"Lay to, or I will sink you."
I had to admire that captain. The fat fellow dominated the
frightened mob by sheer force of lung power. His voice seemed to
sweep the deck and master everything.
"Gun crew to their posts. By Joe, you scalawags. Gun crew to their
posts, I say, by Joe."
We stood watching. I didn't think he could do it, but the panic
stilled. The frightened men stood at a kind of attention. The gun
crew separated itself from the crowd. It looked as though there
would be a fight, his cannon against our rifles. Well, we could pick
them off, and that fat "soul of the situation" would be an excellent
mark to shoot at.
We had one more device left. I gave the signal. From the mastheads
boomed three voices through the megaphones in unison. The shout was
in English and seemed to dominate the ocean to the horizon.
"Torpedoes clear!"
On the deck of the steamer a crazy yell arose:
"No torpedoes, for God's sake, no torpedoes."
Handkerchiefs, napkins, towels, and anything white was waved. The
cook frantically waved his apron.
"Lay to," I shouted, "or we discharge our torpedoes."
There was no further sound. The fat captain was licked, licked by
the terror the torpedo inspired in everyone who sailed on ships. He
made no further protest. He could not have done anything with his
men now, but I don't think he liked torpedoes either. He sat down on
a deck chair, cursing and wiping the sweat off his face.
We still had to be careful. There were plenty of firearms aboard
that ship, rifles, grenades, and what not. I kept our riflemen at
the rail, ready to cover our boarding party and to shoot down anyone
who went near the five-inch gun. Still with the idea of keeping the
men on the steamer overawed, I sent my eight strongest men as the
boarding crew under the command of my giant prize officer. They had
been among the strongest men in Germany. One was the wrestling
champion of Saxony, another the wrestling champion of Westphalia.
One, a Bavarian who had been a sculptor's model. He had been in much
demand for posing because of his prodigious muscular development.
Any one of these fellows could bring up the 220-pound weight with one
hand. They went with bare arms and shoulders. They had long bamboo
poles with hooks at the end. They reached up with the poles, caught
the hooks over the edge of the deck of the captured ship, and climbed
up hand over hand. The men on deck looked down as they ascended.
"What fellows, by Joe. No, by Joe, we're not going to fight with
those fellows!"
Our prisoners came aboard. Among them were eight British marines who
had been assigned to the steamer as a gun crew. The fat captain
looked around our deck with a sort of belligerent curiosity. He
walked up to our smokestack gun, and you couldn't have told his face
from a beet.
"Captain, is that the thing that made that hell of a racket?"
"Yes."
"Where are your torpedoes?"
"Torpedoes? We have no torpedoes."
"No torpedoes? That was a fake, too?"
"Yes."
"By Joe, Captain, don't report that, by Joe."
I promised him I would not report it, and told him heartily that he
had behaved like a true British skipper, and no man could have done
better.
Aye, things have changed on the sea. When I went aboard that
steamer, I had to sit there and look around and think. She was a
freighter, and what were freighters like when I was in the fo'c'sle?
That wasn't so long ago, twenty-odd years, but ships and customs
change rapidly. I was in a magnificent saloon, with heavy carpets,
glittering candelabra, and big, luxurious club chairs. Paintings in
heavy frames hung on the wall. In one corner was a Steinway grand
piano and beside it a music rack. There were other musical
instruments, a melodeon, a violin, a guitar, a ukulele. Freighters
nowadays often have better officers' accommodations than passenger
ships. They have more space for them and their voyages are longer,
sometimes a year or more. The shipowners provide comforts and
luxuries to make the long periods at sea less burdensome. The
sailors, too, are put up in far better style than formerly. In my
time, even on the biggest freight steamers, the officers had simple
quarters and the seamen had little more comfort than they had on the
sailing ships. I remembered the various ships on which I had hauled
at ropes and swabbed the deck.
"By Joe," I thought, "if they had told you of anything like this, you
would have thought them ready for a lunatic asylum."
The hold of the steamer was no less interesting than the officers'
saloon. The cargo was valued at a million pounds sterling. It
included five hundred cases of rare cognac and twenty-three hundred
cases of champagne, Veuve Cliquot. That was something.
"Ho! boys," I called, "lend a hand. There's a bit of work here."
We took the musical instruments, the piano, violin, 'cello, melodeon,
and all. We had aboard the _Seeadler_ a pianist and a violinist,
both excellent musicians out of the German conservatories. We had no
room in our cabins to hang the paintings, so I gave them to our
captive captains to take with them when they left our ship. Some of
the expensive furniture fitted nicely in the _Seeadler's_ cabins. Of
the cognac and champagne we ferried aboard as much as we could stow
away. We opened the sea cocks of the steamer, and she settled down
peacefully beneath the waves.