_Fitted out as a motor schooner under command of Count von Luckner, with a crew of sixty-eight men, half of whom spoke Norwegian, the German commerce raider Seeadler (Sea Eagle) slipped out from Bremerhaven in December, 1916, encountered a British cruiser, passed inspection, and later proceeded, with the aid of two four-inch guns that had been hidden under a cargo of lumber, to capture and destroy thirteen merchant vessels in the Atlantic before rounding the Horn into the Pacific and there sinking three American schooners before meeting a picturesque fate in the South Sea Islands. The narrative of the Seeadler's career as here told by CURRENT HISTORY MAGAZINE is believed to be the most complete yet published._ On Christmas Day, 1916, the British patrol vessel Highland Scot met and hailed a sailing vessel which declared itself without ceremony to be the three-masted Norwegian schooner Irma, bound from Christiania to Sydney with a cargo of lumber. As nothing was more natural, the vessel was allowed to pass, and soon disappeared on the horizon. A few days later, in the Atlantic, running before a northerly gale, this neat-looking, long-distance freighter threw its deck load of planks and beams into the ocean, brought from their hiding places two four-inch guns, six machine guns, two gasoline launches, and a motor powerful enough to propel the vessel without the use of sails on occasion. Then a wireless dispatch sent in cipher from aerials concealed in the rigging announced that the German raider Seeadler was ready for business. On the bow the legend, "Irma, Christiania," and at the masthead the flag of Norway remained to lure the raider's victims to destruction. The Seeadler had formerly been the American ship Pass of Balmaha, 2,800 tons, belonging to the Boston Lumber Company. In August, 1915, while on its way from New York to Archangel, it was captured by a German's submarine and sent to Bremen, where it was fitted out as a raider. Under the name of the Seeadler it left Bremerhaven on Dec. 21, 1916, in company with the Möwe, ran the British blockade by the ruse indicated above, and began its career of destruction on two oceans. While the Möwe waylaid its twenty-two victims along the African coast, the Seeadler turned southwest and preyed on South American trade.