Part 11

But that smell, by Joe! The unexpected always happens to mar the best-laid plans--and help the worst. We had been running our motor full open. Because of the cargo of wood that sealed the deck, there had not been enough ventilation to get rid of the fumes. The characteristic reek of crude oil burning in a Diesel engine seeped up through the secret entrances placed in my cabin, and everything smelled of it. What will the search officer think when he smells a Diesel engine aboard a sailing ship? No use to burn punk or sprinkle eau de cologne.

"Stuff a rug in the chimney of the kerosene stove," I yelled, "and turn up the wicks of the oil lamps as high as you can."

Stench against stench, kerosene smoke against the fumes of the motor. In five minutes my cabin smelled to high heaven of kerosene smoke.

The Britisher had hove to now, and we saw that she was the _Avenger_, an armed merchant cruiser of some 15,000 tons.

"How's that?" I thought. "Why are the guns pointing? We are a peaceable Norwegian sailing ship. Why the guns?"

She had her big guns trained on us, and her officers were on the bridge looking us over with their glasses.

"Can we have been betrayed?" I asked myself. "Of what use is the best mask, of what use are the best men, if a traitor has done his dirty work?"

The thought of treachery always makes the fighting man tremble. I went into my cabin, and like the drowning man who grasps at a straw, I remembered how before leaving port a friend gave me a parcel, saying:

"My boy, take this package with you. But never open it unless you are in a tight fix. Then it may save you."

Well, we were in a tight fix all right, so I opened the package. I took off one wrapper after another. Ah! It was a bottle of rare old Napoleon brandy, almost priceless, made more than a hundred years ago.

"What was good for Napoleon ought to be good for me. He fought against the British, too. Maybe this is just what we need."

I took sixteen or eighteen swallows, and with each gulp felt my cares getting lighter and lighter. Never did I thank God so much that I am not a teetotaller.

The cruiser had put out a small boat. Two officers and sixteen sailors were rowing toward us. We must receive them cordially, I thought. Going to the gramophone I put on, "It's a Long Way to Tipperary." That will make the officers feel good. I also told the cook to stand in the door of the galley with a bottle of whisky in his hand. I know the British! I know what they like, and I guessed that while the officer proceeded with his job, his jack-tars would go poking about to see if they might find anything suspicious. I also suspected that they would go to the galley and sing out:

"'I there, Cookie, got any grog?"

Always give a British sailor a drink, or a German sailor, or an American sailor, or any kind of a sailor, for that matter.

The boat was alongside. I began to swear at my men. It was hard for them to forget their naval habits, and, with an officer coming aboard, they were standing as stiffly as if at attention.

"Take the line, by Joe. Give a hand, by Joe. Don't stand there like wooden men, by Joe."

Then, too, it would sound natural to hear a Norwegian skipper swearing at his men.

The search officer clambered aboard.

"Merry Christmas, Captain."

"Merry Christmas, Mister Officer," I replied, using the kind of broken English I thought a Norwegian skipper would use. I talk English with an accent, luckily about the same brand you would hear in a Scandinavian port. "But," I continued, "if you want to see what kind of Christmas we have had come along down to my cabin."

"A bit of a nasty blow this past week, eh, what!" agreed the officer, "and from the look of your deck you've had more than your share of it. We went in behind the islands and waited for her to blow over."

"Yes, luckily for us," I thought to myself.

"I must see your papers, Captain." He got right down to business. Just then the gramophone struck up "Tipperary," and he began to whistle the tune while his men made for the galley. I ushered the two officers to the cabin. The one who stuck his head in first retreated holding his nose.

"What a hell of a smell!"

"Excuse me, Mister Officer, but my stove is out of order. I could not know you gentlemen were giving me a visit to-day."

"Oh, never mind, Captain, that's all right, that's all right."

I had purposely hung my underwear up to dry so it would be in their way and so that, in stooping to get under it, they would see the name "Knudsen" embroidered on it. As the chief search officer crossed the cabin he suddenly saw my charming wife Josephine, with her blonde wig, her swollen jaw, and the rug hiding her big feet.

"Oh, excuse me."

"That is my wife, Mister Officer. She has been having a bad go with the toothache."

He was chivalrous, just as most Englishmen are. He might have been talking to a court lady, instead of that rascal Schmidt.

"Sorry, madam, to intrude like this, but we must do our duty."

"All right!" said my lovely but somewhat distorted better half in a high falsetto voice out of one corner of her mouth.

"By Joe, Captain, you haven't much cabin left, have you? You have been through some rough weather!"

"I wouldn't mind the rest, Mister Officer, but look at my papers. They are soaked, too."

