Part 18

There were snipe on our island, too, and we hunted them with great success, thereby varying our sea food and pork diet. Using cocoanut shells for fuel, we smoked what flesh and fish we could.

By way of vegetables, we had cocoanuts, and bread made of cocoanut flour, which the Kanakas taught us to prepare, and hearts of palms. This latter is one of the rarest of delicacies, and outside the tropics only multimillionaires can afford it. The price, when you get palm hearts in Europe, is higher than that of Russian caviar. For the most part, it is reserved for castaway sailors and buccaneers like ourselves. It is the core taken from the very tip of the cocoanut palm, right where the new leaves form. For each heart, weighing about ten pounds, a noble palm has to be sacrificed. The taste is between that of hazel nuts and asparagus, only finer and sweeter than either.

But I must tell you more about that invasion of hermit crabs. It caused the first and only fatality in the course of all our adventures. My dog Schnaeuzchen had all of the prying, curious nature of the dachshund. The island, with its teeming life, was an endless source of wonder to her. She investigated everything, forever had her nose sniffing somewhere or other. The swarming hermit crabs, which covered the ground almost like a carpet, sent her into a perfect spasm of astonishment. She jumped and barked and yelped. She cocked one eye and studied the strange creatures, and quite obviously did not like their looks. They crawled on all sides of her, and she was filled with bewilderment and fright. She was furious with them, but kept nimbly out of their way. Finally, however, the pugnacity of her dachs nature got the better of her, and she felt she must attack something. A particularly large and villainous-looking crab excited her ire. She leaped upon it to devour it. The crab raised its great, ferocious claws to strike at her. Schnaeuzchen gave a strange yelp of fright, and rolled over in a spasm. She kicked convulsively for a few moments, and then was still--dead. Poor little Schnaeuzchen! The exotic life of the South Seas had been too much for her. She was only two years old, and on the island she had for the first time found an opportunity to give vent to her passion for hunting. We gave her a fine grave, and planted a cocoa palm on it. Her comrade, Piperle, looked around disconsolately for her and was sad for a long time.

Piperle had an adventure with the birds. He undertook one day to invade one of the densely populated rookeries. Somehow or other, he contrived to antagonize the birds. I suppose he tried to raid a nest. The angry gulls swarmed above him. One seized one ear. Another seized the other. Several struck at his eyes. One hung on to his tail. Piperle howled and struggled. It was at this point that one of our men saw him execute an intelligent bit of strategy. There was a clump of underbrush near by. He struggled toward it, taking the birds with him. He dragged himself into the brush and thereby shook off the birds. He returned to camp a sadly mishandled dog, and never went near any of the rookeries again. From then on he confined his courage and daring to chasing the wild pigs at night, which he did with a prodigious barking and yelping. The pet opossum that our prisoners had carefully rescued from the wreck picked up an excellent living on the island, and came into the messroom every night, asking for water.

If our new home teemed with useful, edible creatures, it was not lacking in pestilential forms of life, either, these both of native origin and imported from ships. A thousand kinds of insects were everywhere. If you awakened thirsty at night and reached for your glass of water, you were likely to find that it contained more cockroaches than water. You had to reconcile yourself to getting up in the morning and finding your toothbrush alive with ants. The ants were particularly pervasive. We could only guard against them by putting the legs of tables, chairs, and other articles of furniture in cups of water. We slept at night to the ceaseless shuffle of rats, huge insolent fellows, running about on the tops of our tents. Piperle waged war against them, but the odds were too great. It would have taken a whole regiment of terriers to end that plague.

Flashing birds of paradise flew from palm to palm. Gorgeous humming birds with green and yellow breasts darted among the branches. With every flower there seemed to be a great butterfly. The whole island was aglow with butterflies. They floated on wide, beating wings of greens, violets, and reds.

Once, in the middle of the night, I was awakened by a small, sharp, repeated sound--knick, knick, knack. It was the opening of tropical flowers. I went outside and there I saw the lovely Queen of Night, which blossoms by the light of the tropical stars. It is a great, gorgeous bloom, eight or ten inches across. There were thousands of them. Scores of glowworms, far brighter than any we know, hovered above each, eager to catch the magnificent perfume that the opening Queen of Night gives forth. In the darkness I could see the flowers only by the light of the glowworms. On every side were these eerie nocturnal lights, a dancing lamp of gathered glowworms illuminating each flower. In that unearthly gleaming, like a kind of moonlight only stranger, the odorous petals shone with the ghostly nuances of their naturally flaming colours, white, crimson, sapphire blue, violet blue. In the South Seas, the flowers have little scent by day, while the sun shines on them. At night, when the dew falls, perfume awakens. It is truly a perfumed night. And the nostrils of man are excited by the rich and almost oppressive blending of odours. The Queen of Night gives off the perfume of vanilla. Mingled with it comes the scent of hyacinth, orchid, mayflower, and heliotrope. Sweet-smelling breezes blow, and above is the tropical sky with its clustered flashing stars and gorgeous Milky Way. Hanging above the horizon is the far-famed Southern Cross.

