistant to the lighthouse keeper of the Cape Leeuwin Beacon, which is south of Fremantle and the biggest light on the southwest Australian coast. "Assistant"—what a fine title! And "beacon," a word that meant everything to the ships driven by the fury of the storm. Wasn't I a sailor who knew all about that from experience? Well, they put me to cleaning the "windows"—that is, the lenses. The thousands of prisms of the reflector astonished me not a little. Each day I wound up the weights for the revolving apparatus. The rest of the time, when I was not sleeping, I kept watch. There were three other lighthouse keepers, who lived in little houses on the cliff. They passed the days playing cards and fishing. They had pushed all of their duties on to me. For doing their work I got ninepence a day!

The daughter of one of the lighthouse keepers was named Eva. She was pretty and very charming. One day I kissed her. It was an innocent kiss, but we were in a bad place, a room with a locked door, but which was open on the side of the sea and looked down on the beach. One of the men was fishing there and saw us. He hurried to Eva's father. Soon there was a cursing and knocking at the locked door. We were terrified. The threats and banging grew more violent. I threw the door open, dashed out and away, frightened half out of my wits.

I left behind me all my belongings. That was how I lost the sea chest that old Peter had given me. It was too bad. Late that night I sneaked back and made off with one of the horses. It was worth about thirty shillings, which I figured was about the value of the luggage I had to abandon.

I rode to Port Augusta, and for a time worked in a sawmill. The work was frightfully hard. The pay seemed good, thirty shillings a day, but the cost of living was so high—one had even to pay for water—that it left only a few shillings out of a day's pay. The work was lucrative only for Chinese coolies, with their low standards of living. I was able to save sixty shillings and then couldn't stand it any longer.

One day I met a Norwegian hunter who had been shooting kangaroos and wallabies and selling their skins. I gave him my money, and my watch that I had brought from Germany, and he gave me his rifle. Then I went into the forest and became a hunter, or at least tried to. After a month, the solitude got on my nerves, and I left the kangaroos in full possession of their native bush.

In Port Augusta I watched a steamer discharge its passengers.

"Oh," I said, "what kind of a crowd is that?"

They were a troupe of Hindu fakirs. Unable to withhold my curiosity, I went up and talked to them. When they learned that I was a sailor, they said I was exactly the man they needed for pitching their large tents, currying the horses, and distributing advertisements, and the like. They explained that their trade was similar to mine, since they were always on the move, only they travelled on land.

They had with them several dark-eyed Hindu girls who looked bewitching. I joined the fakirs.

We travelled from one end of Australia to the other. I pitched their tents and booths in public places. Handling the canvas did remind me a little of my work as a sailor. In Fremantle, when I went around passing out handbills, I heard on all sides:

"Hello, Count. No more Salvation Army, eh? Have a ginger ale."

I found the ginger ale as good as ever.

The fakirs made a mango tree grow before your very eyes. It is one of the classic tricks of India. It was my task after the show was over to clear the place where the tree had miraculously grown. I could never find any sign of preparation. A bowl of water would be brought in and shown to the spectators. The fakir would sit down in such a way as to hide it from the audience. In a little while he would step aside and the bowl would be filled with live goldfish. I could never discover any mechanism for this. A fakir would say to a spectator:

"That is a valuable ring you have on your finger. You must not lose it, But, look, you have lost it already. I have it on my finger."

And, indeed, he would have it on his finger.

There was a little Malayan girl with whom I flirted, thinking I could learn the secret of the tricks from her. At first she was very shy, but then became more friendly. She did tell me how some of the magic was done, but only some of the minor effects. I learned them quite well, and to this day can perform them. The major spectacles, she, herself, thought were miracles. It seems to me impossible for any European ever to learn the more important secrets of these sorcerers. The old masters, accustomed to be worshipped as beings endowed with supernatural powers, hold themselves inaccessible. The two chief fakirs of our company, with their long beards and a poise made perfect by lifelong training of the will, made a sublime picture.

One Sunday morning I sat on the beach washing my clothes. Three men came up, stopped and gazed at me. They looked me over as though I were beef on the hoof. I have always been big-framed and powerfully muscled, with an arm like iron, and shoulders as wide as a barn door, bulging with sinews.

"How old are you, boy?"

