Ahoy Shipmates

Von Luckner decided to sail with five of his men in one of the 10 metre long open boats, rigged as a sloop and named Kronprinzessin Cecilie. Ever the optimist, he intended to sail to Fiji via the Cook Islands, capture a sailing ship, return to Mopelia for his crew and prisoners, and resume raiding.

Three days after leaving Mopelia, they reached Aitu Island in the Cook Islands group, where they pretended to be Dutch-American seamen crossing the Pacific for a bet. The New Zealand Resident, the administrator of the island, gave them enough supplies to reach another island in the group, Aitutaki, where they posed as Norwegians. The New Zealand Resident in Aitutaki was suspicious but had no means of detaining the group, and von Luckner quickly took his party to the island of Rarotonga.

Approaching Rarotonga in the dark, Luckner saw a dark ship which he thought was an auxiliary cruiser, but in fact was a beached ship. Luckner pressed on to the Fijian island of Wakaya, arriving after a voyage of 3,700 km in an open boat. Most people on Wakaya accepted their story of being shipwrecked Norwegians, but one sceptic called a party of police from the old Fijian capital of Levuka.

On 21 September the police bluffed that the non-existent gun on the inter-island ferry Amra would blow Luckner out of the water. Not wishing to cause bloodshed, and not realizing that the police were unarmed, Luckner and his party surrendered and were confined in a Prisoner of War camp on Motuihe Island, off Auckland, New Zealand.

Meanwhile, back on Mopelia, a small French trading ship Lutece anchored outside the reef. Leutnant Kling of Seeadler, having heard of his captain's capture on the radio, sailed out to Lutece and captured it at gunpoint. The French crew was put ashore with the other prisoners, and all the Germans embarked on the ship, now renamed Fortuna, and set course for South America.

The master of A B Johnson, Captain Smith, then took the remaining open boat from Mopelia with three other American seamen, and sailed 1,600 km to Pago Pago, arriving on 4 October, where they were finally able to inform the authorities of the activities of Seeadler and arrange for the rescue of the other 44 sailors still stranded on Mopelia.

The Fortuna, meanwhile, came to grief when she struck uncharted rocks off Easter Island. The crew scrambled ashore, where they were interned by the Chileans for the remainder of the war.

Regards


Sean