XXV

LET'S GO RAIDING AGAIN

My "subjects" somehow managed to get along on terms of general amity. Our American prisoners took no exception to my mandates handed on to them by Leudemann, my prime minister. They said that, since they had been treated so well aboard the _Seeadler_, they wanted no other command over our colony. The two captains and their lady had made mutually satisfactory arrangements among themselves, and, so far as we knew, there was no unpleasant incident, although, for the purposes of my tale, it would have helped a lot if they had fought a duel with swords or cocoanuts or chunks of jagged coral on the shore of our tropic lagoon.

The three Kanakas proved to be thoroughly good fellows and helped us in many ways. We got along with them in pidgin English at first until one of them picked up a little German.

In the middle of the camp we made a sort of plaza. The _Seeadler's_ batteries furnished electric light for it, and there we gathered every night. We still had plenty of champagne and cognac left from the capture of the champagne ship. So, in the cool of the evening, we sat out there on the edge of this equatorial Potsdammer Platz sipping drinks out of wine and brandy glasses, just as we might have at the Adlon in Berlin. There was plenty of pipe tobacco, and Dr. Pietsch had taken care to rescue from the wreck a store of his endless cigars. The wind blew, the stars shone, and the orchestra alternately played German classics from the operas and American ragtime melodies. Ah, yes, this last bit of the once glorious overseas German Empire wasn't such a bad little paradise at all. We castaways out there in the solitude of the South Seas felt as though we were the only people left in the world, like Noah and his family on Mount Ararat.

But after about three weeks of this Garden-of-Eden-without-an-Eve existence, the monotony of it began to get on our nerves. Of course, there was the "wife" of the officer of the ... but she was far too busy to be interested in the rest of us. We hadn't been sent out to colonize the South Seas and take life easy. So we cast about for a way to go buccaneering again. Our first need was for a ship to take the place of our unfortunate three-master impaled out there on the coral reef. The Kanakas told us that a French sailing vessel visited the island every year to take away turtle meat. The best guess that they could make was that it would be another six months or so before she arrived. Well, after six months, we would have a ship. We could always fall back on that. But, by Joe, six months was a long time to wait. The war might be won or lost by then. And it was highly unlikely that any other ship would stray into those waters for Heaven knows how long. We all grew impatient. Few sailors are keen about remaining cast away on a tropical isle for long, and especially on an atoll as small as Mopelia. We felt the itch to get out to sea again. I was particularly anxious to set something stirring. Before long the tropical sun and lazy life would sap my men's vitality, and all they would be good for would be to loll around.

We still had our lifeboats, and the hurricane season was not on. So why not put to sea in one of them? We devised rigging and sails for our best lifeboat, mast, jib boom, main boom, gaff, stays, and back stays. We scraped, caulked, and painted her. She was not in any too good condition, and despite our labour she continued to leak a bit and needed constant bailing. Even in calm weather, we had to bail forty pails a day. We loaded her with provisions for half a dozen men over a long voyage. She was eighteen feet in length and only about fourteen inches above water amidship. Into this small space we stored water, hardtack, machine guns, rifles, hand grenades, and pistols. The only luxuries we allowed ourselves were a few tins of pemmican, a side of bacon, and an accordion. The music of the squealer was to be our solace during a cruise the length of which none could foretell. The great question was, could our tiny craft survive a storm? At any rate, she could sail, and that was something. We christened her the _Kronprinzessin Cecilie_--without, however, painting her name on the stern.

Of course, everybody wanted to go, but there could be only six of us at the most. So I picked the men who seemed to be in the most vigorous health at the time, Mate Leudemann, Lieutenant Kircheiss, Engineer Krauss, Boatswain Parmien, and Yeoman Erdmann. This left the colony on the atoll in the hands of Lieutenant Kling.

