CHAPTER 11

Admiral Cradock’s Voyage

Once Goeben and Breslau had disappeared into the Dardanelles, Admiral von Spee and his squadron became the dominant overseas preoccupation of the British Admiralty. The threat was shadowy but ominous: a powerful force of enemy warships had vanished into the immensity of the Pacific Ocean. With Spee at large, many of Britain’s distant possessions and overseas trade routes were at risk, and it was impossible to tell where the German admiral would strike. “The map of the world in the Admiralty War Room measured nearly twenty feet by thirty,” Winston Churchill wrote after the war. “Being a seaman’s map, its center was filled by the greatest mass of water on the globe: the enormous areas of the Pacific filling upwards of three hundred square feet. On this map the head of a pin represented the full view to be obtained from the masts of a ship on a clear day.” At all possible danger points, Britain must be ready, but as Churchill explained, “we could not be strong enough every day, everywhere, to meet him.” Therefore, he said, “as the days succeeded one another and grew into weeks, taking the Caroline Islands as the center, we could draw daily widening circles, touching ever more numerous points where they might suddenly spring into action.” But the circles remained empty.

One solution would have been to take the offensive, to give priority to locating the East Asia Squadron, to assemble a force that would hunt through every archipelago until it found Spee and completed his destruction. This course was not chosen. Oddly, it was not that the Admiralty did not have sufficient ships of sufficient strength for this purpose. The German East Asia Squadron was recognized in Whitehall as an efficient and powerful unit with excellent morale, led by an experienced and skilled commander. Even so, the forces available to the British Admiralty were superior and, properly deployed, should have had success. In the Pacific, Great Britain, her empire, and her allies could call upon a modern dreadnought battle cruiser, two small battleships, a dozen armored cruisers, five modern light cruisers, and numerous other ships.

At the outbreak of war, these ships were deployed in three squadrons. The China Squadron, based at Hong Kong under Vice Admiral Sir Thomas Martyn Jerram, consisted of the armored cruisers Minotaur and Hampshire, two light cruisers, and the predreadnought battleship Triumph. Minotaur, Jerram’s flagship, just back from visiting Admiral von Spee at Tsingtao, was newer, bigger, and faster than Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and carried heavier guns. The armored cruiser Hampshire was older and less strong, but the light cruisers Newcastle and Yarmouth were far superior in size, speed, and gun power to Emden and Nürnberg. Triumph was a curiosity. Originally built for Chile, she was smaller than Minotaur and, at 18 knots, slower than Scharnhorst andGneisenau. Her value lay in her four 10-inch and fourteen 7.5-inch guns. As war approached, Triumph lay demobilized in a Hong Kong dockyard. An urgent message from the First Lord brought her back to life, but a crew could not easily be found. Jerram quickly demobilized four Yangtze River gunboats, snatching the officers and men from their decks and placing them on the battleship, but this was not enough. An effort to recruit Chinese stokers produced not a single man. In the end, volunteers were solicited from Hong Kong’s military garrison and two officers and 106 men of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry boarded the battleship and were incorporated into the crew. On the East Indies Station at Singapore, Rear Admiral Sir Richard Peirse commanded the battleship Swiftsure, a sister of Triumph,and two light cruisers. His main responsibilities lay westward, toward the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. In addition, at the outbreak of war the French Admiralty placed the armored cruisers Montcalm and Dupleixunder British command and the Russians did the same with their old light cruisers Askold and Zhemchug.

These British squadrons were hodgepodges of ships, mixing old and new, big and little, fast and slow, strong and weak; this was the result of Admiralty uncertainties and compromises as to what could be spared from home waters and who the enemy in the Pacific was likely to be. The squadrons thus were very different from Spee’s homogeneous force; neither the China nor the East Indies Squadron alone could have brought the German admiral to ac-tion if he chose to avoid it, or have been certain of defeating him if he chose to fight. But these squadrons were not all that was available to the Admiralty. The strongest naval force in the Pacific (aside from the fleet of Japan, which was neutral when war began) belonged to the Dominion of Australia. And the Australian squadron based at Sydney and commanded by Rear Admiral Sir George Patey included the dreadnought battle cruiser Australia, an Indefatigable-class vessel constructed in Britain. Australia, with her eight 12-inch guns and 26 knots of speed, might by herself defeatScharnhorst and Gneisenau—although simply by separating and steaming in opposite directions, one of the German ships could have escaped. Two modern 5,600-ton, 26-knot light cruisers, Sydney and Melbourne, each carrying eight 6-inch guns, and two older light cruisers completed Patey’s squadron. In combination, these three British empire squadrons heavily outnumbered Spee’s force, and if they had been ordered to hunt down and destroy the East Asia Squadron, its life surely would have been short.

