"I learned a good many things in those few hours I spent in the _Emden_ of the way of the Hun officers with their men, and the 'cat-o'-nine-tails' I have told you of were not the worst.
"A rather decent sort of chap, who said that he had learned his English working on a Scotchman's farm in Argentina, took me to a doorway leading to a flat from which a ladder had descended to the engine-room and stokeholds. Across that doorway was lying the body of an officer, which nobody seemed to have taken the trouble to move. He was the Gunnery Lieutenant, the chap said, and had been driving up stokers at the point of his revolver to serve a gun whose crew had been knocked out when he was killed. The officer's body was somewhat scorched by lyddite, but from the line of the burns it looked as if they were made after he fell.
"What looked to me very much like a bullet wound in the side of the head struck me at once as the likely cause of his death. 'Did one of his own men shoot him?' I asked; but the chap--seeing a young officer who, I later learned, was Prince Franz Joseph Hohenzollern, a relative of the Kaiser, approaching--only shrugged his shoulder and raised his eyebrows and walked away. I didn't like to ask about the incident after the men were prisoners on the _Sydney_, but just the same there has never been any doubt in my mind as to what occurred.
"Most of my time on the _Emden_ was put in standing by on the quarterdeck in case there was any signalling to be done, and this gave me a good chance to get a line on a little ceremony which had been carried out there just after she sent her flag down.
"We had seen them burn that flag, but just what other things went into that fire we never knew exactly. The nature of some of them, however, I began to surmise when I came upon charred fragments of Bank of England notes lying about among the wreckage and sticking in the cracks of the warped deck. Several coins which I picked up turned out to be English shillings and German marks. I noticed that some of our lads were pushing the search with much energy whenever they had a chance, paying especial attention to the cracks between the charred planking and the deck. When fire-blackened gold sovereigns began to make their appearance in the _Sydney_, and kept appearing even after we had been for months in the West Indies and South Atlantic, I understood the reason for their energy.