WILES OF THE SEEADLER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2244, 26 February 1921, Page 1

WILES OF THE SEEADLER.

LOVE-LETTERS AS EVIDENCE.

The Berlin correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph writes that in a lecture delivered there, Count Luekner, who commanded the sailing cruiser Seeadler, described the tricks by which that vessel managed to slip through the British blockade disguised as a Norwegian merchant ship. He did not say how he. came by the “genuine log book,” but he told how all the members of the crew took on Norwegian nsfines, and learned out of “Baedeker” the topography of the places where they professed to have been born. They were also, somehow, furnished with photographs of sweethearts, which they had to show as evidence that they had been taken at the sailors’ birthplaces. The most difficult task was the provision of love-letters, which seafaring men are accustomed to hoard up for years. It was known, said the Count, that Ihe British were accustomed to take “samples” of such letters, and it was therefore necessary to have them available. Seven men-spent weeks in doing nothing but wiit.e such love-letters.

The ship’s papers “were altered by engraving, and rendered illegible by artificial dampness.” During an overhauling by a British warship one of the crew played the part of the captain’s wife, and in order to escape detection pretended to have toothache, and lay in a bunk with his head swathed in compresses. The result of the-British search was that an “officer gave a certificate that the completely illegible papers were in order.”-