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With Schiller in command the Matoppo headed down the coast, her captor keeping vigil. Off Delaware he ordered the captain to make port. The latter obeyed, but also signaled to shore that a pirate was aboard. Port authorities then sent a boat alongside, and Schiller was arrested. He admitted under examination that he and three other men had plotted to blow up the Cunard liner Pannonia.
There is the inevitable female whom you met once in Devonshire, or the Matoppo Hills, or somewhere, who charges up to you with the remark that it's funny how one always meets people one knows at the Academy. Personally, I don't think it funny." "I suffered in that way just now," said Reginald plaintively, "from a woman whose word I had to take that she had met me last summer in Brittany."
On the morning of March 30, 1916, the steamship Matoppo, a British freighter, put into Lewes, Delaware, with her master and his crew of fifty men held prisoners by a single individual. Ernest Schiller, as he called himself, had gone aboard the Matoppo in New York, March 29, 1916, and hid himself away until the vessel passed Sandy Hook, bound for Vladivostok.
I feel persuaded that one of the reasons why he chose to be buried in the Matoppo Hills was that, in selecting this lonely spot, he felt that he would not often be called upon to see the place where he would rest one day. This dread of the unknown, so rare in people of his calibre, remained with him until the end. It increased in acuteness as his health began to fail.
As he used to say himself sometimes, he was never so happy and never felt so free and so much at peace with the world and with mankind as among the Matoppo Hills. The statesmanlike qualities which Cecil Rhodes undoubtedly possessed were weakened by contact with inferior people.
They bought the dynamite and made the bombs, but his companions' courage failed, and the plan was abandoned. Then it was proposed to stow away on some outward bound ship, seize her at sea and make for Germany. With this purpose in mind Schiller got aboard the Matoppo, but the other conspirators deserted him. Not to be foiled, he captured the vessel single-handed.
The episode to which I refer, when he alone had had the courage to go unattended and unarmed to meet the savage chiefs assembled in the Matoppo Hills, had, by the way, done more than anything else to consolidate the position of the chairman of De Beers in South Africa. During the first administration of Cape Colony by Mr.
Then he came out and with the aid of two weapons which the captain described as horse pistols, proceeded to cow the master and crew. Schiller announced that the Matoppo was a German prize of war and that he would shoot the first man who moved a hostile hand. The crew believed him. They also had an uneasy fear that certain bombs which Schiller mentioned would be set off unless they obeyed.
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