"Crossing the track of the battle, we sighted and picked up three Hun seamen, who claimed to have been blown from the deck of the _Emden_ by the explosion of one of our shells, none of them much the worse for their experience. Indeed, the fact that they were not in worse shape rather led us to suspect that they had jumped overboard to _avoid_ the explosion of our shell rather than as a direct consequence of an explosion. "I don't exactly remember whether it was one of these chaps, or one of the English-speaking prisoners from the _Buresk_, who, by blurting out something about how lucky were his mates who got ashore before the fight started, gave us our first inkling that the _Emden_ had sent a landing party to Direction Island to destroy the Wireless station. There were three officers and forty men, he told us, and this we later learned to be the truth. "What he did not tell us--quite possibly because he did not know of it--was the fact that, besides being armed with rifles, this party also carried three machine guns. It was only by chance that our failure to reckon with this latter fact did not get us into serious trouble. Indeed, I think it is more than likely that I would not be here talking to you now but for the happy fact that the little schooner _Ayesha_ lying in Direction Harbour offered a chance of escape too promising for the officer in command of the party to resist. "The rounding up of this lot, of course, had the call over everything else, and at first the Captain appeared to be considering putting back to Direction at once and landing in the night. Lucky, indeed, it was for us that we didn't, for that--as we learned later from the Wireless-station people--was just what the Germans had expected and prepared for. Had we gone in in the night we would have found the only landing-place covered by machine guns, and we would probably have stepped off into an ambush that would have wiped the lot of us out in a minute or two. Landing at dawn, however, we found our birds flown, and I, for one, was jolly glad to hear it after they had told us what a resolute fellow the German officer leading the party was, and how determined he had been to make a resistance. This chap, by the way, was Lieut. Mucke, who later found his way back to Germany by way of Turkey. When I read, three or four months later, of how well he had used those same machine guns he had mounted to receive us against the Arabs in fighting his way up the coast of the Red Sea, I realised the extent to which we had been asking for trouble in landing armed only as we were. Not expecting any resistance, we had no machine guns, and I think there were several others who, like myself, had been given only revolvers. Since the _Sydney's_ lucky star was in the ascendant for the whole show, however, no harm came of it.