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President Wilson, with his cabinet, prepared a bill of particulars containing the grievances against the German government, with special emphasis on the refusal of the latter to liberate seventy-two American seamen taken to Germany as prisoners on the steamer Yarrowdale, one of the vessels captured in the South Atlantic by the raider supposed to be the Moewe.
Having a powerful wireless apparatus aboard, her commander, Count zu Dohna-Schlobitten, a captain-lieutenant in the Imperial navy, was able to keep up with the movements of British patrol vessels. Several intercepted messages told of a strange white liner that refused to answer questions. This was the Moewe, and before passing into the Atlantic she had changed her coat to black.
On the morning of March 5, 1916, she put into Wilhelmshaven with 4 officers, 29 marines and sailors, and 165 men of enemy crews as her prisoners. And the gold bars were secure in the captain's safe. Immediately a fervor of enthusiasm ran through Germany. The Moewe was back after a trip of many thousand miles, with prisoners and bullion aboard.
Twenty-one vessels were reported to have been sunk by the raider, with a total loss of approximately $40,000,000. Victims of the raider who were landed at Pernambuco, Brazil, January 18 stated their belief that she was the steamship Moewe, notorious as a raider early in the war, but later reported docked in the Kiel Canal. It was said that she left the Canal disguised as a Danish hay-ship.
A more legitimate and romantic form of depredation was the cruise of the Moewe, a disguised auxiliary cruiser, which succeeded in January and February 1916 in capturing fifteen British merchantmen in the Atlantic, and returned safe to Kiel with prisoners and booty.
After leaving the shelter of home waters, with the Swedish colors painted on her hull, the Moewe boldly turned her nose down the Channel. She answered the signals of several British cruisers and on one occasion at least was saluted in turn.
She was worth $1,000,000 stripped, while her cargo sold for $700,000. The $250,000 in gold bars which subsequently went into the Berlin strong box also came from the Appam a round $2,000,000. Altogether it was a very good day's work for the Moewe. Not till the Appam arrived in the Virginia harbor was it positively known that a raider had eluded the allied navies.
Another and a somewhat more plausible theory is that the plan contemplated the escape to the open sea, not of the battle cruisers themselves, but of a number of very fast armed merchant cruisers of the Moewe type, which were to repeat the Moewe's exploit on a large scale, serving the same purpose that the submarines served during the period of their greatest activity.
The cruise of the Moewe stands out as one of the heroic, almost Homeric achievements of the war. She left Bremerhaven on December 20, 1915, according to one of her officers who afterward reached the United States, and calmly threaded her way through the meshes of the British navy's North Sea net.
She had sunk fifteen allied vessels thirteen British, one Belgian, and one French with an aggregate tonnage of nearly 60,000. This had been accomplished in the face of her enemies' combined sea power. The Moewe first sailed through the blockade and then came home again by the long way round.
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