.

She next turned up at the island of St. Felix, 300 miles west of the
Chilean coast, but did not come to the harbor. During the night of
October 14 the inhabitants of that island saw the flash and heard the
roar of an explosion miles out to sea, and for a number of days later
they picked up on their beach the wreckage of what must have been a
collier. As has been related in preceding paragraphs, the _Nuernberg_
took part in that fight. The end of her career came in the battle off
the Falkland Islands, which will be dealt with later.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE GERMAN SEA RAIDERS

While British men-o'-war were capturing German merchantmen and taking
them to British ports, the German raiders which were abroad were earning
terrifying reputations for themselves because the enemy merchantmen with
which they came upon had to be destroyed on the high seas, for there
were no ports to which they could be taken. Prominent among these was
the _Koenigsberg_, a third-class cruiser. When the war came she was in
Asiatic waters and immediately made the east coast of Africa her "beat."
While patrolling it she came upon two British merchant ships, and after
taking from their stores such supplies as were needed she sent them to
the bottom. On September 20, 1914, she made a dash into the harbor of
Zanzibar and found there the British cruiser _Pegasus_, which on account
of her age was undergoing a complete overhauling. She was easy prey for
the German ship, for besides the fact that she was stationary her guns
were of shorter range than those of her adversary. Shell after shell
tore into her till she was battered beyond all resemblance to a fighting
craft. But her flag flew till the end, for though it was shot down from
the masthead, two marines held it aloft, one of them losing his life.
And when the _Koenigsberg_, her task of destruction complete, sailed off,
the lone marine still held up the Union Jack. The British ships in those
waters made a systematic hunt for her and located her at last, on the
30th of October. She was hiding in her favorite rendezvous, some miles
up the Rufigi River in German East Africa. The ship which found her was
the _Chatham_, a second-class cruiser, with a draft much heavier than
that of the _Koenigsberg_, and the difference gave the latter a good
advantage, for she ran up the river and her enemy could not follow. Nor
could the English ship use her guns with much effect, for the gunners
could not make out