Then, as suddenly as they had begun, the forays of the modern corsair ceased. The first belief was, of course, that the pursuing British had found her and sent her to Davy Jones. But as the weeks went by without any announcement to that effect, doubts crept in. Soon the British government, without making a formal declaration, revealed the untruth of this report by keeping its searching vessels at sea. It was the theory that the _Karlsruhe_ had run up the Amazon or the Orinoco for repairs and rest. The expectation was that she would soon be at her old tricks again. The battle and sinking story persisted in the British press, the wish being evidently father to the thought. On January, 12, 1915, for instance, the Montreal _Gazette_ published an unverified (and afterwards disproved) report from a correspondent at Grenada, British West Indies, giving a detailed description of a four hour battle in which the raider was destroyed. This story was allegedly verified by the washing ashore of wreckage and the finding of sailors’ corpses. All moonshine. On January 21, an American steamer captain announced having sighted the _Karlsruhe_ off Porto Rico. On other dates in January and February she was also falsely reported off La Guayra, the Canary Islands, Port au Prince and other places. On March 17, the Brooklyn _Eagle_ published a tale to the effect that the hulk of the raider lay off the Grenadines, a little string of islets that stretch north from Grenada in the Windwards. This report said there had been no battle. The cruiser had been self-wrecked or broken up in a storm. Again wreckage was said to have been found, but here once more was falsehood. On March 18, the _Stifts-Tidende_ of Copenhagen reported that the _Karlsruhe_ had been blown up by an internal explosion one evening as the officers and men were having tea. One half of the wreck sank immediately, the report went on to say, while the other floated for some time, enabling between 150 and 200 of the crew to be rescued by one of the accompanying auxiliaries. The survivors, it was added, had been sworn to secrecy before reaching port--why this, no one can guess. The following day, the _National Tidende_ published corroboration from a German merchant captain then in Denmark, to the effect that the “crew of the Karlsruhe had been brought home early in December, 1914, by the German liner, Rio Negro, one of the Karlsruhe’s escort ships.” Somewhat later, a Brooklyn man, wintering at Nassau, in the Bahamas, reported finding the raider’s motor pinnace on the shore of Abaco Island, north of Nassau. To this there is little to add. Admiral von Tirpitz, then the head of the German navy, says in his memoirs just this and no more: