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CHAPTER XXXV

THE GERMAN SEA RAIDERS

While British men-o’-war were capturing German merchant-men and taking them to British ports, the German raiders which were abroad were earning terrifying reputations for themselves because the enemy merchantmen with which they came upon had to be destroyed on the high seas, for there were no ports to which they could be taken.  Prominent among these was the Koenigsberg, a third-class cruiser.  When the war came she was in Asiatic waters and immediately made the east coast of Africa her “beat.”  While patrolling it she came upon two British merchant ships, and after taking from their stores such supplies as were needed she sent them to the bottom.  On September 20, 1914, she made a dash into the harbor of Zanzibar and found there the British cruiser Pegasus, which on account of her age was undergoing a complete overhauling.  She was easy prey for the German ship, for besides the fact that she was stationary her guns were of shorter range than those of her adversary.  Shell after shell tore into her till she was battered beyond all resemblance to a fighting craft.  But her flag flew till the end, for though it was shot down from the masthead, two marines held it aloft, one of them losing his life.  And when the Koenigsberg, her task of destruction complete, sailed off, the lone marine still held up the Union Jack.  The British ships in those waters made a systematic hunt for her and located her at last, on the 30th of October.  She was hiding in her favorite rendezvous, some miles up the Rufigi River in German East Africa.  The ship which found her was the Chatham, a second-class cruiser, with a draft much heavier than that of the Koenigsberg, and the difference gave the latter a good advantage, for she ran up the river and her enemy could not follow.  Nor could the English ship use her guns with much effect, for the gunners could not make out the hull of the German ship through the tropical vegetation along the river banks.  All that the British ship could do was to fire shells in her general direction and then guess what effect they had.  But to prevent her escape, colliers were sunk at the mouth of the river.  She had come to as inglorious an end as her victim, the Pegasus.

The account of another raider, the Kronprinz Wilhelm, which left New York on the evening that England declared war, with her bunkers loaded with coal and other supplies for warships, has already been related.  The mystery concerning this sailing was cleared up when she was caught coaling the Karlsruhe in the Atlantic.  Both ships made off in safety that time, and soon after a British cruiser reported that she had been heard in wireless communication with the Dresden.  Thereafter the fate of this ship remained a mystery till she put in at Hampton Roads on April 11, 1915.