We made ready to abandon the lifeboat. Our belongings required careful packing. We put rifles, machine guns, cartridges, and grenades in our canvas bags, wrapped our naval uniforms around these, and then rolled each bundle in a couple of blankets and tied it securely. A casual handling would not reveal the armament inside. Each of us took a pistol in one pocket and a hand grenade in the other. At eight o'clock we went aboard the schooner. Our manœuvres had been made carefully, and we had attracted no undue notice of the people who were suspicious of us. Aboard, the captain received us hospitably, and we went around looking over what we expected to make our next prize of war. And a prize she was, just a year out of the shipyard and beautifully finished in every detail. "Look at the saloon," I muttered to Leudemann as we wandered around, "think of what meals we will have here. No more hardtack with loose teeth to bite it. And look at those cabins. Won't those bunks be comfortable when it blows and rains? And what a fine big level deck to walk on, so different from the bottom of our lifeboat." The schooner had two new motors capable of driving her along at a lively clip. They would enable us to cover a lot of the wide Pacific and run down many a copra-laden clipper. The captain told us he had aboard a miscellaneous cargo of cloth, white shoes, helmets, silk underwear for the wives of planters and traders, silk stockings, and so on. He was provisioned for a cruise of six months, and had aboard large stores of preserved fruits and vegetables and six thousand pounds of fresh meat. I said to myself: "Just what we want, by Joe." Here was the perfect prize. What would our comrades marooned back there on Mopelia say when we turned up with this beautiful schooner in tip-top shape, with powerful motors, well-provisioned and all? Already we could hear the lusty cheers, as, with the German flag at our mast, we drew up and cast anchor off the coral reef. I looked up at the trim masts and spars and around at the freshly scrubbed woodwork of the deck and spoke silently to the schooner, calling her by a new name. "Ho, there, _Seeadler-the-Second_! You'll like it as an auxiliary cruiser. We'll have a lot of fun together, by Joe." I could hardly wait for her to raise anchor and set sail. But we had counted that brood of mental chickens before they had hatched, by Joe. A steamer slid into port!