But British warships and admirals in the Pacific had been given conflicting responsibilities during August and early September 1914. The paramount concern of the British government in the first weeks of the war was to help stem the onslaught of the German army rushing down on Paris. Everything Britain could do to assist the French had to be done. Most of the British regular army was hurried to the Continent. Within a few weeks, tens of thousands of Dominion troops had been offered by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and every effort had to be made to bring them to Europe. But, with German surface raiders on the oceans, these troops had to move in convoys escorted by warships. The East Indies Squadron, for example, was immediately assigned to escorting troops westward from India and none of its ships were free to help seek out and destroy Admiral von Spee. In addition, the Admiralty and government, encouraged by the Australian and New Zealand governments, were busy playing the old imperial game of colony-grabbing, endeavoring to occupy as much of Germany’s overseas territory as possible. In part, this was an effort to reward the Dominions for their loyalty to the mother country. But there was more to it. Well in advance, the British Admiralty had planned—in the case of war with Germany—to dismantle the German colonial empire. Months before war came, the Admiralty had invited Australia and New Zealand to be prepared to send expeditions to New Guinea, Yap, Nauru, and Samoa, knowing that these expeditions would have to be escorted by naval forces. Thus stimulated, New Zealand’s eye fell on the German islands to her northeast, particularly German Samoa, lying on her trade route to the west coast of America. Australia wished to snap up the whole of German New Guinea and other possessions administered from Rabaul, including the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands. Both governments saw these acquisitions as a means of rallying public support for the dispatch of the Anzac expeditionary forces to Europe, and they were quick in insisting on these projects: on August 8, the New Zealand government informed the Admiralty that if a naval escort could be furnished, the expedition to attack Samoa could start on August 11. Churchill assented. Simultaneously, an expedition organized by the Australian government was forming to invade and seize German New Guinea. Admiral Patey’s force, including Australia, was assigned to escort these two seaborne expeditions. Locating Spee’s armored cruisers, therefore, was given third priority, behind convoying troops to Europe and plucking ripe colonial plums.

On August 30, Patey, with Australia, Melbourne, and Montcalm, arrived off Apia, the capital of German Samoa, where, without resistance, he put ashore an occupying force of New Zealand troops. On September 15, he landed the Australian expedition at Rabaul. Thereafter, Patey was told, he was to escort the Australian troop convoy to Europe, at least as far as Aden on the Red Sea. But on September 14, Scharnhorst was reported at Samoa, and on September 24, Australia and Montcalm were released to hunt for Admiral von Spee. They had proceeded only 200 miles toward the Marshalls and Carolines when they learned that on September 22, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had bombarded Papeete. Tahiti was 5,000 miles away; to coal and provision for a voyage of this length, Patey returned again to Rabaul. On October 2, he finally sailed for the Fiji Islands. Arriving there on October 12, but forbidden to go farther east, Patey spent the next three weeks defensively patrolling the Fiji–New Zealand trade route. Apparently, the Admiralty did not consider that if Spee was headed for South America, it might be useful to put Australia on his trail. Patey himself never agreed with the Admiralty’s priorities. Long before September 15, when Spee was first located at Samoa, he was certain that the East Asia Squadron’s most likely destination was South America. Jerram, too, had wished to begin the war by seeking out Spee. As early as August 17, he had signaled the Admiralty: “Probably Scharnhorst, Gneisenau . . . Nürnberg are now together. . . . Possible objective of German squadron . . . Pacific coast of America.”

There was another, even more powerful Allied naval force in the Pacific: the Japanese fleet. Japan entered the war on August 23, 1914, with a navy of three dreadnoughts, including Kongo, and fifteen other battleships. Until the Japanese came in, the Admiralty had thought it possible that Admiral von Spee might return to Tsingtao, but once Japan declared war, this idea evaporated. And by the time the Japanese had joined the search for Spee, he had vanished. Japan’s priority, in any case, was different from Britain’s. On August 15, Tokyo gave Berlin an ultimatum to surrender Tsingtao within seven days. The Germans refused, Japan declared war, and a siege of the port began. From Berlin, the kaiser ordered the garrison to fight to the end, thinking to strengthen its courage by telegramming: “God be with you in the difficult struggle. I think of you.” Meanwhile, Japanese squadrons proceeded to occupy German possessions in the Marshalls and Carolines. Only late in October, when these other assignments had been completed and Tsingtao was about to fall, were Japanese ships specifically ordered to join the hunt for Admiral von Spee. By then, he was on the other side of the Pacific.

Far more important to the Admiralty and the British war effort than anything that could happen on the west coast of South America—indeed, anywhere in the Pacific Ocean—was the protection of British trade in the North and South Atlantic. Across this ocean moved a larger volume of shipping than anywhere else in the world. The critical nature of trade with the United States and Canada was obvious, but the importance of securing the wide avenue of commerce from Buenos Aires and Montevideo on the river Plate to Europe was almost equal. At the outbreak of war, the threat to Britain’s trade in the western Atlantic amounted to two fast German light cruisers, Dresden and Karlsruhe, supplemented by the possibility that some of the fast German civilian liners that had taken refuge in harbors in the United States might emerge as armed merchant cruisers. For the British and the German navies, the sudden coming of war had meant a rapid reshuffling of relationships. In peacetime, the two had displayed in the western Atlantic the same unusual blend of comradeship and wariness seen on the coast of China. During the 1914 revolution in Mexico, Dresden had patrolled in concert with warships of the Royal Navy for the protection of European citizens and property. A light cruiser of 3,200 tons with an armament of ten 4.1-inch guns and two torpedo tubes, Dresden was the only German warship in the western Atlantic at that time. But she was due for relief; on July 25, she met her replacement, the new light cruiser Karlsruhe of 4,800 tons and twelve 4.1-inch guns, at Port-au-Prince. As a result, when war was declared, Germany had two light cruisers in the western Atlantic. Both ships received orders to attack British trade.

