Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II BOTTLING UP THE " KONIGSBERG " During the month of September 1914 H.M.S. Pegasus—an old light cruiser of about 2,000 tons— put into Zanzibar Harbour to repair her boilers. Now Zanzibar is a British protectorate, but this fact afforded no guarantee at that time that the island was not swarming with German agents, and lying as it does not far from the mainland of German East Africa, it followed as a matter of course that the Germans were kept fully informed as to what was happening at Zanzibar. By means of wireless stations, which were quite plentiful down the coast of German East Africa, they were able to communicate interesting news to any of the German cruisers that were roaming the seas in those days. And so it came about that the German cruiser Konigs- Berg received a message to say that a small British cruiser was lying disabled in Zanzibar Harbour—an old third-class cruiser with out-of-date guns, that could not be expected to put up any kind of a fight, and could be easily outranged by the German guns. Here was just the kind of job the Konigsberg enjoyed, and so on 20th September she pounced down on her prey, and very quickly pummelled the poor old ship to pieces. Out of the destruction of the Pegasus the only compensation to be gained was the knowledge that the elusive Konigsberg was off the East African coast, and it was a fair assumption that she was A. Approximate position of KONICSBERG 31C B. ii , 4 D C. Position where NEWBRIDGE was sunk receiving her supplies of coal and stores from the shore, by means of German merchant vessels. There were several of these vessels dancing attendance on the raider, and, according to information received, one of them was called the Prasident, and another the Somali. There were other ships in Dar-es- Sala...