“Von Luckner preferred to capture his prey rather than kill. In its entire career as a raider, Seeadler’s guns only took a single life.”

By Blaine Pardoe

THE STORIED AGE OF SAIL was long over by the outbreak of the First World War. It had been almost a century since Europe had witnessed a sea battle fought by wind-powered fleets; steel-hulled battleships now ruled the waves.

Yet remarkably, that fact didn’t stop the Imperial German Navy, or Kaiserliche Marine, from turning history’s last fighting ship-of-sail loose onto the high seas during the war’s third year. Less than six months after the Battle of Jutland, Germany cut-loose a windjammer to conduct commerce raiding.

She was known as the Seeadler or Sea Eagle and over a period of nine months beginning in late 1916, the 64-man crew of the obsolescent armed three-master and their aristocratic skipper, Kapitänleutnant Felix von Luckner, would cruise two oceans and capture a total of 16 merchant ships, while making headlines around the world.

Von Luckner was born in 1881 to a minor royal family in Prussia. Previous generations of his family had thrown their lot in with Napoleon as cavalry commanders of Count Luckner’s Hussars. Since then, they were something of a cavalry family, which did not settle well with the young Felix, who yearned to go to sea.

At the age of 13, he ran away from home, adopting an alias and getting work as a deck hand on a sailing vessel. In 1905, he graduated the Lübeck Navigation College and enlisted in the German navy.

Von Luckner was also an oddity among German nobility. He had lived as a commoner and had many grand stories to tell of his youth on the high seas as a ship’s mate. He soon became a favorite in the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It was this relationship with the German emperor that would set him on the course that would define his life.

When Germany found itself at war in 1914, its navy relied heavily on merchant raiding vessels. These were armed steamships, often converted from captured freighters. Sailing under false colours, they appeared to casual observers as neutral cargo vessels. They would come alongside an enemy ship, run up the German flag, drop the façades concealing their guns, and demand the enemy captain surrender. Most raiders took the crews as prisoners and sunk their target ships along with their cargo.

Despite their reputation as fearsome hunters, merchant raiders faced almost insurmountable perils in their missions. The British blockade of the North Sea meant they were subject to being boarded, inspected and discovered. The ships themselves had little armor and their firepower was often no match for the guns of even small patrol craft. Just getting from the North Sea into the Atlantic required both bravado and luck.

In 1916, a German navy lieutenant named Alfred Kling, came up with the novel idea of outfitting a windjammer sailing vessel as a merchant raider. It was reasoned that a square-rigged tall ship might easily deceive the ships blockading Germany and slip out into the international shipping lanes to raid commerce.

The navy would test the concept with the 245-foot long, three-masted clipper The Pass of Balmaha. Launched in 1888, the Boston-owned sailing freighter was captured by a U-boat in 1915. She was armed with two 4.2-inch guns hidden behind piles of false lumber on the deck along with a pair of heavy machineguns. A 900-hp diesel engine made the experimental raider not wholly dependent on the wind. To the uninformed, she would appear as a Norwegian merchant vessel dubbed the Hero. Her true identity was the Seeadler or Sea Eagle.

When a search was made of German naval officers with experience aboard large sailing vessels, Von Luckner’s name rose to the top of the list. In his own account, the Kaiser raised the mission with him as a challenge.

“Well Von Luckner, at the Admiralty, they tell me it is madness to attempt the blockade in a sailing ship. What do you think?”

“Well, your majesty, if our Admiralty says it is impossible and ridiculous, then I am sure it can be done.”

The Seeadler and her crew set sail for the Atlantic shipping lanes on Dec. 17, 1916. On Christmas Day, she was caught north of England by an auxiliary cruiser, HMS Avenger. Von Luckner passed the ship and its crew off as Norwegians to the British lookouts observing the ship through their binoculars, with one crewmember going so far as putting on a dress and wig to masquerade as one of the officers’ wives. The British were fooled and let the ship pass.

