Castles of Steel (38 page)

Admiral von Spee’s next stopping point was the isolated, British-owned Suvorov Island, 500 miles east of Samoa, but finding that a huge ocean swell prevented coaling, he continued another 700 miles to Bora-Bora, an island of the Tahiti group in the lush French Society Islands. Bora-Bora, with its volcanic mountains, dense foliage, and settled population, was a welcome change from the flat, sun-baked, deserted coral atolls they had left behind.
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
anchored off Bora-Bora, displaying no national flag. The French authorities, believing the visitors were English, sent out a police officer in a boat flying the tricolor and offered to help “the British admiral.” The policeman met only German officers who spoke English or French, and the subterfuge continued as other representatives of the local government came on board to present a huge bouquet of flowers, pass along war news, and, in response to gentle questioning, describe the defenses of Papeete. The Germans paid with gold for coal, pigs, poultry, eggs, fruit, vegetables, and several oxen, slaughtered immediately. In the afternoon, as the cruisers weighed anchor, a large French flag was hoisted in a farewell salute from the shore. In reply, the Germans politely raised the German naval ensign.

From Bora-Bora, Spee continued on to Papeete, the port and capital of Tahiti. Papeete, its harbor and town lying in the shadow of 7,000-foot volcanic peaks, was known to be defended; as the German squadron approached on the morning of September 22, the cruisers prepared to lower boats for an armed landing. But the French had been warned from Bora-Bora: all navigation aids in the harbor had been removed; the town’s inhabitants had fled to the hills; all supplies of coal that Spee might use had been set afire, and a huge black cloud was spreading over the harbor. Spee fired briefly at the anchored French gunboat
Zélée,
which capsized and sank. From the hills, French artillery fired back, their white puffs of smoke showing amidst the trees until Spee’s gunners silenced them. Afterward, the French sent a steamer to Samoa to report the attack, but not until Septem-ber 30 did the news reach London.

From Tahiti, Spee took his squadron 850 miles farther east, to the French Marquesas. Arriving off the island of Nuku Hiva on September 26, he remained for seven days, coaling and stocking fresh provisions. The crews went ashore to bathe in fresh water and the admiral paid a courtesy visit on the Catholic mission and collected more specimens of tropical plants.

On October 2, when Spee left the Marquesas, sailing southeast, he was leaving behind the sunny climate and lush, flowering landscapes of the tropics. Now, angling down toward the coast of South America, the crews found the temperature cooler and they ceased going barefoot on deck. The length of the voyage was beginning to tell: sand mixed with soda was used instead of soap; dysentery and beriberi began to appear. Spee’s objective was Easter Island, a solitary, volcanic, treeless speck of land lying off all trade routes. On the way,
Scharnhorst
’s wireless room picked up a signal from the German light cruiser
Dresden,
3,000 miles away.
Dresden
had come around the southern tip of South America from the Atlantic and now was off the west coast of Chile; she signaled that she was probably being followed into the Pacific by the British armored cruisers
Good Hope
and
Monmouth.
On October 4, Spee signaled
Dresden
to join him at Easter Island. Other ears, however, could pick up wireless signals: this message from
Scharnhorst
was intercepted by a British wireless station at Suva in the Fiji Islands. Passed to London, it provided the Admiralty not only with the East Asia Squadron’s position but also with its destination. Spee, unaware, believed that his long voyage was approaching a successful conclusion. On October 11, writing in his diary at sea, he noted that 5,000 tons of coal were due at Easter Island, to be brought by colliers from San Francisco escorted by the light cruiser
Leipzig.
“If no enemy ship approaches Easter Island,” he wrote, “we can, with fresh coal, continue [to the coast of Chile] via Juan Fernández.”

Dresden
arrived at Easter Island first, during the night of October 11. Admiral von Spee’s squadron arrived the following day, anchoring in Angaroa, also known as Cook’s Bay, on the island’s deserted east coast, away from the little colony. The supply ships
Yorck
and
Göttingen
came alongside the armored cruisers, but the long, southwesterly swell rolled the ships day and night, slamming them against each other, impeding coaling and the hoisting out and launching of boats. On October 14,
Leipzig
rounded the northern point of the island, bringing with her three colliers from San Francisco with 3,000 additional tons of coal.

