While lying at Pirate Cove we had an exciting experience. It seems that some of the Germans had a suspicion that some of the prisoners were going to try to escape by swimming ashore. They doubled the guards both below and on deck and in addition had twenty-four Marines sleep on the afterdeck with their muskets alongside of them. On this particular night the German sailors had stolen a couple of cases of whiskey from the cargo of the _Matunga_ and many of them were pretty badly intoxicated. At 11:30 P.M. one of the guards down below aft imagined that he saw someone making a sneak for the stairs leading on deck. Next moment he shouted "Help! Help!" and blazed away with his revolver in the general direction of the stairway. Naturally the prisoners sleeping on the far side of the stairs made a rush to get out of the line of fire. The guard saw this crowd rushing his way and ran on deck immediately. A general alarm was sounded and men and officers poured on deck from all directions. Just then a shoal of fish some little distance away in the water made a disturbance and the German crew, thinking that somebody was attempting to swim ashore, opened fire on the fish with two machine guns. Also everybody who had a rifle or a revolver opened fire at something. One officer, who stood in front of my room, emptied his revolver into the air, just shooting because everybody else was doing it. Meanwhile, Chief Officer Schmell and three sailors had jumped into the launch and also mistaking the shoal of fish for prisoners trying to swim ashore, made for the spot--and were enthusiastically fired upon by the German machine guns in the dark. It sure was bum team work and a miracle that Schmell and his men were not killed. The launch was punctured in several places. As soon as the big searchlight was put into commission, it became apparent that there was nobody in the water. All the prisoners were then mustered out and counted, and as there were none missing, the Germans decided that it must have been a false alarm and everybody blamed everybody else. When Schmell got back on the _Wolf_ he was raving mad at having been fired at by the machine guns. He wasn't red, but green with anger, and he talked so fast that I couldn't make out what he said, but I heard afterwards that he wanted to court-martial everybody, including the cook. It always will remain a miracle to me that some of our own fellows weren't shot as the frenzied guard emptied his gun before running on deck.