The crew of a freighter do what they are told, ask few questions. But last week the German crew of the blunt-nosed broad-beamed Falke, reached the limit of cowed endurance. In Port of Spain, Trinidad, they begged the German consul to take action against their captain, before the dumpy little Falke should be sunk as a pirate.
Last June in Hamburg the Falke's crew learned without particular interest that their ship had changed owners. Not the Hamburg Kauffahrtei Gesellschaft, to which they had belonged for so many years, but a firm known as Felix Prenzlau & Co. would pay their wages in future. In the freight trade one Captain is much like another. They were not excited when their new master, one Capt. Tipplitt, came aboard. But Capt. Tipplitt turned out to be different.
Riding high, in ballast, the Falke clanked out of Hamburg harbor for the coast of Poland. The Falke's crew became interested three days later, when they rolled idly off a Polish beach at dawn while motor boats came out to meet them carrying 125 swart, excitable passengers smelling of rum and perfumed hair tonic, speaking Spanish.
The Falke was supposed to call at Las Palmas, Canary Islands for orders. She went nowhere near the Canaries. Capt. Tipplitt turned her nose straight for the coast of Venezuela. Soon the crew learned the truth. The 125 passengers were revolutionists, many of them Generals, under the command of General Romano Delgado Chalbaud, exiled former chief of the Venezuelan Navy. The baggage and boxes of the revolutionists contained rifles, machine guns, ammunition. Capt. Tipplitt was in their pay. The Falke's job was to raid the coast of Venezuela.
In Cumana, Venezuela, last week, citizens smoked their evening cigarets along the water front, striving for a breath of cool air. A little tramp steamer, her name roughly painted out, chugged into the harbor, noisily dropped her mud hook. Small boats were put out, rowed ashore. Boxes and crates were landed on the beach. From Cumana's fort an officer watched for a few minutes till he saw the fat barrel of a machine gun lifted out of a crate. Then hastily he threw away his cigaret, sounded the alarm.
Came a braying of bugles, the pad of running feet. Rifles banged and flashed, bullets bored the air. Ragged government troops and excited revolutionists darted through streets and round corners, stooping, firing, running. On the bridge of the Falke stood Capt. Tipplitt, just appointed "First Admiral of the Revolutionary Government of Venezuela." Waving an automatic pistol he forced the third officer of the Falke and a lifeboat crew to row ashore with more guns, more ammunition. On the beach the third officer was killed. Killed too was General Chalbaud, leader of the rebels, and General Emilio Fernandez, defender of Cumana. Minor generals on both sides strewed the sand. When a government airplane flew overhead, raking the landing party of filibustered with machine gun fire and dropping bombs, General Chalbaud's surviving son and followers climbed back aboard the Falke, fled from Cumana as fast as leaking engines would drive her.