among newspaper readers ashore, who watched the game of hide and seek
with all the interest of spectators at some magnificent sporting event.
Nor was the sympathy all against the German, for the odds were too
heavy. The wildest rumors were floating in by every craft that reached
port from the Southern Atlantic, by radio and by cable. On October
27, a Ward Line boat came into New York with the report that she had
observed a night battle off the Virginia Capes between the German
raider and British men-of-war. On November 3 came the report that the
_Karlsruhe_ had captured a big Lamport and Holt liner off the coast of
Brazil as late as October 26. On November 10 an officer of a British
freighter captured by the raider reached Edinburgh and told the story
that the _Karlsruhe_ was using Bocas Reef, off the north Brazilian
coast, as a base.
Then, as suddenly as they had begun, the forays of the modern corsair
ceased. The first belief was, of course, that the pursuing British had
found her and sent her to Davy Jones. But as the weeks went by without
any announcement to that effect, doubts crept in. Soon the British
government, without making a formal declaration, revealed the untruth
of this report by keeping its searching vessels at sea. It was the
theory that the _Karlsruhe_ had run up the Amazon or the Orinoco for
repairs and rest. The expectation was that she would soon be at her old
tricks again.
The battle and sinking story persisted in the British press, the
wish being evidently father to the thought. On January, 12, 1915,
for instance, the Montreal _Gazette_ published an unverified (and
afterwards disproved) report from a correspondent at Grenada, British
West Indies, giving a detailed description of a four hour battle in
which the raider was destroyed. This story was allegedly verified by
the washing ashore of wreckage and the finding of sailors’ corpses. All
moonshine.
On January 21, an American steamer captain announced having sighted the
_Karlsruhe_ off Porto Rico. On other dates in January and February she
was also falsely reported off La Guayra, the Canary Islands, Port au
Prince and other places. On March 17, the Brooklyn _Eagle_ published a
tale to the effect that the hulk of the raider lay off the Grenadines,
a little string of islets that stretch north from Grenada in the
Windwards. This report said there had been no battle. The cruiser had
been self-wrecked or broken up in a storm. Again wreckage was said to
have been found, but here once more was falsehood.
On March 18, the _Stifts-Tidende_ of Copenhagen reported that the
_Karlsruhe_ had been blown up by an internal explosion one evening
as the officers and men were having tea. One half of the wreck sank
immediately, the report went on to say, while the other floated for
some time, enabling between 150 and 200 of the crew to be rescued by
one of the accompanying auxiliaries. The survivors, it was added, had
been sworn to secrecy before reaching port--why this, no one can guess.
The following day, the _National Tidende_ published corroboration from
a German merchant captain then in Denmark, to the effect that the “crew
of the Karlsruhe had been brought home early in December, 1914, by the
German liner, Rio Negro, one of the Karlsruhe’s escort ships.”
Somewhat later, a Brooklyn man, wintering at Nassau, in the Bahamas,
reported finding the raider’s motor pinnace on the shore of Abaco
Island, north of Nassau.
To this there is little to add. Admiral von Tirpitz, then the head of
the German navy, says in his memoirs just this and no more:
“The commander of the _Karlsruhe_, Captain Köhler, never dreamt of
taking advantage of the permission to make his way homeward; working
with the auxiliary vessels in the Atlantic, surrounded by the English
cruisers, but relying on his superior speed, he sought ever further
successes, until he was destroyed with his ship by an explosion, the
probable cause of which was some unstable explosive brought aboard.”
It is obvious from this that the _Karlsruhe_ was given the option of
returning home, having gained enough glory and sunk enough ships to
satisfy a dozen admirals. But the main fact to be gleaned from Tirpit’s
statement is that an internal explosion was the thing officially
accepted by the head of the German admiralty as the cause of her
disappearance. And this is the most likely of all the theories that
have been or can be proposed. But, that said, we are still a long way
from any satisfaction of our deeper curiosity. Where and when did the
explosion take place? Under what circumstances? Did any escape and
return to Germany to tell the tale?
To these queries there are no positive answers. If the _Karlsruhe_
was, as so often stated, accompanied by one or more auxiliaries or
coaling ships, it seems incredible that all the crew can have been
lost and quite beyond imagination that there was not even a distant
witnessing of the accident. Yet this seems to have been the case. In
spite of the report that a large part of the famous raider’s crew got
safely home after the supposed explosion, I have searched and scouted
through the German press and the German book lists for an account of
the affair--all in vain. Not only that, but I am assured by reliable
correspondents of the American press in Germany that nothing credible
or authoritative has appeared. We have von Mücke’s book “The Emden,”
published in the United States as early as 1917, and previously in
Germany. We have the exploits of the _Moewe_, and we have the lesser
adventures of the popular von Luckner and his craft. But of the famous
_Karlsruhe_ we have nothing at all, save rumors and gossip.