To meet this threat, Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, commander of the British navy’s North American and West Indies Station, had been given four old County-class armored cruisers: Suffolk, Berwick, Essex, and Lancaster, plus the modern light cruiserBristol. Soon after mobilization, these ships were reinforced by five more cruisers from England. Four were old armored cruisers: Carnarvon, Cornwall, Cumberland, and Monmouth, commissioned from the Reserve Fleet and sent overseas without opportunity to evolve into efficient fighting units. Still another obsolescent cruiser, Good Hope, was detached from the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow and sent to Cradock, who made her his flagship.

In the first month of war, Admiral Cradock reached several conclusions about his assignment. He realized from observation and intelligence that the German liners were not coming out of New York. And he learned that both German light cruisers were operating far to the south of his normal station: Karlsruhe was reported at Curaçao and Dresden off the mouth of the Amazon, where her presence was raising anxiety among shippers and traders down the coast of South America. The Admiralty agreed that the threat in the North Atlantic was diminished; accordingly, on September 3 a new South American Station was created, with Cradock in command. His assignment was to move down the coast of South America to protect merchant shipping in the South Atlantic and to find and sinkDresden. Protection of the West Indies and the upper South Atlantic and responsibility for dealing with the threat of Karlsruhe were transferred to Rear Admiral A. C. Stoddart, who was to have Carnarvon, Cumberland, and Cornwall.

The force with which Cradock was to carry out his South Atlantic mission was thoroughly ragtag. Good Hope, his flagship, was twelve years old and displaced 14,100 tons. When she was new and first put to sea, she had several distinctions. “She was the fastest cruiser afloat, having done over 24 knots on trial,” said her gunnery officer, Lieutenant Ernle Chatfield, later captain of the battle cruiser Lion. And “we were the first new ship to be painted grey all over.” Even so, considering the large size of her hull, Good Hopewas laughably undergunned, with two 9.2-inch and sixteen 6-inch guns, half of the latter mounted in broadside batteries so close to the water that they could not be fired in a heavy sea. When Fisher became First Sea Lord, he complained that “the guns . . . on the main deck are practically useless. We know this from experience. Half the time they cannot see the . . . [target] for want of view and the other half they are flooded out by the sea.” Not yet old, Good Hope was, in fact, already obsolete. She had been made so not only by the advent of battle cruisers but by the appearance of more modern armored cruisers only a few years younger, for example, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Good Hope had been consigned to the Third Fleet with other old armored cruisers of her era, then suddenly was recommissioned on mobilization with a crew of whom 90 percent were reservists. When she steamed out of Portsmouth on August 2, a Salvation Army band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” In the three months that followed, her untrained crew carried out only one full-caliber shoot. “It certainly is the limit,” a regular navy gunnery officer wrote later, “taking a ship like that off the dockyard wall, giving her four rounds [per gun] of practice, and then putting her up against a ship like Scharnhorst.”

Good Hope at least carried two heavy 9.2-inch guns, but Cradock’s other armored cruiser, Monmouth, an eleven-year-old, 10,000-ton County-class armored cruiser, carried no heavy guns at all. Here, Fisher’s bitter comment was “Sir William White designed the County class but forgot the guns.” In fact, Monmouth carried fourteen 6-inch guns, but they were old and had no greater range than the 4.1-inch guns of the modern German light cruisers. Worse, many of Monmouth’s guns were sheltered behind gun-port doors only a few feet above the water; in a heavy sea, the doors had to remain shut or the waves would come in. Not infrequently at night, the men on the starboard forward main deck gun would ask permission to shut the gun port, normally kept open for night defense stations, because they were being washed out by the sea. Like many other ships, Monmouth was a victim of haste and improvisation in the Admiralty’s mobilization. About to be scrapped, she was hurriedly recommissioned on August 4, crewed with naval reservists, coast guardsmen, boy seamen, and naval cadets and dispatched to the South Atlantic. When Monmouth met the new light cruiser Glasgow at sea on August 20, Glasgow’s officers were appalled. “Sighted Monmouth at eleven a.m.,” wrote one Glasgowofficer. “She had been practically condemned as unfit for further service, but was hauled off the dockyard wall commissioned with a scratch of coast guardsmen and boys. There are also twelve little naval cadets who are keen as mustard. She left England on August 4, she is only half equipped and is not in a condition to come six thousand miles from any dockyard as she is kept going only by super-human efforts.” Still another vessel added to Cradock’s polyglot squadron was the 12,000-ton converted Orient Lines liner Otranto, sent off to war with six 4.7-inch guns. Otranto’s mission was to hunt down converted German merchant ships of her own kind; no one intended that she should fight enemy warships.