"I can understand that, after the weather you've had."

"Yes, Mister Officer, it's all right for you to see them in this condition, because you saw the storm yourself, but later, if I meet some of your comrades who didn't hit the blow that we had, they may not take my word for it. That's what's worrying me."

"Oh, don't worry, Captain, I'll give you a memorandum explaining the condition of your papers. You are lucky to have saved your ship."

That memorandum was just what I wanted. There was no telling when we might be searched again.

I had the papers scattered all over the cabin to dry, and each time I handed one to him I spat a stream of tobacco juice on the cabin floor. He examined the papers with a practised eye and made entries in his notebook. Each page in his book was for a ship, and I could see that thirty or forty pages had been used already. Yes, he was an experienced officer.

When he came to the last document, the one signed with the false signature of the British Consul at Copenhagen and sealed with a false British Imperial seal, and read the formal statement that the _Irma's_ cargo of lumber was destined for the use of the British government in Australia, he turned to me suddenly.

"These papers are all right, Captain."

In the excitement of the moment I suddenly swallowed my chew of tobacco. I was afraid this might give our whole sham away. So I coughed and coughed as though with a bad cold, trying to cover up what had happened. What would a British search officer think if a Norwegian skipper got seasick? My mate Leudemann was standing next to me holding the log book. I had told him to have it ready in case the Britisher should want to examine it. Leudemann saw there was something wrong with me, and was quick-witted enough to divert the search officer's attention, by handing him the book.

"Oh, yes, the log," exclaimed the officer, and opened the wet pages.

The quid of tobacco seemed to be moving up and down my gullet. I struggled with myself, and to show an outward calm I said to Leudemann in Norwegian:

"I wish I'd had that officer's camel's hair cape and hood. It would have been fine to keep a fellow warm while up there north of the Circle."

"For rain and spray, too." The Englishman spoke up in Norwegian to show that he knew the language.

You must admire how careful those English are. The officer examined every page of the log.

"How is this, Captain?" he exclaimed. "You were laid up three weeks and a half?"

There was a discrepancy in dates which represented our wait after the Admiralty had ordered us not to sail because of the return of the submarine, _Deutschland_, and the consequent increased vigilance of the blockade. I had not thought of it. Here was the one detail that we had neglected to provide for in our elaborately detailed preparations. Even if I had been in the best of health, I should not have known what to reply. With that tobacco quid running around inside of my body I could only pray to God for help.

Again Leudemann saved the situation. He was a little fellow and simple-hearted, but a great character. When bad times came, Leudemann was at his best.

"We didn't lie there for pleasure," he said in his dry way as he looked up at the big Englishman. "We had orders from our owner not to sail until we got word."

"How so?"

"Haven't you been warned then about German cruisers?"

"What's that?"

"Haven't you heard about the _Moewe_ and the auxiliary cruiser, _Seeadler_?"

The search officer turned to me.

"What about this that your mate is saying, Captain?"

My stomach felt much better, now that Leudemann had spoken. So I thought I might as well give the Englishman a good dose.

"There were rumours at home in Norway that two cruisers and sixteen German submarines had put out of port."

The search officer's comrade, who had been looking around the cabin, came over to us when he heard all this.

"I think we had better be going," he spoke up suddenly.

"Yes," replied the other, and they went on deck.

They made no attempt at questioning the sailors or investigating the sailors' belongings.

"Your papers are all right, Captain," said the search officer, "but you will have to wait here for an hour until you get a signal to proceed."

"All right, Mister Officer."

One of my boys, who was of a pessimistic turn of mind, heard this. As he walked away from my cabin he said out loud to himself:

"Everything is lost."

Down below were the members of my other crew, waiting in the dark. They were right beneath the floor of the deck, straining their ears to catch any word that might give them an idea how things were going on deck. They heard the exclamation, "Everything is lost," and took it for the official word that we were discovered and for the command to do what was to be done in that case. They lit the fuses of the three bombs that were to blow up the ship, and waited for the hatches to be opened to let them on deck to the boats. The fuses would burn for fifteen minutes.

The British were in their boat now, trying to push off. But you can't hold a sailing ship in one place like a steamer. She keeps drifting. And the suction of the _Seeadler_ as she drifted held their boat so it couldn't get away. What was still worse, it kept slipping aft, and if it got under our stern, they would have been sure to see our propeller. A sailship with a propeller? Yes, sometimes, but we would have been done for, as there was nothing to that effect in our papers. Seizing a rope, I tossed it overboard toward them.

"Take the rope, Mister Officer, take the rope," I shouted as though clumsily trying to help them.