I replied that I was nearly sixteen.

"How would you like to learn boxing?"

"Very much," I replied, "because if I knew how to spar, I would be less likely to get a thrashing."

They took me to a school of boxing, where I was submitted to another examination. They gave me six pounds sterling and agreed to train me for the prize ring. In return, I was to box for Queensland, exclusively.

That began a strenuous time for me. I was put to work with all kinds of gymnastic apparatus to harden my body, particularly chest and stomach, to resist blows. I went through three months of that kind of training before I was allowed to try a boxing pass. Then I practised sparring with an experienced boxer. I was told that, after I had progressed far enough, I would be sent to San Francisco for additional training and would make my debut there as "the Prize Boxer of Queensland." It all looked very rosy. I liked boxing and do to this day.

An American craft was in port, the Golden Shore a four-masted schooner plying between Queensland and Honolulu. She was later put on the San Francisco-Vancouver-Honolulu run. They needed hands and offered to take me as an able-bodied seaman at the excellent pay of forty-five dollars a month. From cabin boy to able-bodied seaman in one jump—that was an inducement, by Joe. The usual line of succession is: cabin boy, yeoman, 'prentice seaman, able-bodied seaman. I guess I was made to be a sailor, because that promotion looked bigger than anything else in the world. I quit my boxing and shipped aboard the Golden Shore.

In Honolulu I came upon a mystery, a fantastic mystery. It sounds unbelievable. I, myself, cannot explain it. Someday I hope to meet someone who can. One of the cabin boys aboard the Golden Shore was a German named Nauke. He was a violin maker by trade who had lost all his money and put to sea. We became fast friends. At Honolulu, Nauke invited me to go ashore with him. He brought along a can of condensed milk, a delicacy he knew I liked. We went sightseeing, and one of the sights was that of royalty. We stood outside of the palace grounds and watched the Hawaiian potentate while he had tea. He sat in a reed chair, and a couple of his wives stood beside him. A well-dressed gentleman who seemed to be on a stroll came up to us and began to talk to us in English.

"Don't waste your time on anything like that," he said. "Why not see the hula-hula dance?"

Nauke and I said all right, because the hula-hula was just what we did want to see.

The gentleman asked whether we had any better clothes to wear, to which we responded that we had not.

"It doesn't matter," he said, "I will provide you with a suit each."

He took us to a carriage drawn by four mules, and we all got in. I remarked to Nauke that the gentleman seemed to be a man of means. The gentleman turned his head.

"You mustn't talk so much," he said in German.

We came to the sugar plantations outside the town. The carriage stopped. Our host led us to a field path, until finally we came to a European house that had an air of distinction. Young colts grazed within a fence. Through the large windows of the stately villa I saw a row of large black tables such as are used in Germany, in a lecture room. Our host told Nauke to wait outside, and got a piece of cake for him. I whispered to Nauke not to go away.

I felt very strange on entering the house. The man showed me into a room next to the hall with the many tables. He was about to lock the door. I asked him not to. In the room was a long black table like those I had seen in the other room. The man said he was going upstairs to get a measuring tape. While he was gone, I noticed that under the table were two long narrow boxes with heavy locks on both sides. What if I should end in one of those boxes! But I was confident. What had I learned boxing for?

The stranger returned with a tape. He measured my arm. Unlike a tailor, he measured from wrist to shoulder instead of from shoulder to wrist.

"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.

I gave the Pinmore a willing farewell, hoping never to see her again. Strange how coincidence turns. I did see her again, a long time later, from the deck of my raider Seeadler.

V
WRESTLING CHAMPION OF SANKT PAULI

When a German sailor came back from a cruise with a bit of money burning holes in his pockets, Hamburg and the bright lights of Sankt Pauli were his goal. When I left the Pinmore, I had a thousand marks in my jeans. This was a new thrill, and I had it all changed into silver, so that I could feast my eyes on it. Proudly I strutted down Sankt Pauli water front, a full-fledged sailor, back from his first cruise around the world. I swaggered like a veteran old salt. But my thoughts were not of the gay amusement parlours of Sankt Pauli. There was another mission that had brought me to Hamburg.

I went to the old house at the Brauerknechtergraben and climbed the creaking stairs. The name Peter Breumer was still on the door. A broken old woman answered my knock and ushered me in. From the roof hung the flying fish. On the wall was the painting of the ship. The ragged parrot was in its cage.