When Admiral Cradock’s improvised squadron steamed into the South Atlantic, Glasgow was already there. The only modern British warship on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean, the three-year-old Glasgow was a Town-class light cruiser of 4,800 tons, a sister of Gloucester, which had dogged Goeben. Designed for 25 knots, she had gone faster when her turbine engines burned coal that had been sprayed with oil. Her armament of two 6-inch and ten 4-inch guns made her more than a match for any German light cruiser, and her regular navy crew was as well trained and efficient as any in the German fleet. Beyond this, Glasgow had an exceptional captain in John Luce. For two years, he and his ship had been showing the flag and singlehandedly guarding British interests along the east coast of South America, his beat extending from the mouth of the Amazon down to the Straits of Magellan. Under his protection were the vital trade routes supplying Britain with meat and grain from the river Plate, nitrates from Chile, and coffee from Brazil; on any given day in peacetime, hundreds of British and German merchantmen would be moving along these routes. At the end of July 1914, Glasgow was in Rio, expecting shortly to return to England. Believing they would soon be home, members of the crew had bought Brazilian parrots to take back with them; sixty birds were housed in cages on deck in the warm South Atlantic air. When the Admiralty telegram warning of war arrived, the crew began stripping away superfluous woodwork and sending armchairs, books, and other personal possessions ashore. The men could not bear to give up their parrots, however, and Luce agreed that the birds could stay. Officers’ civilian clothing received no exemption; only Lieutenant Hirst, the intelligence officer, was allowed to keep his plain clothes. “Later on,” he said, “when leave could be taken, it was amusing to see my whole range of suits going ashore in the officers’ boat, worn by messmates of varying sizes.”

Luce’s primary concern, once war began, was lack of a coaling base. South America during the Great War was a neutral continent except for the colonies of British Guinea on the northeast coast and the British Falkland Islands, 2,000 miles to the south. In peacetime, Glasgow could buy coal anywhere. But once hostilities commenced, under international rules of war, a warship could coal and provision only once every three months in any given neutral country; admiralties and captains on both sides preferred to reserve this privilege for emergencies. Even in wartime, there was no difficulty obtaining coal; it could be bought from British firms or through British agents in foreign ports. But Glasgow’s operations—and those of other British warships coming south—were certain to be hampered by the lack of a safe harbor where the coal could be transferred from colliers into warships. During the two years Luce had served on the station, he had located two places that, in an emergency, might serve. One was Abrolhos Rocks, a group of rocky islets, surrounded by reefs, fifteen miles off the Brazilian coast, north of Rio and near the main trade route between the Plate and the North Atlantic. The islets, the largest of them three-quarters of a mile long, were uninhabited except for the keeper of a lighthouse, but they belonged to Brazil. However, three miles out to sea from the lighthouse—and thus outside Brazilian territorial waters—an anchorage of sorts had been formed by reefs above or just below the surface. The site was exposed to the southeast trade winds and the prevailing southeasterly swell caused ships alongside each other for coaling to grind together, denting side plates and starting leaks, but there was no alternative. Luce’s other temporary coaling site, also in international waters, lay in an area in the broad, shallow estuary of the Plate itself, seven miles off the coast of Uruguay, where ships could anchor in forty- or fifty-foot water. Beyond that, the British navy had only the harbor of Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands.

As Cradock’s squadron steamed down the east coast of South America, the admiral spread his net for Dresden. The net came up empty in respect to the fugitive light cruiser but did produce another result. At the end of August, the 19,000-ton Cunard armed merchant liner Carmania arrived in the South Atlantic from England, bringing Cradock’s ships a cargo of coal, provisions, and a large quantity of frozen meat. These supplies delivered, Carmania, which had been equipped with eight 4.7-inch guns, remained with Cradock. It was in this capacity that the ship was detached from the main force and ordered to reconnoiter Trinidad Island, which the Admiralty suspected was being used as a secret German coaling base. This island, not to be confused with the British island colony of Trinidad in the West Indies, lies about 600 miles east of South America on the same latitude as Rio, and belonged to Brazil. Far from any trade route, it was no more than a mid-ocean group of sharp coral rocks inhabited by seabirds and scuttling land crabs.

Shortly after 11:00 a.m. on September 14, as the ocean was ruffled by a moderate breeze, Carmania, coming down from the northeast, sighted three German steamships at anchor in a bay at the western end of the island. One was a large liner, and the others were colliers, their derricks busy transferring coal to the bigger vessel. On seeing Carmania, the three ships immediately separated and made off in different directions. The large ship was the new Hamburg–South America Line liner Cap Trafalgar, 18,710 tons and 590 feet long, whose wartime assignment was to prey on British trade in the South Atlantic. At the outbreak of war, Cap Trafalgar had been at Buenos Aires, where she installed heavy lumber to buttress her decks for gun mountings and painted two funnels to resemble the markings of a British Union Castle liner. On September 2, Cap Trafalgar had rendezvoused at Trinidad Island with the German gunboat Eber, where she mounted two 4.1-inch guns and eight machine guns, and took aboard most of Eber’s navy crew of 392 officers and men. Lieutenant Wirth of the Imperial Navy became the liner’s new captain. Thereafter, Cap Trafalgar had cruised for ten days looking for British merchantmen, but the air was so filled with British naval wireless signals that Wirth became more concerned about the safety of his ship than with attacking enemy vessels. Now he was back at Trinidad Island to coal.