[
Leipzig
’s cruise had been relatively uneventful. At the beginning of August 1914, she was at Mazatlán Bay on the west coast of Mexico in company with a British sloop and an American warship. Before hostilities began, Captain Johannes Haun sailed north and ten days later was off the entrance to the Straits of San Juan de Fuca, the gateway to Vancouver and Seattle. On August 11, he coaled at San Francisco and then lay off the Golden Gate for five days, keeping Allied shipping in port. On September 3, the Naval Staff signaled Haun to “transfer cruiser warfare to southwest America and the Atlantic.” Moving south, he operated with little success between the coast of Peru and the Galápagos Islands until October 1, when he received orders from Berlin to rendezvous with
Dresden.
On October 3,
Dresden
signaled that she was on her way to Easter Island to join Spee and, accordingly,
Leipzig
also steered for Easter Island.]

Spee’s reinforced squadron was now up to full strength: two armored and three light cruisers.

Easter Island, a possession of Chile, lies 2,200 miles west of South America. Seven miles across at its widest point and thirty-four miles in circumference, the island and its rough grass then supported 250 Polynesian inhabitants, 12,000 sheep, and 2,000 head of cattle. The administrator and nominal governor of the island was the manager of the sheep and cattle ranch, a British subject named Percy Edmonds. The island had no contact with the world other than that provided by a Chilean sailing vessel, which arrived twice a year to carry its beef and wool to market. Without wireless, the islanders knew nothing of the world war; Edmonds, accordingly, was happy to supply Von Spee with fresh meat and vegetables. Cattle were lassoed and slaughtered on the beach, and boatloads of beef and mutton went out to the ships. The Germans also bought livestock for the future, and
Gneisenau
departed Easter Island with eleven lambs and a calf penned on her steel deck. Edmonds accepted payment in checks payable by a German bank in Valparaíso, which subsequently and “vastly to his astonishment and relief” were honored.

One morning, the admiral and his elder son, Otto, from
Nürnberg,
went ashore to look at the mysterious statues for which Easter Island is famous. There were scores of these giant, monolithic figures, between twenty and thirty feet high and wearing conical brimmed hats. Most were lying prostrate when the two German visitors saw them, but once they stood in rows on terraces at the water’s edge. Curiously, all originally were looking, not out to sea as commonly imagined, but inland. The largest weighed up to fifty tons. How had they been transported from the mountain quarries? Whom did the faces represent? Gods whom the carvers wished to propitiate? Chiefs who wished to leave an image of themselves behind?

[Sadly, the statues offered the inhabitants little protection against the perils of this world. An early-eighteenth-century population of 4,000 had plunged to 175 by the end of the nineteenth; internecine warfare, Peruvian slavers, and smallpox were responsible. In 1888, when Chile annexed the island, the survivors were confined to a single village and given 5,000 acres to farm for their subsistence. The remaining 30,000 acres of grasslands were assigned to the grazing of cattle and sheep.]

At the other end of the island, these questions were of such consuming interest to a group of visiting Britons, the members of an archaeological expedition headed by the husband-and-wife team of Scoresby and Katherine Routledge, that they did not bother to cross the island to look at the German ships. Mrs. Routledge, hard at work, declared that she had no intention of riding for four hours “to gaze at the outside of German men of war.” Her concern, rather, was that the visiting officers would come to visit their site, “and being intelligent Germans, would photograph our excavations. We therefore . . . covered up our best things.”

Spee rested at Easter Island for six days. At five p.m. on October 18, with his coal bunkers full and his storage lockers replenished, with lambs and calves penned on his decks, he left for Más Afuera, one of the Juan Fernández group of volcanic islands, 450 miles from the Chilean coast.
Leipzig,
sent ahead to reconnoiter, reported that Más Afuera was clear. Eight days and

1,500 miles later, on the morning of October 26, the German squadron reached Más Afuera. On the island’s northwest side, a sheer wall of rock rose 3,000 feet straight from the sea. At the base of this gigantic cliff lay the island’s best anchorage, a little underwater ledge no deeper than twenty-five or thirty fathoms beyond which the bottom plunged thousands of feet to the ocean floor. Here, the ships cautiously took soundings and anchored. From their decks, the seamen looked up at the volcanic cliff, the steep, thickly wooded slopes cut by zigzag paths, and the thousands of goats nibbling the dry grass. Because Más Afuera was inhabited only by fishermen and their families, Von Spee ignored its Chilean nationality. One afternoon while the squadron was coaling in the damp air and heavy swell, the admiral went ashore to observe the island’s seabirds and bring back some of its early-blooming spring plants.