Our overloaded cockleshell with a crew of six was the smallest auxiliary cruiser in the war. For cruiser we were, and we were setting out to capture a ship, sail back to Mopelia, pick up our comrades there, and continue our raid. To find and take a ship on the high sea was a doubtful proposition, but we might get to some of the other islands, not too well populated and guarded, and find a vessel at anchor. We could board her at night, overpower the captain and crew, and sail off with her. We planned first of all to visit the Cook Islands, some eight hundred miles distant, and if we found no ship there, continue on another thousand miles farther to the Fiji Islands, where there were sure to be ships loading with copra for the ammunition factories of Europe. We figured on making around sixty nautical miles a day, so that, if we had to go all the way to the Fijis, it would take us approximately thirty days. Thus we should be back with a ship in three months at most. We discussed our tactics thoroughly for the expected capture. We would steal aboard. Half-past three in the morning was the best hour. Men sleep their soundest then. A couple of us would go to the officers' cabins, the rest to the forecastle. We would show our pistols, disarm them, and herd them below. It would be good to sneak to their clothing first and take away their belts and snip the buttons off their trousers. Then, when you have them put on their clothes they stand, without belts, suspenders, or buttons, holding up their trousers. Thus they are helpless. We had a few bombs loaded only with powder, harmless, but capable of making a terrific noise. If there is any trouble, you throw one. It hurts nobody, but the terrible explosion creates a general panic. A couple of men with their heads about them can do wonders with dozens in a panic. Another good thing is to have a couple of fellows outside shout suddenly and make a great disturbance. That creates excitement and throws people off their guard. I said to my bo's'n:

"Don't hurt anybody unless you have to. We don't want to spoil our clean record by killing anybody. But, by Joe, if a captain or a watchman raises a rifle or a pistol, don't wait till he shoots. Get him first."

On a bright summer morning--August 23, 1917, to be exact--we all shook hands. There was no cheering, merely quiet, earnest words of friendship and good luck. It was the first time that we sixty-four seamen had parted since the _Seeadler_ had set sail to run the blockade eight months before, and it was only now, at the moment of saying good-bye, that we realized how closely attached to one another we had become. We who were going could see a brooding question in the eyes of those who were staying behind:

"How will that overloaded cockleshell stand heavy weather?"

Never mind, we would probably find out soon enough. The understanding was that, if we did not return in three months, something had happened to us. They should wait for us until then. Afterward, Kling and his men were to get away from the atoll as best they could.

We sailed out of the lagoon, through the coral entrance, into the open sea. The hulk of the _Seeadler_ lay there helpless on the reef. The tide was high, and the breakers swept over the coral. She was a red brown now from rust and weathering. Each flooding billow raised her a bit, and then she sank back hopelessly with loud groans and creaks of despair on the coral bed. As we passed her she seemed to call over to us:

"Come aboard, I want to take you on your voyage. Don't desert your old friend."

And as a wave raised her it seemed as though she were struggling to get on an even keel again and come to us, only to find that the coral held her in a relentless grasp. Tears filled our eyes.

"Good-bye, _Seeadler_" I called; "perhaps we shall never see you more. And even if we do, you can never sail again. Nevermore will songs resound on your decks. Nevermore will you raise your sails and fly a flag from your masts."

A brisk wind carried us westward with a swelling of our sails. The happy island receded. The last German colony and the wreck of the _Seeadler_ slowly dropped out of sight over the rim of the horizon.

To-day the _Seeadler_ still remains on the reef at Mopelia. After we had gone, Lieutenant Kling, afraid that the stumps of her mast might attract a passing warship, blew them out with dynamite. The explosion set a fire that burned away part of the woodwork. A quantity of ammunition still aboard blew up and cracked the forepart of the hulk. Afterward, when the _Seeadler's_ history became generally known, the Harris-Irby Cotton Company of New York, which had originally owned the ship as the _Pass of Balmaha_, investigated the possibilities of salvaging the ship. A party of engineers was sent to Mopelia. They reported that the ship was unsalvageable. In my cruise around the world aboard the _Vaterland_ I shall stop at the island and survey what once was my tropical domain. And again I shall board the old _Seeadler_ on which we sailed and raided. So, until then, old ship! _Auf wiedersehen!_

XXVI

FROM THE SOCIETY ISLANDS TO THE COOK ISLANDS IN AN OPEN BOAT

It has been something of a sport of recent years to cross the Atlantic and even the Pacific in a small boat, sometimes under sail and sometimes under motor power. Tiny craft have done it, and at best it is not a comfortable kind of voyage. In sporting events, your ocean-going small boat always had a cabin, or an imitation of one. That is what we should have had, but we were not so lucky, and, besides, the load we carried made existence aboard our lifeboat that had been converted into a cruiser a cramped affair indeed.

