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.