ame on board, solitary farmers who were in touch with the
world only every three months through schooners. They knew nothing about
the war, took us for an English man-of-war, and asked us to repair their
motor boat for them. We kept still and invited them to dinner in our
officers' mess. Presently they stood still in front of the portrait of
the Kaiser, quite astounded. 'This is a German ship!' We continued to
keep still. 'Why is your ship so dirty?' they asked. We shrugged our
shoulders. 'Will you take some letters for us?' they asked. 'Sorry,
impossible; we don't know what port we'll run into.' Then they left our
ship, but about the war we told them not a single word.

[Sidenote: Coal steamers captured.]

"Now we went toward Miniko, where we sank two ships more. The Captain of
one of them said to us: 'Why don't you try your luck around north of
Miniko? There's lots of ships there now?' On the next day we found three
steamers to the north, one of them with much desired Cardiff coal. From
English papers on captured ships we learned that we were being hotly
pursued. The stokers also told us a lot. Our pursuers evidently must
also have a convenient base. Penang was the tip given us. There we had
hopes of finding two French cruisers.

[Sidenote: The fourth smokestack.]

"One night we started for Penang. On October 28 we raised our very
practicable fourth smokestack--Muecke's own invention. As a result, we
were taken for English or French. The harbor of Penang lies in a channel
difficult of access. There was nothing doing by night; we had to do it
at daybreak. At high speed, without smoke, with lights out, we steered
into the mouth of the channel. A torpedo boat on guard slept well. We
steamed past its small light. Inside lay a dark silhouette; that must be
a warship! But it wasn't the French cruiser we were looking for. We
recognized the silhouette--dead sure; that was the Russian cruiser
_Jemtchug_. There it lay, there it slept like a rat. No watch to be
seen. They made it easy for us. Because of the narrowness of the harbor
we had to keep close; we fired the first torpedo at 400 yards. Then to
be sure things livened up a bit on the sleeping warship. At the same
time we took the crew quarters under fire, five shells at a time. There
was a flash of flame on board, then a kind of burning aureole. After the
fourth shell, the flame burned high. The first torpedo had struck the
ship too deep because we were too close to it,