"Peter? He is dead. I live here now. I am his sister."

"Peter dead?"

"Yes, three years ago. And that's you, his boy, whom he helped to go to sea. How often he said: 'Where may the boy be now?' But Peter is gone."

I went to his grave at Ohlsdorf. It was shabby. I got a big iron anchor and had a brass plate fixed on it with the engraving: "I did not forget you.—Your boy." Then I placed it on Peter's grave, a fitting monument for a sailor.

Since the raids of the Seeadler the grave of old Peter has become a kind of shrine where people visit, especially German children.

It was in December, and the festival called the Hamburg Dom was being held. In Sankt Pauli were many diversions and shows. In one show, Lipstulian the wrestler held forth. Fifty marks were offered to anyone who could throw him. My pals said: "Go up there, Phelax. You can beat him."

I said no. I had no desire to make myself conspicuous. On the platform the wrestler drew himself up in his tights and taunted me.

"My lad, you had better bring along a bag in which to carry home your bones."

I considered this an insult, and climbed on to the stand. The barker outside shouted.

"Step inside, ladies and gentlemen. We have found a sucker who is going to get his bones crushed."

Lipstulian paced the platform like a prize steer. I gave my purse to our sailmaker to hold. Attendants escorted me to a little booth, where they dressed me in a red and white shirt and pants and a belt. When I stepped on to the platform Lipstulian looked at my bare arms and became pensive.

It was not real wrestling, but merely a test of raw strength. Lipstulian tried to jerk me to him and tip me over before the signal had been given. That made me angry. I seized him, but could not lift him. The sailors howled encouragement to me. One of my shipmates offered me an additional fifty marks if I downed him. On the third attempt I lifted him. He tried to support his foot against a tent pole, but slipped. I threw him to the floor.

The barker howled that I had not put the champion on his back. That found little favour with the audience. There was a tremendous din. The sailors were ready for trouble. The manager paid me in silver. He gave me, however, twenty instead of the promised fifty marks. I did not protest. I felt good-natured. My shipmates were hoisting me on their shoulders. They carried me to the nearest saloon, where, as the victor, I treated the crowd again and again.

My shipmates took me to a photographer, where they had a picture made of me in wrestling togs with the inscription on it—the Champion Wrestler of Sankt Pauli. By Joe, but I was proud of that picture. It was a visible indication that I had been somebody.

That night I sat looking at it. I had often wanted to write to my parents. They must think me dead by now. I was ashamed to have them hear from me as a nobody. But now ... I looked at the picture again. On the back of that formidable representation of the Champion Wrestler of Sankt Pauli I wrote: "To my dear father for remembrance, from his faithful son Felix, 1902." I addressed an envelope.

Then my courage left me. The difference between that photograph and our life at home, between the "Champion Wrestler of Sankt Pauli" and the stately, severe Count Heinrich von Luckner, my father, came vividly upon me and made my heart sink. I put the picture back in my sea chest.

The remembrance came back to me how my father expected me to become an officer in the Imperial Service, and how I had vowed that I would never go back until I was a naval officer in the Imperial Service. Let them think me dead until I was able to go home clad in the Imperial naval uniform.

When I did return home as a naval officer, I jokingly showed my father the photograph of the Champion Wrestler of Sankt Pauli. He took it from me and for years carried it proudly in his wallet.

VI
THE TRAGIC CRUISE OF THE CÆSAREA

By Joe, I've got a real sea yarn to tell you now. Wait a minute till I light my pipe, and I'll tell you about the voyage of the Cæsarea.

She was my first German ship. With a cargo bound for Melbourne, we set sail from Hamburg. My friend Nauke was aboard, and again we were comrades. The captain was a clever sailor, but an old skinflint. The cook, who on German ships is called "Smutje"—smudgy, smutty—was a good fellow, but was keen to please the miserly captain. Together, they did wonders in skimping our food. On Monday we got peas, on Tuesday beans, on Wednesday, for a change, yellow peas, on Thursday brown beans, on Friday "blue Henry," which looked like coffee beans, but smaller, on Saturday corned beef (bully beef), and on Sunday, as a Sabbatical delicacy, we got a special dish called "plum and dumplings." The fare never changed, and we were always hungry. Very good, Smutje, you were an excellent fellow at heart, but that penny-squeezing captain made a son-of-a-gun of a sea cook out of you, and you are the hero of this tale.

