Seeadler sets sail

On 21 December 1916 the German raider Seeadler (Sea Eagle), one of the last sailing ships in history to wage war at sea, put to sea. She was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Count Felix von Luckner. The three-master, disguised as a Norwegian ship carrying timber to Australia, was to slip through the British blockade and sink Allied ships on the distant oceans. The British chronology of the war places her departure, with the reservation that the date is approximate, under 22 November. The British official history of the war at sea, German studies and Luckner’s biographies all agree, however, on 21 December. Seeadler was the third German raider sent out onto the trade routes that winter, after the auxiliary cruiser Möwe and the freighter Wolf.

A sailing ship from Glasgow

Seeadler began life as Pass of Balmaha, a steel sailing ship built in 1888 at Robert Duncan’s yard in Port Glasgow in Scotland. When the war broke out she belonged to an American owner. In the summer of 1915 she was sailing with cotton from New York to Archangel. A British auxiliary cruiser stopped her and, with a British prize crew on board, sent her to Kirkwall in the Orkneys, but on the way she was stopped by the German submarine U-36. Its commander judged the cotton to be contraband and sent the ship to Cuxhaven. The British spent the whole voyage hidden in the hold.

The German navy was then looking for a way to resume cruiser warfare on the oceans. Steamers lacked coal, because they no longer had overseas bases. A sailing ship needed no coal. At the Tecklenborg yard in Geestemünde (PL) Pass of Balmaha was given an auxiliary engine, fuel and water tanks, hidden quarters for prisoners and two 105 mm guns concealed behind drop-down bulwarks. On 2 December 1916 she was commissioned as Seeadler.

The Sea Devil

The navy could not have found a better commander. Luckner, born in 1881 in Dresden, ran away from home as a teenager and sailed under an assumed name as an ordinary seaman on sailing ships. He then obtained a merchant navy officer’s certificate, and only thanks to family connections did he get into the navy. At the Battle of Jutland he commanded a gun turret on the battleship Kronprinz, and according to the British official history he later served on the raider Möwe under Nikolaus zu Dohna-Schlodien. He was almost the only naval officer with extensive experience of sailing large square-riggers.

The British official history describes with admiration the care of his preparations. Luckner found in the registers a Norwegian sailing ship similar to his own and decided to impersonate her. He obtained a full set of false papers for a voyage with timber to Melbourne, and even labelled the ship’s instruments with the names of Norwegian firms. The crew, numbering 63–64 men according to different sources, was chosen from sailors who knew Norwegian. Each was given a false name and a bundle of letters from a supposed family and sweetheart, written by an expert in Norwegian and copied out in different handwriting. One of the young sailors was to pose as the captain’s wife, suffering from toothache.

Through the blockade

Seeadler waited a long time in the Heligoland Bight to sail. When she finally did, she at once ran into a heavy south-westerly gale, which drove her far to the north. According to Luckner’s account, on 25 December, between Iceland and the Faroe Islands, she was stopped by a British auxiliary cruiser. According to many studies it was Avenger, while the British official history considered it likely to have been Patia. The boarding party examined the papers and the log, while the German part of the crew sat armed, hidden in the hold. The British noticed nothing and sailed away. The Germans then threw the camouflage cargo of timber overboard, hoisted the naval ensign and celebrated Christmas in uniform.

Seeadler’s cruise lasted 225 days. In the Atlantic, and then in the Pacific, the raider sank more than a dozen ships, most of them sailing ships, and treated her prisoners so well that she was praised even in British accounts. According to all sources only one man died during the whole cruise. In August 1917 Seeadler was wrecked on the reef of the island of Mopelia in French Polynesia, and Luckner, known as the “Sea Devil” (Seeteufel), was taken prisoner and became one of the legends of this war.