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Updated: June 14, 2025
Helgoland and the newly enlarged Kiel Canal were hives where an intensive industry kept every man and vessel fit. And the navy grew while it waited. It was not the work of a day, though, nor of a generation, to match the sea power that Great Britain had spent centuries in building.
In ancient days Helgoland was ten times larger than it its now, and on this old rocky island, which had been the last aslyum of the gods of northern paganism, lived a warlike people, who knew no other laws than those, of their own will, no other toil than piracy, and who submitted to no other master than the chieftain chosen from among their most colossal fellows.
The girl explained to him that her father dwelt in these houses, and the church was one of the seven that stood in his realm, which extended all over Helgoland and Finmark. No service was held in them yet, but it would be held when the drowned bishop, who sat outside in a brown study, could only hit upon the name of the Lord that was to be served, and then all the Draugs would go to church.
In Helgoland the swarms of smugglers sheltered, who had taken upon themselves the risk of trading English goods, against which Napoleon's hatred tried to shut the entire continent. There came the crowd of foreign merchants, to purchase of English dealers the goods which Napoleon's decrees had prohibited in his own dominions, as well as in those of his allies.
The scene of the battle which took place here was the Bight of Helgoland, which formed a channel eighteen miles wide some seven miles north of the island and near which lay the line of travel for ships leaving the ports of the Elbe.
There was Helgoland, the mysterious island; Cuxhaven, at the mouth of the river Elbe; Buxtehude, notoriously known from a very peculiar ferocious breed of dogs; Norse Loch on the coast of Holstein, and numerous other locker, or inlets, hard to find, harder to enter when found and hardest to pronounce.
But by now the heavy British battle cruisers Lion and Queen Mary had also come down from the northwest to take part in the fighting, and letting the Arethusa escape from the range of the light cruiser Köln, they went for the German, which, overpowered, fled toward Helgoland.
When this naval force was first discovered by the lookouts on Helgoland, there immediately appeared approaching from the German base two Zeppelins and a number of German seaplanes, together with some submarines. Meanwhile, from the decks of the British craft there went up the seven British seaplanes.
According to the statement of Admiral Jellicoe, the British fleet has for some months past made a practice of sweeping the North Sea from time to time with practically its whole force of fighting ships, with a view to discouraging raids by the German fleet, and in the hope of meeting any force which might, whether for raiding or for any other purpose, have ventured out beyond the fortifications and mine fields of the Helgoland Bight.
The twenty-one little and speedy German boats bravely came out and chased the two British destroyers and three submarines, while a German seaplane slowly circled upward to see if the surrounding regions harbored enemies. Presumably the airman found what he sought for he soon flew back to report to Helgoland.
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