The conclusion must be that the ship did break up somewhere in the
deepest ocean, as the result of an explosion, while she was altogether
unattended. She must have gone down with all her men, for not even the
reports of finding bits of her wreckage have ever been verified. The
mystery of her end is still much discussed among seafaring men and
William McFee, in one of his tales, suggests that she lay hid up one of
the South American rivers and came to grief there.
* * * * *
Even more fantastic than this, however, is the story of the great
United States collier _Cyclops_. This vessel, of nineteen thousand tons
displacement, five hundred and eighteen feet long, of sixty-five foot
beam and twenty-seven foot draught, with a cargo capacity of twelve
thousand five hundred tons, was built by the Cramps in Philadelphia
in 1910. She was designed to coal the first-line fighting ships of our
fleet while at sea and under way, by means of traveling cables from her
arm-like booms. She had frequently accompanied our battleships abroad,
had transported the marines to Cuba and the refugees from Vera Cruz to
Galveston in April 1914. On a trip to Kiel in 1911, she was wonderingly
examined by the German naval critics and builders, who declared her to
be a marvel of design and structure.
[Illustration:
_Wide World._
~~ _U. S. S. CYCLOPS_ ~~]
On March 4, 1918, the _Cyclops_ sailed from Barbados for an unnamed
Atlantic port (Norfolk, as it proved), with a crew of 221 and 57
passengers, including Alfred L. Moreau Gottschalk, United States Consul
General at Rio de Janeiro. She was due to arrive on March 13. When that
date had come and nothing had been heard from her, it was announced
that one of her two engines had been injured and she was proceeding
slowly with the other engine compounded. But on April 14 the news came
out in the press that the great ship was a month overdue and totally
unaccounted for.
For a whole month the story had been veiled under the censorship while
the Navy Department had been making every conceivable effort to find
the ship or some evidence of her fate. There had been no news through
her radio equipment since her departure from Barbados. There had
been no heavy weather in that vicinity. She had been steaming in the
well-traveled lane of ships passing between North and South America,
yet not a vessel had spoken her, heard her radio call or seen her at
any distance. Destroyers had been searching the whole Gulf, Caribbean,
North and South Atlantic regions for three frantic weeks. They had not
found so much as a life preserver belonging to the missing ship.
The public mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that a German
submarine had done this dirty piece of business, if an attack on an
enemy naval vessel in time of war may be so listed. Alas, there were
no German submarines so far from their home bases at that time or
any proximate period. None had been reported by other vessels and
the German admiralty has long since confirmed the understood fact
that there was none abroad. A floating mine was next suspected, but
the lower West Indies are a long distance from any mine field then
in existence and a ship of the size of the _Cyclops_, even if mined,
probably would have had time to use her radio, lower some boats and
put some of her people afloat. At the very least, she must have left
some flotsam to reach the beaches of the archipelago with its tragic
meanings.
The mystery was soon complicated. On May 6 a British steamer from
Brazil brought news that two weeks after the due date of the _Cyclops_
but still two weeks before her disappearance was announced, an
advertisement had been published in a Portuguese newspaper at Rio
announcing requiem mass for the repose of the soul of A. L. M.
Gottschalk “lost when the _Cyclops_ was sunk at sea.” Efforts were
made by the secret agents of the American and Brazilian governments to
discover the identity of the persons responsible for the advertisement,
but nothing of worth was ever discovered. The notice was signed with
the names of several prominent Brazilians, all of whom denied that they
had the least knowledge of the matter. The rector of the church denied
that any arrangement had been made for the mass and said he had not
known Gottschalk. Some chose to believe that the advertisement had been
inserted by German secret agents for the purpose of notifying the large
number of Germans in Brazil that the Fatherland was still active in
American waters.
A rumor having no substance whatever was to the effect that the crew
of the ship had revolted, overcome the officers and converted the ship
into a German raider. A companion tale said the ship had sailed for
Germany to deliver her cargo of manganese to the enemy, by whom this
valuable metal was sorely needed. The only foundation for this rumor
was the fact that the _Cyclops_ was indeed carrying a load of manganese
ore to the United States.
It was not until August 30, 1918, that Secretary of the Navy Josephus
Daniels announced that the ship was officially recorded as lost.
At that time he notified the relatives of the officers, crew and
passengers. More than three months later, on December 9th, Mr. Daniels
supplemented this official notice with the statement, given to the
newspaper correspondents, that “no reasonable explanation” of the
_Cyclops_ case could be given. And here the official news ends. At this
writing, inquiry at the official source in Washington brings the answer
that nothing has since been learned to alter the then issued statement.
