COUNT VON LUCKNER

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 195, 15 May 1936, Page 20

COUNT VON LUCKNER

Famous War Prisoner To Visit Dominion By Telegraph.—Press Association. Auckland, May 14. Count Felix von Luckner, whose war-time escape from Motuihi Island at Auckland with other German prisoners of war and seizure of the scow Moa will be well remembered, expects to visit Auckland at the end ot the present year in his own yacht. In a letter to an Auckland resident, he says that he often thinks of New Zealand, where he spent six months as a prisoner of war and was treated in every way as a gentleman. Von Luckner, a German naval officer, commanded the. auxiliary sailing ship Seeadler. After capturing and sinking a number of ships the Seeadler came to grief on a coral reef in the Society group. Von Luckner and a few members of the crew then sailed in a whaleboat to the Cook Islands and Fiji and, exciting suspicion, were arrested at Wakaya Island and brought to Auckland, where they were interned on Motuihi. In December, 1917, they seized a launch and captured the scow Moa off Mercury Island. They then sailed for the Kermadee Islands and the Moa was at Curtis Island when the cable steamer Iris, now the Recorder, sent out from Auckland, came up with her. After a shot was , fired von Luckner surrendered. At the end of the war von Luckner and his companions were sent back to their own country.