Once in the Atlantic the Seeadler began its illustrious career as the last sailing raider on the high seas. Her first victim was the British transport Gladys Royale. After hailing the unsuspecting vessel and asked to approach for a chronometer reading, Von Luckner and his crew revealed themselves. All aboard the Gladys Royale were taken alive, the ship was stripped of its coal and she was sent to the bottom. Von Luckner made his guests as comfortable as possible and even dined with the captured captain and his wife.

Over the coming weeks, the Seeadler would use similar tactics to take more than a dozen vessels as she made her way into the South Atlantic. Von Luckner and the crew would lure in their prey with a request for news of the war, or some other pretense, at which point they’d hoist their colours, unmask their guns and demand immediate surrender. Often just the sign of the artillery was enough to compel the merchants to surrender. If that didn’t work, a warning shot would be fired, then the ship would be fired on.

Von Luckner preferred to capture his prey rather than kill. In its entire career as a raider, Seeadler’s guns only took a single life: a young boy hit by a shell fragment aboard the merchant vessel the Horngarth.

With over 200 prisoners taken, Von Luckner ended up putting his captives aboard one of his captured vessels, with orders for them to go to a neutral port. Upon their arrival, those onboard let it be known that the Germans had converted a sailing ship into a merchant raider. The exploits of the Seeadler became international news. They also proved to be a boon for German public relations, as the former prisoners spoke highly of their treatment by the ship’s swashbuckling captain.

On April 16, Seeadler rounded Cape Horn and entered the Pacific where a British cruiser had been poised to intercept them. Fortunately for Von Luckner, the clipper slipped away in a storm. The raider had an entirely new ocean to patrol, and with the United States only having just entered the war, there would be new prey to stalk.

By July however, a new enemy had presented itself: disease. After eight months at sea, both the Seeadler’s and their prisoners were all showing signs of scurvy and beriberi. Recognizing the need for fresh provisions, Von Luckner ordered the crew ashore on a remote Pacific atoll called Mopelia Island. Somehow while anchored, the Seeadler slipped her mooring and was sunk on the reef. The entire crew was marooned… or so it seemed.

Never one to give up, Von Luckner took one of the lifeboats, fitted it with a mast, and in late August set sail to capture a ship and return for his crew. Dubbing the small craft Kronprinzessin Cecilie, the wily count sailed to the Cook Islands where searched for prey. Von Luckner and his small party were captured near Fiji while preparing to seize another vessel.

A worldwide celebrity of sorts, the German captain was placed in a New Zealand POW camp where he was the ranking officer who seemed to forever be plotting his escape. Like something out of the 1960s sitcom, Hogan’s Heroes, Von Luckner used a camp play as a diversion while he stole the commandant’s sword and, more importantly, his personal launch. After a brief return to the sea, he and his prize crew were captured again in December 1917, this time for the rest of the war. Ironically, his crew on Mopelia Island had seized a passing merchant ship and had made it as far as Easter Island before being taken themselves and interned in South America.

Von Luckner returned home after the war as a national hero. American journalist Lowell Thomas wrote about the Seeadler’s adventures, while the count’s own memoirs made much of his exploits. Von Luckner was welcomed in the U.S. where he lectured about his cruise.

During the Second World War, Von Luckner became a critic of Germany’s Nazi regime and despite an offer to return to the high seas, he was sidelined to his hometown of Halle. When the American’s came to liberate the town, Von Luckner sneaked through the lines of battle and successfully negotiated for the Germans with General Terry Allen, leaving the town so that it could be occupied by U.S. troops, saving the residents from certain destruction.

Von Luckner returned to fame again in 1959 when the American TV show, This is Your Life, featured him as a guest, reuniting him with some of his former ‘prisoners.’

While the exploits of the Seeadler did not tip the scales of the naval war, their raid impacted insurance rates and curtailed and rerouted Allied shipping. While materially the $25 million in cargo did not change the results of the war, it certainly was a hinderance. It marked the last time that a major government used a sailing vessel as a commerce raider.

What was more compelling than the raid was the bravado and daring of the dashing captain/count.

Blaine Pardoe is a New York Times bestselling author and military historian. His book, Cruise of the Sea Eagle, is the definitive account of the voyage of the Seeadler and Count Von Luckner’s extraordinary life.

(Originally published on Sept 22, 2020)