That made them look up, so that the rope might not fall on their heads. I heaved the rope just as they were sliding around our stern and away. The officers thanked me, and one of them, angry with his men for not being able to push the boat off, exclaimed:

"I have only fools on my boat."

"Yes, maybe you have," I thought, "and maybe you are the worst-fooled one of all!"

My stomach was quite normal now. I was so happy that I even felt as though I could digest that quid of tobacco. The men on deck felt like cheering and singing, but they had orders to go on about their jobs as though nothing unusual had been going on, until the cruiser was far and away. They just grinned, but so broad were the grins that I thought they would split their faces.

My first thought was to bring the happy news to the boys in the darkness down below. I went to one of the secret hatches, which they had fastened from within.

"Open," I shouted.

There were vague sounds below.

"Open up," I called again.

Then I heard a muffled voice say:

"Open the flood valves."

"What's that?" I yelled. "What's the matter? Open the hatch!"

The hatch opened. I saw troubled faces. I could hear water rushing into the ship.

"By Joe," I shouted, "are you trying to sink my boat?"

I could hear men running below to all parts of the ship. I climbed down roaring. One of the men spoke up.

"They are cutting the fuses and closing the flood valves."

"Fuses, flood valves, by Joe. How's that happen, by Joe?"

Then one of the men said: "But someone called down that all was lost! Afterward you called 'open' and we thought you meant open the flood valves."

The fuses had been burning for eight minutes out of their fifteen, and hundreds of gallons of water were pouring into the ship.

By Joe, I looked for the fellow who said: "All is lost." He came forward at once and confessed.

"I wasn't calling to the men below. I merely said it to myself."

"Why do you say 'all is lost,' by Joe, just when everything is fine?"

"Well, Captain, when the Englishman said that we would have to wait for an hour, I thought to myself that the game was up. It means that he is keeping us waiting while he sends a wireless to Copenhagen asking about the _Irma_, when there is no _Irma_."

"By Joe," I said, "that's right."

In our excitement, neither I nor my officers had thought about the wireless. It had not occurred to us to ask ourselves why we had been ordered to stand by for a whole hour. We didn't even think of Lloyd's Register. The search officer might have gone back to his ship to look up the _Irma_ in the Register, where there was no _Irma_.

For days I had been on deck in the storm and in the ice regions. For the past half hour I had gone through worse turmoil even than that. And now, when everything seemed clear, the sky looked black again and that quid of tobacco started getting in its dirty work. I went to the rail and hung there on my elbows, staring through my binoculars at the _Avenger_ and watching for the flag signal. My hand shook, and instead of only one I could see three cruisers in my glass. I handed it to Leudemann and while he took a look I leaned there with the code book in my hand, ready to decode the signal when it came.

I don't know how long it was, fifteen minutes or an hour, but finally three little flags went up the signal rope. Old imperturbable Leudemann steadied his glass. At last he made out the signal:

"T-M-B."

I thumbed the book clumsily. It seemed as though I would never find T-M-B. But there it was. It meant "Planet." Nonsense. Read the signal again.

I was getting weaker and weaker, whether from the anxiety or from that quid, I don't know. This time he read:

"T-X-B."

Pages, columns, and then the right place.... Continue voyage.

I felt as though my heart had two valves instead of one and was pumping madly through both. I sat down and breathed heavily. Instead of going about their ordinary tasks, my men wanted to yell like Indians.

Hello, what's this? The _Avenger_, with her 15,000 tons driven by 100,000-horsepower engines, was racing straight at us. Huge streams of smoke and great flames like torches poured out of her three funnels as her safety valves blew out from the over-pressure of her boilers. Just as she got on top of us she swerved off. At her stern flew a signal. I did not need a code book. I knew that signal by heart--Happy Voyage. We raised the signal--thanks--and dipped our Norwegian flag three times.

The British had behaved like gentlemen toward us. I think the way they pointed their guns at us when they came up to us was a bit of a joke. The hour they made us wait was, I think, to enable them to make wireless inquiries about the story we told of German cruisers and submarines. The search officer did his work courteously and well. No seaman should try to make another seaman ridiculous. We were disguised so well that he could have suspected nothing. In his place, I should have been fooled exactly as he was, and so would any other officer.

"And now, boys, let's celebrate Christmas!"

We dumped our deck load of lumber into the sea, and cleared the deck for a big time. I had a Christmas tree that I had brought from home. We set it up. Before the _Seeadler_ left port, Fraulein Bertha Krupp had sent us a huge box full of Christmas presents, something for every man. We opened it and found clothing, cigars, pipes, cigarettes, cigar holders, knives, liquor, soft drinks, and musical instruments.