The _Cyclops_ case naturally excited and disturbed the public mind,
with the result of an unusual crop of fancies, lies, false alarms and
hoaxes. On May 8, 1923, for instance, Miss Dorothy Walker of Pittsburgh
reported that she had found a bottle at Atlantic City containing the
message “_Cyclops_ wrecked at Sea.--H.” This note was written on a
piece of note paper torn from a memorandum book and was yellowed with
age. The bottle was tightly corked and closed with sealing wax--a
substance which shipwrecked sailors do not have in their pockets at the
moment of peril.
Other such messages were found from time to time. One floated ashore at
Velasco, Tex., also in a bottle. It read:
“U. S. S. _Cyclops_, torpedoed April 7, 1918, Lat. 46.25, Long. 35.11.
All on board when German submarine fired on us. Lifeboats going to
pieces. No one to be left to tell the tale.”
The position indicated is midway between Hatteras and the Azores, where
the _Cyclops_ had no business and probably never was. It was found
after the war, as already suggested, that no German submarine had been
in any so distant region at the time. We may accordingly look upon this
bottle as another flagon of disordered fancy, another press from the
old “_spurlos versenkt_” madness.
Finally, in their search for something that might explain this dark and
baffling affair, the hunters came upon a suggestive fact. The commander
of the _Cyclops_ was Lieutenant-Commander George W. Worley. It now came
to light--and it struck many persons like a revelation--that this man
was really G. W. Wichtman, that he was born a German; ergo, that he
was the man responsible for this disaster to our navy. It proved true
that Wichtman-Worley was a German by birth, but he had been brought
to the United States as a child and had spent twenty-six years in
the American navy. No one in official position suspected him, but the
professional Hun _strafers_ insisted that this was the typical act of a
German, no matter how long separated from his native land, how little
acquainted with it or how long and faithfully attached to the service
of his adopted country. It is only fair to the memory of a blameless
officer to say that Lieutenant-Commander Worley could not have done
such a complete job had he wished to and that his record is officially
without the least blemish.
We are left then, to look for more satisfactory explanations of
the fate of the big collier. One possibility is that the manganese
developed dangerous gases in the hold and caused a terrific explosion,
which blew the ship out of the water without warning, killed almost all
on board and so wrecked the boats that none could reach land. The only
trouble with this is that a nineteen thousand ton ship, when destroyed
by an explosion, is certain to leave a great mass of surface wreckage,
which will drift ashore sooner or later or be observed by passing
vessels in any travelled lane. It happens that vessels sent out by the
Navy Department visited every ness and cove and bay along the coast
from Brazil to Hatteras, every island in the West Indies and every
quarter of the circling seas without ever finding so much as a splinter
belonging to the collier. Fishermen and boatmen in all the great region
were questioned, encouraged with promises of reward and sent seeking,
but they, too, found never a spar or scrap of all that great ship.
This also seems to dispose of the possibility of a disaster at the
hands of a German raider or submarine. Besides, to emphasize the
matter once more, the German records show that there is no possibility
of anything of this sort. The suspicion has been officially and
categorically denied and there is no reason for concealment now.
There remains one further possibility, which probably conceals the
truth. The _Cyclops_, like her sister ships, the _Neptune_ and
_Jupiter_, was topheavy. She carried, like them, six big steel derricks
on a superstructure fifty feet from her main deck. This great weight
aloft made it dangerous for the ship to roll. Indeed she could not
roll, like other heavy vessels, very far without capsizing. We have
but to suppose that with her one crippled engine she ran into heavy
weather or perhaps a tidal wave, that she heeled over suddenly, her
cargo shifted and her heavy top turned her upside down, all in a few
seconds. In that event there would have been no time for using the
wireless, no chance to launch any boats. Also, with everything battened
and tied down, ship-shape for a naval vessel travelling in time of
war, especially if the weather was a little heavy, there is the strong
possibility that nothing could have been loose to float free. In this
manner the whole big ship with all her parts and all who rode upon her
may have been dumped into the sea and carried to the depths. One of the
floating mines dropped off our Southern Coast in the previous year by
the U 121 may have done the fatal rocking, it is true.
There is no better explanation, and I have reason to know that an
upset of this sort is the theory held by naval builders and naval
officials generally. But certainly there is none and a satisfying
answer is not likely to come from the graveyard of the deep.
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Transcriber’s Notes:
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Some questionable spellings (e.g. Monterey instead of Monterrey) are
retained from the original.