“The commander of the _Karlsruhe_, Captain Köhler, never dreamt of taking advantage of the permission to make his way homeward; working with the auxiliary vessels in the Atlantic, surrounded by the English cruisers, but relying on his superior speed, he sought ever further successes, until he was destroyed with his ship by an explosion, the probable cause of which was some unstable explosive brought aboard.” It is obvious from this that the _Karlsruhe_ was given the option of returning home, having gained enough glory and sunk enough ships to satisfy a dozen admirals. But the main fact to be gleaned from Tirpit’s statement is that an internal explosion was the thing officially accepted by the head of the German admiralty as the cause of her disappearance. And this is the most likely of all the theories that have been or can be proposed. But, that said, we are still a long way from any satisfaction of our deeper curiosity. Where and when did the explosion take place? Under what circumstances? Did any escape and return to Germany to tell the tale? To these queries there are no positive answers. If the _Karlsruhe_ was, as so often stated, accompanied by one or more auxiliaries or coaling ships, it seems incredible that all the crew can have been lost and quite beyond imagination that there was not even a distant witnessing of the accident. Yet this seems to have been the case. In spite of the report that a large part of the famous raider’s crew got safely home after the supposed explosion, I have searched and scouted through the German press and the German book lists for an account of the affair--all in vain. Not only that, but I am assured by reliable correspondents of the American press in Germany that nothing credible or authoritative has appeared. We have von Mücke’s book “The Emden,” published in the United States as early as 1917, and previously in Germany. We have the exploits of the _Moewe_, and we have the lesser adventures of the popular von Luckner and his craft. But of the famous _Karlsruhe_ we have nothing at all, save rumors and gossip. The conclusion must be that the ship did break up somewhere in the deepest ocean, as the result of an explosion, while she was altogether unattended. She must have gone down with all her men, for not even the reports of finding bits of her wreckage have ever been verified. The mystery of her end is still much discussed among seafaring men and William McFee, in one of his tales, suggests that she lay hid up one of the South American rivers and came to grief there. * * * * *