When Carmania appeared, Cap Trafalgar decided to run for it and soon was making 18 knots. Carmania, designed for 18 knots, could make only 16. Then, for unknown reasons, Wirth changed his mind and decided to fight, and turned Cap Trafalgar onto a converging course. At noon, when the distance between the two ships was down to 8,000 yards, Carmania opened fire. Cap Trafalgar fired back, and the world’s first battle between ocean liners began. Carmania had overwhelming superiority in guns, but battle between ships of this size and design was awkward. Neither ship had any kind of coordinated fire control; each gun crew simply fired whenever a target appeared in its sights. On both big liners, the upper deck where the guns were mounted was seventy feet above the hold where the ammunition was stored. As there were no ammunition hoists, the shells had to be carried to the guns by hand.

The range continued to fall. At 4,500 yards, Carmania began firing salvos from her port guns and two of these broadsides struck Cap Trafalgar on the starboard waterline. The German ship replied as well as she could, but most of her shells went high andCarmaniawas hit mostly in her masts, funnels, derricks, and ventilators. When the range came down to 3,000 yards, the German machine-gunners opened fire and the bullets hammered noisily but harmlessly against the steel sides of Carmania. When the barrels ofCarmania’s port-side 4.7-inch guns—all of them over twenty years old—became red-hot, her captain, Noel Grant, solved the problem by turning his ship around to bring her starboard guns into action.

Within half an hour, Cap Trafalgar was on fire forward and was listing to starboard. Carmania was also in trouble. A German shell had passed through the captain’s cabin under the forebridge and started a fire; the fire main was cut, so no water was available. With the flames out of control, Carmania’s foredeck was abandoned and, in order to steer the ship, orders were relayed through megaphones to a rudder station at the stern. Meanwhile, flames and smoke sucked down the ventilators set the engine-room crews to gasping and choking. Nevertheless, Carmania had begun to prevail when Wirth decided to attempt a second escape. Cap Trafalgar still had the higher speed and Carmania, in pursuit, continued firing until, beyond her maximum range of 9,000 yards, her adversary was out of reach. By 1:30 p.m., the British believed that Cap Trafalgar had escaped. The reality was different: Captain Wirth had been killed, the fires burning fore and aft had made the German decks untenable, the ship’s list was increasing. Then, suddenly, the great vessel heeled over, resting her funnels on the surface of the water. At 1:50 p.m., Cap Trafalgar sank, first lifting her stern high in the air. Five boatloads of men pulled away.

Carmania’s precarious condition after the battle made it impossible for her to stop and pick up the German seamen. The fire raging in the fore part of his ship forced the British captain to steer Carmania before the wind so that the flames would be blown out over her bow rather than down his decks. In this situation, he could not steer in the direction of the German lifeboats. In addition, Carmania had five holes at the waterline, and the forebridge with all its steering and navigational instruments and its communications to the engine rooms had been destroyed. Beyond that, smoke had been seen on the northern horizon and Captain Grant feared the possible arrival of a German warship, which he believed that Cap Trafalgar had been continually signaling during the action. In fact, the smoke rose from one of the German colliers, now flying an American flag in hope of misleading Carmania and being allowed to collect the survivors. Carmania did not interfere; the collier took its surviving compatriots into Buenos Aires.

The wounded British liner limped away to the Abrolhos Rocks and eventually to Gibraltar for repairs. The ship had been hit seventy-nine times; five men had been killed, four died of wounds, and twenty-two were injured. Most of the casualties occurred among the men on deck, for the most part among the gun crews and ammunition-supply parties. No one below was harmed except by smoke inhalation.

By September 18, when Cradock and his squadron reached the river Plate, Dresden already was around Cape Horn and in the Pacific. From the moment this light cruiser had sailed from St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, her captain, Fritz Lüdecke, had displayed little interest in trade warfare. He had stopped and sunk one British freighter in the South Atlantic and let others go, destroying only their wireless equipment. Otherwise, his objective was to reach Cape Horn; he stopped only to coal. On September 5, he arrived at Orange Bay in Tierra del Fuego, on an uninhabited stretch of coastline just east of Cape Horn. Here, hidden against the desolate shore and a backdrop of the snow-topped mountains of Hoste Island, Dresden met a collier and remained for eleven days to rest and adjust her engines. While she was there, she received, by way of Punta Arenas, a message from Berlin: “It is advisable to operate with Leipzig.” On September 16, Lüdecke departed Orange Bay and, accompanied by a pair of supply vessels, passed slowly around the Horn. Believing himself now out of danger, he eased down to a speed of 8 knots to help his collier manage the heavy sea. He continued north up the Chilean coast, coaling in Bahia San Quintin in the Gulf of Penas, then cruising off the small port of Coronel. On September 30, Lüdecke left the South American coast for remote Más Afuera and from there his wireless room established contact with Scharnhorst. On October 4, he sailed for the rendezvous at Easter Island, arriving on the afternoon of October 12.

