England began then to hit at the outlying parts of the German Empire with her navy.  The cruiser Pegasus, before being destroyed by the Koenigsberg at Zanzibar on September 20, 1914, had destroyed a floating dock and the wireless station at Dar-es-Salaam, and the Yarmouth, before she went on her unsuccessful hunt for the Emden, captured three German merchantmen.

As far back as the middle of August, 1914, the capture of German Samoa had been planned and directed from New Zealand.  On the 15th of that month an expedition sailed from Wellington, and in order to escape the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, went first to French New Caledonia, where the British cruisers Psyche, Philomel, and Pyramus were met with.  On the 23d of the month, this force, which was augmented by the French cruiser Montcalm and the Australian battleships Australia and Melbourne, sailed first for the Fiji Islands and then to Apia on Upolu Island off Samoa.  They reached there on the 30th.  There was, of course, no force on the island to withstand that of the enemy, and arrangements for surrender of the place were made by signal.  Marines were sent ashore; the public buildings were occupied, the telegraph and telephone wires cut, the wireless station destroyed and the German flag hauled down, to be replaced by the Union Jack.  The Germans taken prisoners were rewarded for the kind treatment they had accorded British residents before the appearance of this British force, and were sent to New Zealand.

The next German possession to be taken was that in the Bismarck Archipelago.  It was known that there was a powerful wireless station at Herbertshoehen, the island known as New Pomerania.  A small landing party was put ashore on the island in the early morning of September 11, 1914, and made its way, without being discovered, to the town.  The surprised inhabitants were too frightened to do anything until this party left to go further on to the wireless station.  By that time it met with some resistance, but overcame it.  A few days later another landing party had captured the members of the staff of the governor of New Pomerania, together with the governor himself, at Bougainville, Solomon Islands, whence they had fled.  The wireless stations on the island of Yap, in the Carolines, and on Pleasant Island were destroyed during the following month.

Perhaps the strangest operations of naval character ever performed were the inland “sea” fights in Africa.  The great Nyassa Lake in Africa was the scene of this fighting.  With its entire western shore in British possession and with a goodly part of its waters within the territory of German East Africa, it was not unnatural that fighting should take place there.  Both countries maintained small armed vessels on the lake.  The British ship Gwendolen, a 350-ton craft, had been built on the Clyde and had been sent to Nyassa Lake in sections and there assembled and launched in 1898.  During August she fought with a German ship and captured it.  The fighting on the lake could not, however, determine the success of the military operations taking place in those regions.