One day I was sitting on a topyard. I could hear Smutje down in the galley whistling "My Heart Is Like a Beehive," which was a song hit of those days. I whistled along with him. My heart was like a bee-hive, and girls were the bees and one of them was the queen bee. I could see her floating in front of me. Yes, it was the same fairy princess of my dreams whom I had seen in imagination from the deck of the Niobe on that first voyage when we sighted the Isle of Fuerteventura in the Canaries. My fairy princess lived on that distant tropic island of waving palms and white houses. So I whistled as loud as I could the same tune that Smutje was whistling, "My Heart Is Like a Beehive."

"What is that?"

I couldn't trust my eyes. I saw two arms thrust from the galley. They supported a big tray, which they thrust on to the skylight of the galley. The tray was heaped with a big stack of pancakes. What? A thousand miles out at sea, and pancakes fresh and warm?

I slid down the rope, and tiptoed to the galley. I took that stack of pancakes from the plate and slipped them inside my shirt, against my breast. Then I climbed to the yardarm again. Whew! By Joe, those pancakes were hot! They were burning into my flesh. When I was halfway up the mast I thought I should fall down, but I kept saying over and over, "Phelax, you are a sailor now, and a sailor never winces." When I was aloft I laid the pancakes on the yard, and ate them as fast as I could. There were fourteen of those pancakes.

Smutje was still whistling. "Ah, but just wait, you old sea cook, and see what kind of a beehive your heart is in a few minutes!"

Two arms were thrust out of the galley, and very carefully, so the flapjacks might not slide off, the empty platter was lowered. Next a long shrill whistle and then a smothered cry:

"My flap jacks!"

Smutje came climbing to the roof of the galley, thinking that perhaps with the rolling of the ship the flapjacks had slid off the plate. Then he roared, cursing:

"Damned pack of thieves."

I called down from aloft.

"Who is a thief, Smutje?'

"Not you," he replied, "because you are working up there. But did you see anybody take my flapjacks?"

"No, I haven't been looking that way, Smutje."

I slid down to talk with him, still amazed at the phenomenon of encountering fresh, hot—very hot—flapjacks on the high seas.

"What was that you were talking about, Smutje? Flapjacks, how can that be?"

"I will tell you, Phelax. You are the only honest fellow aboard."

"I know that, but go ahead."

"It is the captain's birthday to-day, Phelax. Nobody aboard can make him a present except me. I fixed fourteen flapjacks for him. Is that too much for the captain's birthday?"

"No, Smutje, it is not too much."

"And a delicious cranberry jelly to go with them."

"Cranberry jelly, Smutje?"

"Yes; a fine cranberry compote. Now, by Joe, Phelax, you know I am a good fellow. I would say nothing if some son-of-a-gun stole one flapjack, but, by Joe, I say the one who took the whole fourteen is a son-of-a-gun, by Joe."

"I agree with your opinion, Smutje, he is a son-of-a-gun, by Joe."

"You are an honest fellow, Phelax, and I always give you the best. That cranberry compote is no use to me now, anyway. You can eat it because you are honest and because you will help me to find the thief."

The compote was just what I needed, what I had missed. It should have been spread between the pancakes, but still it was going to the same place.

"How can I catch the thief, Smutje?"

"Watch to-night, and see who eats the least peas."

"All right, Smutje, I will watch."

"Be sure to catch him, Phelax, and now, because you are honest, here is the cranberry compote."

It was delicious.

That night I reported to Smutje that each of the other men had eaten approximately an equal amount of peas. It was not part of the bargain to report that I had scarcely eaten any. I promised to continue the hunt for the culprit, and Smutje was confirmed in his opinion that I was the only honest man aboard.

The Cæsarea docked in Melbourne, and there an important event occurred. The captain invited the German consul to dinner, and then took counsel with Smutje.

"We must have something good when the consul comes."

Smutje immediately fell in with the suggestion and replied: "Yes, on such an occasion nothing is too good."

The captain restrained his enthusiasm.

"But there must not be too much expense."