Cradock, steaming south and already looking beyond his own area of responsibility, wondered aloud whether Spee might be coming across the Pacific. “Gniesenau and Scharnhorst reported Caroline Islands . . . 8 August,” he signaled the Admiralty on September 5. “Is there any later information as to movements? Several German colliers said to be in vicinity of Magellan Straits.” The Admiralty could tell him only, “No certain information of these ships since 8 August. . . . Magellan Straits and its vicinity quite possible. Falkland Island anchorages might be used by them.” On September 14—the same day that Carmania sank Cap Trafalgar, and while Cradock was in the river Plate—the Admiralty took a stronger position. Whitehall still had no definite news of Spee’s whereabouts, but the repeated warnings of Patey and Jerram had created concern, and a telegram to Cradock, forwarded by the British minister in Rio, contained a multitude of new orders: “There is a strong probability of Scharnhorst and Gneisenauarriving in the Magellan Straits or on the west coast of South America [where] the Germans have begun to carry on trade. . . . Leave sufficient force [in the Atlantic] to deal with Dresden and Karlsruhe. Concentrate a squadron strong enough to meet Scharnhorstand Gneisenau, making Falkland Islands your coaling base. Canopus is now en route to Abrolhos; Defence is joining you from Mediterranean. Until Defence joins, keep at least Canopus and one ‘County’ class cruiser with your flagship. As soon as you have superior force, search Ma-gellan Straits with squadron, being ready to return and cover the River Plate, or, according to information, search north as far as Valaparaiso. Break up the German trade and destroy the German cruisers.”

This telegram, lengthy, complicated, and sometimes contradictory, bore heavy responsibility for what happened later. Cradock, reading the message, understood that Spee might be coming toward him. To meet this threat, he was ordered to concentrate a squadron strong enough to meet and “destroy the German cruisers.” He was to move his primary base south to the Falklands. The southeastern Pacific, it was implied, would be added to his theater of operations, but, simultaneously, he was to leave behind in the Atlantic sufficient ships to deal with Dresden and Karlsruhe. He was assured that reinforcements were on the way: the old battleship Canopus was en route and, more important, the modern armored cruiser Defence would join him from the Mediterranean. UntilDefencearrived, Good Hope and Monmouth should stick close to Canopus for mutual protection. He was to search the Magellan Straits, but he was also to be ready either to double back to the Plate or to proceed up to Valparaíso to harass German trade, “according to information.”

Evaluating the strengths of the two ships being sent to reinforce his squadron, Cradock could think of little use for Canopus, and for the next seven weeks he would continue to wonder how to employ this lumbering predreadnought. Completed in 1899, Canopus,at 12,950 tons, was lighter than Cradock’s flagship, the 14,000-ton armored cruiser Good Hope. To please nineteenth-century admirals, Canopus had been built with a ram, a weapon dating back to Phoenician and Roman galleys and designed to pierce the hull of an enemy vessel that somehow came too close. It was true that the old battleship carried four 12-inch guns, but they were of an early design and their maximum range of 13,000 yards was no greater than that of Von Spee’s sixteen 8.1-inch guns. In any case, by 1912 the ship’s general deterioration had forced the Admiralty to place her and her five sisters in the Reserve Fleet, with scrapping scheduled for 1915. For over two years, Canopus had been moored at Milford Haven with only a maintenance party aboard. In July 1914, she was granted a last reprieve to swell the numbers at the Spithead Review and then, when war came, her temporary recommission was extended. Manned by a crew of partially trained reservists, she spent several weeks escorting the BEF across the Channel and then was ordered to the Cape Verde Islands, and then to the Falklands. Her speed was unreliable: “Few [ships of the Canopus class] can steam well now except for short spurts,” said a contemporary naval annual. In preparation for the Spithead Review, her old engines were coaxed to push her through the water at 16 knots, but all knew that this figure was illusory; Churchill credited her with an actual speed of 15 knots; Jellicoe qualified this by saying, “If she did not break down.”

The modern armored cruiser Defence, on the other hand, was precisely what Cradock needed. This was a ship of 14,600 tons with four 9.2-inch guns and ten 7.5-inch guns and a speed of 23 knots. Defence was one of the last three British armored cruisers ever built. Completed in 1908 after the launch of the battle cruiser Invincible, she was faster and more powerfully armed than Spee’s two armored cruisers; indeed, she and her sisters, Minotaur and Shannon, had been laid down in reply to the building of ScharnhorstandGneisenau. Cradock’s older armored cruisers, Good Hope and Monmouth, were weaker than Von Spee’s ships but just as fast; now, bolstered by Defence, he should be able to meet the Germans on equal terms.