There was only one place we could trust to be dry, the buoyant air tanks at the sides of the boat. In these we packed our hardtack, a few pieces of clothing, photographic apparatus, and the all-important tobacco. It affected the buoyancy of our craft, but we had to keep some things away from the sea water. In the body of the boat were placed the water tanks, our large supply of weapons and ammunition, cordage for the rigging, and several spare sails. Canvas shields at the side, which could be drawn over at the top and be made to form some kind of tent, sheltered us somewhat from waves and dirty weather. Without these we should have been practically drowned. Four mattresses could be stretched on the bottom, where four men could sleep while two kept watch. As a concession to civilization, we had six pairs of knives and forks, six mugs, a coffee pot, and $5,000 in silver, gold, and paper, much of it in pounds sterling.

At six in the morning, the two men on watch filled the coffee pot and applied fire to it from a soldering lamp. With the slightest breeze and a rocking of the boat, it was impossible to bring the water to a boil. Then we were glad to get tepid coffee-bean soup instead of coffee. After toilets had been made with salty sea water, we squatted in the cockpit for breakfast of coffee and hardtack. Navigation was difficult in so small a boat. It was impossible to spread the charts out properly, and with the slightest carelessness the wind might take our priceless navigation papers overboard. We had to use the sextant and other navigation instruments in a boat that often pitched so much we could scarcely stand. The papers, charts, tables, logarithms, and so on, got sopping wet, and when we dried them in the sun they grew swollen and difficult to handle.

It was cool at night, but not unpleasant so long as our clothes were dry. The weather was fair, but an occasional whale would come alongside and douse us with the spray of his spout. Then, in our damp clothing, we felt the chill of the night. The days were broiling hot, but even while taking advantage of what little shade we had, we grew heavy and torpid. We had, above all things, to be careful of our water supply. We never dared drink enough to quench our thirst completely, and were, in fact, continually thirsty.

By way of amusement, we had readings aloud from the one book we had brought along, Fritz Reuter's comic story, _A Trip to Constantinople_, and at night the squealer wheezed and blared, and we whiled away the tedious hours singing old German folk songs.

After three days we sighted Atiu, the first island of the Cook group and a British possession. There was no ship in sight. Too bad, but perhaps a ship might be expected soon. Anyway, we had to make port and get fresh food. Aside from the danger of storm, if our voyage continued for any length, we feared most of all beri-beri and scurvy, which our diet of hardtack would inevitably bring upon us unless we varied it with fresh vegetables.

A crowd of natives, fine-looking Polynesians, watched curiously as our little craft drew up to the dock. Kircheiss and I went ashore and straight to the house of the British resident. He lay stretched out in his shirt and trousers on a Borneo long chair on his porch, and didn't even get up when we approached. He was a good-looking fellow, but lazy as the devil. The lassitude of the South Seas had certainly got him.

"My name is Van Houten," I began, "and this is my chief officer Southart."

The resident looked at me suspiciously. It was a true British mistrust. Ordinarily, your Englishman is the best of fellows, a pleasant chap to meet, a perfect host. But in wartime you had to admire them. They were on the lookout for everything. Their brains seemed made only of suspicions. Kircheiss, who spoke English better than I did, continued:

"We are Americans of Dutch birth. A few months ago we made a bet at the Holland Club in San Francisco that we would sail from Honolulu in an open boat via the Cook Islands to Tahiti and back to Honolulu. The wager is for twenty-five thousand dollars. Would you, my dear sir, kindly give me a certificate that we have been here in accordance with the terms of our bet? Also, we should like to lay in a supply of fresh water, canned goods, and fresh fruit."

The resident yawned, looked us over with a watery eye and replied:

"Well, a man must be a hell of a fool to go in for that kind of sport."

"Sure," Kircheiss said politely, "but, just the same, we should like to have the certificate. Won't you give it to us or tell us who will?"

"Oh, to hell with you, don't bother me. I've just had dinner and want to take my nap."

Even his British mistrust, with which he first regarded us, subsided into the indescribable something that comes over a white man who yields to the soft enervation of the tropics. He now looked at us merely as mad fellows who wanted him to do something too crazy to merit his consideration.

"Any news from the bloody war?" he asked. "Why are they so stupid as to carry on with this fighting business? In the end, it will only help these yellow races."

He continued like this and spoke highly of the Germans. Naturally, we did not express any pro-German sentiments.

"We simply must get this old bird to give us that certificate," I said to my comrade in Low German, pretending that it was Dutch.

"Yes," he replied in the same dialect, "it may come in mighty useful later on."

The resident, as he told us, had served in the Boer War, and should have known better, but he took our Plattdeutsch for the language of Holland. Presently he scribbled a note saying that we had called on him in the course of our sporting cruise.

"Any ships expected in port soon?" Kircheiss asked quite casually.