Admiral von Spee remained at Más Afuera for three days and two nights. Then, in bright moonlight on the night of October 28, the Germans steamed away, leaving behind the massive figure of the rock cliff, which for a long time was visible across the water. A day and a half later, when the ships were forty miles west of the port of Valparaíso, “in glorious sunlight, we saw the snow-capped summit of Aconcagua, the highest mountain of the Andes, rising above the haze of the coast.” The Pacific voyage of the East Asia Squadron was over.

Admiral von Spee had crossed the great ocean, but up to this point, his achievement—beyond the worry he had caused the British Admiralty—had been minimal. He had done no military damage and, because there was no British trade in the regions he had traversed, he had taken no prizes. His voyage had been a technical success; his ships had steamed 12,000 miles through tropical heat without engine trouble; he had kept them supplied, and the morale of his men remained excellent. But, in three months of war, he had done little to contribute to the German cause. From this failure, however, one ship of the East Asia Squadron was excluded. This was
Emden.

The light cruiser
Emden
was the most successful German commerce raider of the Great War. Her forty-one-year-old captain, Karl von Müller, demonstrated what could be done by a fast, modern ship commanded by a man of outstanding ability. Tall and blond, with delicate features and a quiet manner, Müller displayed the qualities Britons liked to associate with their own naval officers: daring, skill, courage, and chivalry. For almost three months after its detachment from Spee’s squadron—that is, from August 14 until November 9—this 3,500-ton ship, operating in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, ravaged Allied shipping and paralyzed trade along the east coast of India. A single light cruiser compelled the Admiralty to keep ships in ports and provide strong escorts for Anzac troop convoys. During these seventy days, Müller intercepted twenty-nine Allied and neutral merchantmen, sinking sixteen British merchant ships, a Russian cruiser, and a French destroyer. He was ingenious:
Emden
had three funnels; Müller quickly made a fourth out of canvas, disguising his ship as an English four-funneled light cruiser. He was scrupulously courteous, even courtly, to his prisoners. No seaman taken from the ships he sank was harmed; all were sent into port on another intercepted ship at the first opportunity. When the captain of one British merchant ship about to be sunk with explosives asked whether he could bring his harmonium to safety, Müller obliged, although the German sailors assigned the task grumbled about “furniture removal.” Two French sailors killed in action against
Emden
were wrapped in tricolor flags and buried at sea with military honors and a gun salute. Müller presided and made a speech about fallen heroes.

Emden
began her marauding career in the Bay of Bengal and between September 10 and September 14 sank eight steamers on the approaches to Calcutta before the Admiralty realized that the ship had left the Pacific. Müller’s enterprise flourished so magnificently that at one point, said one of his officers, “we had five or six vessels collected at one spot. You could just see the tops of the funnels of one, the next was under the water right up to her decks, the next was still fairly normal, just rolling from side to side as she filled with water.” All vessels trading in the bay were immediately held in port. In darkness on the night of September 22, Müller approached to within 3,000 yards of the port city of Madras, switched on his searchlights, and during half an hour fired 125 shells at the Burmah Company’s oil tanks, destroying nearly half a million gallons of kerosene. On October 28, he entered Penang roads at dawn and torpedoed and sank an anchored Russian cruiser. The following day in the open sea, he sank a French destroyer by gunfire.

The British public, seeing that a few German cruisers were apparently doing whatever they chose on the oceans and sinking British merchantmen day after day, was astonished and indignant. Total losses of British tonnage were infinitesimal relative to the nation’s huge maritime resources—
Emden
and
Karlsruhe,
the other successful raider, between them sank 39 merchant ships out of 4,000 vessels at sea, 176,000 tons out of 16 million—but the public demanded to know why, given British naval supremacy, this was happening at all. “The
Emden
’s company have proved their gallantry,” wrote the London
Daily Chronicle.
“We admire the sportsmanship of their exploits as much as we heartily wish that the ship may soon be taken.” The Admiralty offered a variety of excuses but, as the naval historian Arthur Marder has written, “the chief reason is that the sea is very large and afforded ample opportunities, with its many archipelagos, for the game of hide and seek.”