Even promised reinforcement of his squadron, Cradock could make little sense of the Admiralty’s September 14 signal. He might have sufficient strength to fight Admiral von Spee, but he did not have enough ships to do everything he had been told to do. At best, he would need to rely on guesswork and luck, shuttling ships back and forth to the place of greatest danger. The confusion of overlapping orders recalls the instructions to Milne at the outbreak of war: to destroy Goeben, cover the French transports, and keep the Austrian fleet from leaving the Adriatic. The originator of both sets of orders was Churchill (once again, the language is unmistakable) and, again, the First Lord’s strategy was approved by Prince Louis and Sturdee.

Reading the September 14 message, Cradock doubtless wondered why Canopus was being sent. The background to this decision reveals something of how things were working at the Admiralty. At the first suggestion that Spee might appear on the coast of South America, a War Staff memorandum of September 7 had recommended reinforcing Cradock with three armored cruisers and a light cruiser from the Mediterranean. Prince Louis and Sturdee had gone further, advocating the dispatch of two battle cruisers from the Grand Fleet to the South Atlantic. But Jellicoe objected to this weakening of Beatty’s force and Churchill refused to overrule the Grand Fleet Commander-in-Chief. Ultimately, the Admiralty decided that only Defence could be spared. Battenberg, however, insisted that something more be done for Cradock. Canopus, ram and all, then serving no purpose at the Cape Verde Islands, was that something more.

Meanwhile, another event upset all of these arrangements. On Septem-ber 14, Admiral von Spee suddenly appeared off Samoa, hoping to find the New Zealand troop transports at anchor. Samoa was 2,500 miles farther east than the German squadron’s last known position, so Churchill and his colleagues, once they began drawing fresh circles on their maps, would normally have been left in little doubt that Spee was headed for South America. Then, presumably, the Admiralty would have confirmed and perhaps even increased its reinforcement of Cradock. But Spee, finding nothing at Apia, steamed away to the northwest—a false course—before doubling back to the east. The Admiralty was deceived by this elementary ruse used by sea captains for centuries. Spee, London now assumed, was returning to the Far East. And if he was not making for South America, there was no need to reinforce Cradock. Defence, which on September 14 had been summoned from the Dardanelles, had traveled as far as Malta. On September 18, these orders were canceled and Defence was ordered back to the Dardanelles. Essentially, Cradock was told that he no longer need worry about the German East Asia Squadron. The fatal signal read: “Situation changed . . . Gneisenau appeared off Samoa on 14th and left steering NW. German trade on west coast of America is to be attacked at once. Cruisers need not be concentrated. Two cruisers and an armed liner appear sufficient for Magellan Straits and west coast. Report what you propose about Canopus.” In this message, there was no mention of the cancellation of Defence’s sailing orders. For weeks, Cradock continued to expect this powerful ship; he calculated that if she had left the Mediterranean shortly after receiving the September 14 telegram and was steaming toward him at 15 knots, she would arrive at the river Plate early in October.

Cradock, with Good Hope, Monmouth, Glasgow, and Otranto, was in the river Plate when the Admiralty’s September 18 message arrived. Told that Spee was no longer coming east, Cradock decided that two cruisers—Glasgow and Monmouth—and his armed linerOtranto would suffice to search the Magellan Straits and go up the South American west coast to disrupt the activities of German merchant ships. He had no use for Canopus and proposed to leave her as a guard ship at the river Plate. Once Defence arrived, he would have her “coal and await orders” with Canopus.

Cradock’s departure from the Plate was delayed by a gale, but on September 22, he left for the Straits of Magellan. At this point, he understood that the only enemy ship the Admiralty thought he was likely to meet was Dresden. Privately, however, he still suspected that Spee’s East Asia Squadron might be making for South America. Before leaving Montevideo, he wrote a personal letter to King George V, whom he had known during the monarch’s naval career. “I have a feeling that the two [German] heavy cruisers from China are making for the Straits of Magellan and am just off there to ‘search and see,’ ” he said. A memorandum Cradock left at the British consulate in Montevideo underlined this suspicion. It emphasized the “urgent importance that any and all information of movements of . . . Gneisenau and Scharnhorst and other China cruisers should reach Rear Admiral [Cradock] . . . without delay.” Before leaving it behind, Cradock had deleted from the message a line that revealed the depth of his concern: “Delay may entail loss of H.M. ships.”

Steaming south, Cradock encountered a merchant ship on September 25 that told him that Dresden had passed into the Pacific a week before. On the twenty-eighth, the British squadron arrived at the Chilean port of Punta Arenas, in the Magellan Straits, where the British consul reported that Dresden had been at Orange Bay on the southern coast of Tierra del Fuego. Hoping that the German ship still might be there and that he could catch her by surprise, Cradock left Punta Arenas after midnight—without lights, to conceal his departure from the town’s large German colony. On September 29, in thick weather and falling snow, the British squadron threaded the narrow, uncharted Cockburn Channel where high, snow-covered mountains and glaciers came down to the water on either side. The Cape Horn weather was freakish: gusts of wind roared down the mountains, whipping calm seas into foam; then the ships would round a bend and find the water still as glass. Leaving the channel, the squadron rounded Cape Horn west to east and charged into Orange Bay. They found it empty, although a landing party discovered a tablet left by Dresden, saying that she had been there September 8, 9, and 10. The following day, Cradock sent Otranto to Punta Arenas and took the rest of his squadron to the Falklands to coal. At Punta Arenas, Otranto intercepted a German wireless signal suggesting that Dresden had returned to Orange Bay. Cradock left the Falklands at high speed and made another descent on the remote anchorage. Arriving on the night of Octo-ber 6, he again found the bay empty. Thereupon, he ordered Captain Luce of Glasgow to take his light cruiser with Monmouth and Otranto to search up the Chilean coast as far as Valparaíso. Good Hope, with Cradock aboard, would return to the Falklands to coal, to remain in closer wireless touch with Montevideo and London, and to guard against the possibility that Dresden might double back and return to the South Atlantic.