It was the merriest Christmas of our lives. Singing "Yo-ho" and cheered up with many good bottles of rum, we headed south to play our rôle as buccaneers.

XIV

WE CAPTURE THE _GLADYS ROYAL_ AND THE _LUNDY ISLAND_

"All hands on deck!"

Aloft my boys flew, into the rigging and up the ratlines like monkeys.

"Loose the fore-taups'l!" boomed up from the quarter deck.

"All gone, the fore-taups'l," they sang out. "Loose the ga'nts'ls and stays'ls!"

The sails were sheeted home and were filling out. We didn't lose much time in getting her away. Lying over on her beam ends and running before the wind, we set our course for Madeira.

We knew that just off Gibraltar would be one of our best hunting grounds, so we cleared away the remains of our Norwegian camouflage, and after a few days we were as spick and clean and orderly as a German auxiliary cruiser should be. We were the _Irma_ no longer, but the _Seeadler_ now, although I felt a pang of regret at letting go the name that had served us so well and brought us luck.

There was constant labour on the motor. The lubricating oil we had was of poor quality. Oil, like many other things, had become scarce in Germany. Our enterprise had the enthusiastic support of only a few of the officials at the Admiralty. The others thought it certainly foredoomed to failure, and did not want to risk too much on it. Among these were the heads of the department that supplied us with oil. A sailing vessel under the pressure of sail nearly always lists to one side. The work of the motor was hampered by a leaning position. We sailed most of the time throughout our cruise with the motor dismantled and under repairs.

We had only two guns, and only one at a time could be brought into action against an enemy. Our orders were to attack sailing ships only. Windjammer against steamship was considered a ridiculous idea. We would not need great broadsides of cannon in capturing sailing vessels. We tried to make up for our lack of gun power by skill and precision in handling the guns we had. Our gun crew worked incessantly at drill and target practice, and schooled themselves to such quickness and accuracy of fire that the power of our armament, in effect, was doubled.

Our lookout posts were excellent. We had a crow's nest with a comfortable seat high up on the mast. Only a man at ease watches well. A second lookout was on the foremast, where a petty officer was perched. I offered ten pounds sterling and a bottle of champagne to whoever should report a ship first. A jealous rivalry grew up between the lookouts. In each raged a tremendous thirst for that bottle of champagne. All day long eager eyes swept the horizon.

On January 9th, off Gibraltar, the shout rang out:

"Ship ahoy."

On our larboard side was a large steamer heading toward us. Flying our Norwegian colours, we turned to meet her. She flew no flag and carried no name. The British were the only people who sent their boats out without names. She looked of British build, too. Our orders were not to tackle steamers. Well, you can promise a lot. We raised the signal:

"Chronometer time, please."

A sailing ship long away from port rarely has the correct time. Our request was reasonable enough. The steamer signalled that she understood us, and came to the windward so that we could heave to. I wore my great-coat to conceal my uniform. Those of the crew that had rifles hid themselves behind the railings.

The steamer came near, ready to give the sleepy old Norwegian the time.

"Shall we tackle him?" I asked one of my sailors who was crouched next to me peering through a loophole.

"Sure, let's take him. He's an Englishman."

I shouted the command, and the drum beat "clear for action." A section of the rail could be lowered and raised as a gun shield. It dropped clattering and revealed the muzzle of the cannon. Up with the German flag and fire, one across her bows.

It was the _Seeadler's_ first shot against the enemy.

What's that, by Joe? Nothing happened, no movement on deck, no slowing down of the ship. Then a flag went up the mast, the British flag. It was like the fantastic things that happen in a dream. I thought I must be asleep. Another shot across her bows. She suddenly changes her course. Hello, she wants to get away. A shot over the stern, another over the smokestack, and now she hove to.

A boat was in the water rowing toward us. We all put on our best manners, and I welcomed Captain Chewn aboard the _Seeadler_. What did we want of him, he asked, so bewildered that he stuttered. "Well, first a friendly chat," I replied. He was an old salt with a scraggly gray beard. I liked him right off. His ship was the _Gladys Royal_, bound from Cardiff with five thousand tons of coal for Buenos Aires. I told him that, much as I disliked sending any ship to the bottom of the sea, nevertheless, we must sink the _Gladys Royal_.

"Oh, no," he argued, "we are bound for a neutral port and won't harm anything. It will be bad for me to lose my ship, and I have a wife and children at home."

"Do you believe, Captain Chewn, that, under the same circumstances, a British naval officer would show any mercy to a German ship?"

He made no reply.