SEA DEVIL AGAIN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 238, 8 October 1935, Page 15

SEA DEVIL AGAIN.

A SMILING INVASION. SANK SEVENTEEN SHIPS. BUT TOOK NO LIFE. (Special.—By Air Mail.) LONDON, September 14. The "Sea Devil" came to London this week in the persoli of Count Felix - von Luck nor, Robin Hood of the sea. He is the huge, hawknosed, laughing fellow who took a sailing ship out to sea from Germany during the war, glided gaily through the dense British blockade under the very nose of Jellicoe, gained, the ocean and played havoc with British and Allied shipping in the Atlantic and Pacific. He sank £8,000,000 of Allied shipping with his old windjammer, raiding the trade routes of the ocean# in the guise of an innocent trader. He was one of the greatest menaces to shipping in the latter days of the war and has come to raid England this week with a smile that would open the gates of a prison. Never once in. all hii raids did he cause the loss of a single life. He sank dozens of ships, yet not cvon a ship's cat was drowned. "I have c;ome to raid your hearts," he said as lie bounded down from the air liner at Crovdon.

People flocked round him as he strode, laughing and talking, to the waiting car. "All! How did I get through the blockade?" he laughed in answer to a question. "Well, I know the British are conservative. They believe what they see until they see they are wrong. Then they never believe you again. As I approached the Grand Fleet I was an innocent Norwegian. My old schooner was the most peaceful ship at ?ea. I had a cabin boy of sixteen. I dressed him as a girl to make him look like my wife and paraded him on the deck. I had a sailor playing on a concertina ' It's a Long "Way to Tipperary.' I almost made myself believe I was an innocent Norwegian sailor.

"The honest, conservative British Navy believed I was what I looked and so I got through. And then ... ha! ha!

. . . in the end, when I had escaped everything human, I was • wrecked on the South Sea coral reef. Ho! what a sailor! I had to spend days in an open boat. I ran away <from bome when I was thirteen," he added. "My hero was Buffalo Bill and my one idea was to get .to America to see him. But the boat I ran away in was bound for Australia!"

It was not until years later that Count von Luekncr, having tramped from San Francisco to Colorado, reached his hero's home, only to find that lie had fjone to Germany! On his return home Count von Luckncr enlisted in the Germany navy. "I sank 17 ships and millions of pounds' worth of cargo," he said. "But in every single case wc managed to save the crews. My own mother has always been my best friend," he continued, "and I am glad that no action of mine has caused another mother to mourn her son."