COUNT YON LUCKNER

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 67, 20 March 1931, Page 7

COUNT YON LUCKNER

LOVE FOR NEW ZEALAND

COMING WITH HIS YACHT

NEW YORK, 10th March,

Count Felix yon Luekner has announced plans for taking his schooneryacht Mopelia to New Zealand next winter, "because I love that country."

Count .Felix yon Luckner, the commander of the little Seeadler, which became a buccaneering craft in the South Seas, was a romantic figure of the war, and boasts that ho- is a privateer who never killed a man. "With a small crew and a mere three-masted windjammer ho passed through the British blockade, undergoing inspection, and roamed the' sea at will, capturing ship after ship. He took, in all, 68,000 tons of Allied shipping and sent it to the bottom, and sunk also 58,000 tons of precious saltpetre which was needed for munitions. "The Seeadler," he said years afterwards, "was a bluff. She had wickedlooking holes under her-rails threatening her enemies, but the 'only cannon sho had on board was an antique muz-zle-loader, made in 1817, which was made to look extra dangerous by being covered with a painted barrel. '.' The ship sailed under the Norwegian flag, and posed as a lumber vessel. Yon Luckner ran away to sea at the age of 13, served as a cabin boy, and worked in a kitchen and a sawmill in Australia. It was after a visit to the United States, where was billed as a champion boxer from Queensland, that he returned to Germany and joined the navy, obtaining his commission in 1905. He entered the World War full of enthusiasm, and set out on the audacious cruise, which saw him sink fourteen Allied merchant ships. The Seeadler then was lost on a coral reef, and the Count took live companions and travelled 2000 miles in a small boat in the attempt to capture another ship. He was captured before he could carry out his plan, and was taken to Motuihi Island in the Hauraki Gulf. Here he made a clever escape, taking tho commandant's launch and his best uniform, but, being overhauled by the cable steamer Iris and returned to gaol after boarding a scow laden with lumber. This ship, the Moa, was unsuitable for an ocean voyage, and yon Luckner could only have remained on the coast. The Moa had no keel and drew only three feet of- water. Yon Buckner spent the rest of the war period in Mount Eden Prison, and did not return to Germany until July, 1919.