Through an oily sea we sailed south and west toward the Falkland Islands. Many a time had I passed this way in the old days when bound for Cape Horn. These islands of the South Atlantic have long been the base for whaling schooners. But to every German the Falklands will be forever memorable as the scene of a one-sided naval engagement in which one of our best beloved admirals was overwhelmed by a British fleet. Had you seen our deck as we sailed south during these days, you might have wondered what we were about. Along with other plunder, we had looted captured ships of several great sheets of iron. We had ripped them from iron walls and roofs of forecastles and stowed them on our deck. Now the mechanics of the _Seeadler's_ motor crew got busy with acetylene torches, and from those sheets of metal they welded a great iron cross, ten feet high. We drew near a spot on that lonely ocean just a bit to the east of the Falkland Islands. My navigation officer and I figured out the point carefully on our chart, and when our instruments told us we were there, I called all hands on deck. Somewhere far below on the floor of the ocean were the bodies of hundreds of our comrades and the battered hulks of a once proud German fleet. It was in these very waters that our gallant Pacific Squadron under Count von Spee sank in three thousand fathoms. For here it was that our light cruisers, the _Scharnhorst_, _Gneisenau_, _Nuremburg_, and _Leipsic_, with odds against them, fought it out with a more powerful British squadron. With flag at half mast, we stood at solemn attention. The sky was gray and melancholy. The sea rolled with a gentle swell. In our mind's eye we could picture that disastrous day when, outranged by the guns of the great British warships, our cruisers, two large and three small, had fought a losing and hopeless fight. One, a scout cruiser, escaped. The others went down. Pounded from the distance, they trembled under the blows of the shells that rained down upon them. Exploding projectiles raked the decks and pierced the hulls of the ill-fated vessels. As if in a last struggle, trying to keep afloat for one more shot at the enemy, they staggered, lurched, and then, one after the other, plunged into the depths, entering port on their final voyage far below on the ocean floor, eighteen thousand feet beneath the surface. Every man aboard three of the ships was lost. A high sea happened to be running at the time, so the victors had little chance to rescue the men from the doomed ships. Two hundred and fifty members of the crew of the _Gneisenau_ were picked up and got to the Falklands alive. As if in a dream, I thought of the last time I saw my friend Count von Spee. It was in the days before the world went mad. The Navy Yard at Kiel was in gala mood. Every warship in the harbour had sent three hundred men. They stood at rigid attention while Von Spee and his staff strode by. Then he addressed them.