The cruise of the _Moewe_ stands out as one of the heroic, almost Homeric achievements of the war. She left Bremerhaven on December 20, 1915, according to one of her officers who afterward reached the United States, and calmly threaded her way through the meshes of the British navy's North Sea net. After leaving the shelter of home waters, with the Swedish colors painted on her hull, the _Moewe_ boldly turned her nose down the Channel. She answered the signals of several British cruisers and on one occasion at least was saluted in turn. Having a powerful wireless apparatus aboard, her commander, Count zu Dohna-Schlobitten, a captain-lieutenant in the Imperial navy, was able to keep up with the movements of British patrol vessels. Several intercepted messages told of a strange white liner that refused to answer questions. This was the _Moewe_, and before passing into the Atlantic she had changed her coat to black. She was sighted by probably a dozen British warships before reaching the North Atlantic. By refusing to heed the signals of distant vessels, which she had a good chance of outdistancing in a race, and showing every courtesy to those close at hand, the raider made her escape. The _Moewe_ had about three hundred men aboard. They were a picked crew, and her commander a man of daring. Within a period of less than three months he sunk fifteen merchant ships, captured the _Appam_ and sent her to Norfolk, Va., then returned home with 199 prisoners and $250,000 in gold bars. And he may have been responsible for the loss of the British battleship _King Edward VII_, of 16,500 tons, which struck a mine in the North Sea on January 9, 1916. It is certain that the _Moewe_ left a chain of mines behind her on the outward voyage, some of which undoubtedly caused loss to allied shipping. Once past the British Channel fleet, the _Moewe_ struck for the steamship lane off the Moroccan, Spanish, and Portuguese coasts. There she was comparatively safe from pursuit, and so skillfully were her operations carried on that it was many weeks before the fact became known that a raider actually was abroad. But one by one overdue steamships failed to reach their ports and suspicion grew. Either the _Karlsruhe_ had returned to life as a plague upon allied shipping, an able successor appeared, or a flotilla of giant submarines was at large that could cruise almost any distance. Several vessels brought tales to England of being chased by a phantom ship near the African coast. But such stories had been repeated so many times without any foundation that the British admiralty was in a quandary. To overlook no clue, a flotilla of cruisers swept the seas under suspicion. They came back empty handed.