Seeadler wrecked

On 2 August 1917 the German raider Seeadler was wrecked on the reef of the small atoll of Maupihaa, then called Mopelia. The atoll lies in the western part of the Society Islands, about 450 kilometres from Tahiti, in what is now French Polynesia. So ended the 225-day cruise of the sailing ship which in December 1916 had slipped through the British blockade disguised as a Norwegian timber ship. None of the crew or the prisoners died, but the ship was lost.

The last weeks of the cruise

In the Atlantic Seeadler had sunk eleven ships by March 1917. She then rounded Cape Horn and entered the Pacific, and the British cruisers lost track of her. Kapitänleutnant Count Felix von Luckner took the ship to the central Pacific, where he hoped to find American sailing ships. According to the British official history of the war at sea, however, in more than five weeks there he took only three American schooners: A. B. Johnson, R. C. Slade and Manila. The crew, without fresh food for months, began to suffer from scurvy. The ship also needed her fouled hull cleaned. Luckner therefore headed south, to an uninhabited atoll covered with coconut palms, where turtles could be caught and the men could recover their strength.

At the end of July, on 28 July according to the British official history, Seeadler anchored off Mopelia. The entrance to the lagoon was too narrow and winding to bring the sailing ship in, so she lay at anchor outside the reef. For several days the crew and the prisoners rested in a camp on shore.

A wave or a mistake at anchor

On the morning of 2 August the ship was driven onto the reef and within a few minutes became a wreck. Exactly what happened is not certain. Luckner related that the sea suddenly rose and a huge wave, later described as a tsunami, broke the anchor chains and threw the ship onto the coral before the engine could be started. This version was adopted by the British official history, which in this part relies on his memoirs, and is repeated by many works. According to the accounts of some of the prisoners, and following them some historians, the cause was careless anchoring: current and wind pushed onto the reef a ship that almost nobody was watching, since most of the men were ashore. German authors suggest that Luckner invented the story of the wave to protect his officers.

The Robinsons of Mopelia

The castaways saved two boats, weapons, food, sailcloth and timber from the wreck. On shore a settlement of huts grew up, which Luckner called “Seeadler village”. On the atoll there were about 60 Germans and several dozen prisoners, mostly Americans from the sunk schooners. According to German works there were 46 or 47 of them.

Luckner did not intend to wait for rescue. On 23 August he set out with five men in an open motor boat about six metres long, armed with rifles and hand grenades. He wanted to seize a schooner, return for the rest of the crew and start the cruiser war afresh. Via Atiu and Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, where according to the British official history he and his companions passed themselves off as Americans of Dutch descent, he reached Fiji after a month. There, on the island of Wakaya, around 21–22 September he was detained by the local police. Luckner, caught out of uniform, surrendered without a fight. He was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in New Zealand, from which in December 1917 he escaped once more on a captured schooner, but was caught after a few days.

The men left on Mopelia under Lieutenant Alfred Kling on 5 September seized the small French schooner Lutece (126 tons), which had come to the atoll. They renamed her Fortuna and sailed her to Easter Island, where in October they were interned by the authorities of Chile. The American and French prisoners remained on the atoll. Four of them, with the captain of the schooner A. B. Johnson, sailed in the last boat to Pago Pago in American Samoa and informed the authorities. Only then did the Allies learn what had become of the raider.

The cruise in figures

Seeadler sank fourteen ships, three steamers and eleven sailing ships, totalling about 30,000 tons. She stopped two others and let them go, among them the French barque Cambronne, onto which she transferred the prisoners from the Atlantic. Compared with the losses inflicted by submarines this was a modest result, but the cruise tied down dozens of Allied warships on several oceans. During the whole voyage only one man died, a sixteen-year-old seaman from the steamer Horngarth, fatally scalded by steam from a damaged pipe. Because of this, and because of his good treatment of prisoners, Luckner, the “Sea Devil”, earned respect even among his enemies.