"No, certainly not. Let us have ducks. That is something good and does not cost much around here."

I heard the captain inviting the first mate to his table.

"But don't forget to put on a white collar, Mate. It is the consul who is coming."

"Thank you, sir, thank you." And the first mate grinned all over his face.

Then the captain tackled the second mate.

"I invite you to supper to-night at eight bells. The consul is coming."

"Thank you, sir, thank you." The second mate wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

It was on a Saturday. I sat near the porthole of the galley, patching my trousers and very busy at it. All the while I kept an eye on Smutje preparing the ducks. They were roasted, stuffed with prunes and apples, and I do love them that way. I was waiting for the moment when Smutje would go aft to get something.

I didn't see the captain. He was sitting on the bridge reading his newspaper, apparently. He had made a hole in the middle of the page, through which he looked down into the open door of the galley and kept his eye on the ducks. At first he did not see me. The mast was in the way. Then he happened to lean to one side, and caught sight of me near the porthole industriously mending my trousers.

Suddenly, a marlinespike came flying past me.

"You loafer, by Joe. What are you sniffing around the galley for? And so you brought your pants along for wrapping purposes!"

I promptly moved on.

At night the consul came. The captain and the mates were all dolled up. They had even cleaned their finger nails. In the cabin the consul was the only one who was given a napkin. On the skylight sat Nauke and I. We watched the ducks on the table. We had brought along a boat hook, waiting for the moment when the consul should leave.

The consul ate well, but the captain seemed to have very little appetite. He took only one small helping of the duck. The two mates held back out of politeness. It would have been bad manners for them to eat more than the captain.

When the duck course was done the captain would not let the birds be taken away, but kept them in his sight. When the consul left, the captain had to escort him to the gangway, but he ushered the mates out first, so that they would not have a chance to snatch a drumstick, and, before he left the cabin, he had Smutje take the ducks away to the pantry. Nauke and I watched all this from the skylight. There was no chance for us to use our boathook.

The pantry, however, could be reached from the bull's-eye. We waited till Smutje had gone to his bunk, and then stole our way to the bull's-eye. I reached in. Good luck. The pantry was open. Smutje must have forgotten to close it. The unfortunate part of it, however, was that it was the captain who had left the pantry door open. He had stolen down to have his fill of ducks, and at this moment was sitting at a table with a bird before him. His back was turned to the pantry.

I fished around and first got a big handful of plum and apple stuffing, which I put in my pants pocket for safe keeping. I was very quiet about it, and the captain heard nothing. I felt around again, and found a whole, fine bird. It must have been my excitement and delight which caused me to make a slight noise. The captain looked around and saw the magnificent fowl suspended in midair and going away. With half a drumstick in his mouth he yelled:

"My bird!"

Then he jumped, and grabbed my arm just as it was disappearing.

"Let go that bird," he howled, twisting my arm.

I let the bird go, and kept silent in spite of the pain, hoping that he would let me go without learning who I was. He reached for a rope and spliced my arm to the brass handle of the drawer. Nauke reached into my pants pocket and took out the stuffing to save it from destruction during the coming licking.

The captain came out.

"Oh, it's you, Phelax. You don't like ducks, do you? But you like the rope's end."

With that, he gave me an awful beating with a rope's end. I howled, by Joe.

Limping and sore, I went forward to get my share of the stuffing from Nauke. He had eaten it all. That made me so angry that, in spite of my soreness, I passed a good share of my licking on to him. Smutje shook his head and remarked sadly that the society of thieves had corrupted the only honest fellow aboard.

We took on a supply of sausages made out of pemmican that were to be sewn up in canvas and whitewashed so they would keep. For this work younger seamen are used, they being considered more honest and unspoiled than the older hands. I was not in line for the job. However, we slipped appropriate advice to the yeomen on the sly. Broomsticks were cut up in lengths a trifle shorter than the sausages. The two ends of sausages were cut off and spliced to the ends of the pieces of broomstick. The dummies were then tied up in sail cloth in such a way that the ends could be inspected. After this they were whitewashed. When the captain carefully counted the one hundred and sixty sausages and inspected the unmistakable sausage ends of each one, he said: "Thank God, boys, that you are still honest."

Later on he stormed and raged when he had to revise this good opinion.