'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.

"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.

"One night we started for Penang. [A graphic narrative of this raid on
Penang from the special correspondent of THE NEW YORK TIMES, who was
ashore there, appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES CURRENT HISTORY of March,
1915.] On Oct. 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,
a second torpedo which we fired off from the other side didn't make
the same mistake. After twenty seconds there was absolutely not a
trace of the ship to be seen. The enemy had fired off only about six
shots.

"But now another ship, which we couldn't see, was firing. That was the
French d'Ibreville, toward which we now turned at once. A few minutes
later, an incoming torpedo destroye