These refugees told, one and all, the same story. There would be a smudge of smoke on the horizon and within minutes the long slender German cruiser would come churning up out of the distance with the speed of an express train, firing a shot across the bows and signalling for the surrender of the trader. The prize crew came aboard, always acting with the most punctilious politeness and treating crew and passengers with apologetic kindness. If the vessel was old and slow, her coal was taken, the useful parts of her cargo transferred, her crew and passengers removed to safety and the craft sent to the bottom with bombs or by opening the sea cocks. If, on the other hand, the captured ship was modern and swift, she was manned from the cruiser, loaded with coal and other needed supplies, crowded with the captives and made to form an escort. At one time the cruiser is said to have had six such vessels in her train, at another four. When there got to be too many passengers and other captives, the least worthy of the vessels was detached and ordered to steam to a given port, being allowed just enough coal to get there. As early as October 4, 1914, two months after the opening of hostilities, it was announced that the _Karlsruhe_ had captured thirteen British merchantmen in the Atlantic, including four hundred prisoners. She did much better than that before she was through and the chances are she had then already put about twenty ships out of business, for this was a conservative announcement from the British Admiralty, which let it be known soon afterwards that all of seventy British war vessels were hunting the _Karlsruhe_ and her sister raider, the _Emden_. Shipping in the Atlantic was in a perilous way and excitement was high among newspaper readers ashore, who watched the game of hide and seek with all the interest of spectators at some magnificent sporting event. Nor was the sympathy all against the German, for the odds were too heavy. The wildest rumors were floating in by every craft that reached port from the Southern Atlantic, by radio and by cable. On October 27, a Ward Line boat came into New York with the report that she had observed a night battle off the Virginia Capes between the German raider and British men-of-war. On November 3 came the report that the _Karlsruhe_ had captured a big Lamport and Holt liner off the coast of Brazil as late as October 26. On November 10 an officer of a British freighter captured by the raider reached Edinburgh and told the story that the _Karlsruhe_ was using Bocas Reef, off the north Brazilian coast, as a base.