Glasgow, Monmouth, and Otranto made a memorable westward passage around Cape Horn. A gale piled up mountainous seas and “it blew, snowed, hailed and sleeted as hard as it is possible to do these things,” wrote one of the squadron officers. “I thought the ship would dive under altogether at times. . . . Monmouth was rolling 35 degrees at times . . . the ship was practically a submarine.” On Otranto, another officer said, “We finally got past caring what might happen, what with the strain, the weather, and the extreme cold.” On October 12, Luce’s three ships reached a temporary coaling base established at Vallenar roads, among the Chilean fjords in the Chonos Archipelago. The water and the scenery in the shadow of Mount Isquiliac reminded British sailors of a Scottish loch on a summer day: a blue lagoon surrounded by green islands with mountains rising to 5,000 and 6,000 feet and, in the distance, the snowcapped higher Andes. Explorers from the ships had difficulty penetrating past the fringe of beach; beyond lay an almost impenetrable forest, dense with boulders, fallen tree trunks, thick scrub, and bog pitted with deep holes filled with wet, slippery moss.

Having coaled, Luce left Otranto behind, and with Glasgow and Monmouth steamed north up the Chilean coast. Admiral von Spee’s squadron was much on his mind. “It seemed to both the captain of Monmouth and myself,” Luce said later, “that we were running a considerable risk without much object, and I should personally have preferred to go alone in Glasgow which I knew to be faster than any of the Germans, and unless caught against the land, would be able to avoid a superior force. Monmouth, which had been long due for a refit, was at the best only equal in speed to the Germans and her fighting value would not avail against the enemy’s superior armored cruisers. I was therefore very anxious to complete my mission before Von Spee appeared on the coast.” On October 14, Luce reached Coronel, a small coaling harbor lined by white sand beaches and forests of fir and eucalyptus, 275 miles south of Valparaíso. The next day, Glasgow arrived at Valparaíso and anchored among a number of German merchant vessels that had sought refuge in the harbor. While his ship loaded provisions, Hirst went ashore to the English club “for a good square meal.” He found it “an extraordinary place; nobody spoke a word to me, although I was in uniform; simply stared at me as though I were a wild beast.”Glasgow remained only a few hours and then returned to Vallenar. On October 18, the entire British squadron was back at sea off Valparaíso. Rolling uncomfortably in the big Pacific swells, Glasgow’s officers envied their comrades on theGood Hope “snug as a bug at Port Stanley . . . her men breaking up the pubs—our pubs.” On October 21, Monmouth reported additional boiler defects and announced that she would be completely out of action by January. “She has already been condemned twice,” Hirst noted.

Meanwhile, at Port Stanley in the Falklands, Admiral Cradock had been waiting for two weeks for instructions and reinforcements. On the evening of October 7, he received an Admiralty signal sent from London on October 5, which once more entirely changed his situation. On the night of October 4, a British radio station at Suva in the Fiji Islands had intercepted a message from Scharnhorst declaring that the German squadron was steaming east from the Marquesas toward Easter Island. As Easter Island lies halfway between Tahiti and the South American coast, the news left little doubt as to Von Spee’s destination. There was yet time for the Admiralty to reinforce Cradock. It did not do so. “It appears that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau are working across to South America,” the Admiralty signaled Cradock on October 5. “You must be prepared to meet them. . . . Canopus should accompany Glasgow, Monmouth and Otranto, the ships to search and protect trade in combination. . . . If you propose Good Hope to go [to the west coast], leaveMonmouth on east coast.” The Admiralty, in other words, was telling Cradock to be ready to meet Spee, but also to split his force; if he decided to take Good Hope into the Pacific, he was to leave Monmouth behind to protect trade in the South Atlantic. Notably, the Admiralty did not mention Defence.

Cradock replied the next day, October 8, but because of delays in transmission, his signal was not received in London until October 11. He began by questioning the Admiralty’s assumption that Spee’s two armored cruisers would be accompanied by only a single light cruiser. His own visits to Orange Bay clearly indicated that the Dresden was in the Pacific where, he assumed, she would join Nürnberg and Leipzig, giving Spee three light cruisers. He asked specifically, “Does Defence join my command?” He also asked whether “regulations of the Panama Canal Company permit passage of belligerent ships.”

[Cradock’s question about the Panama Canal arose from the possibility that von Spee might take that route between the Pacific and the Atlantic and thus avoid South America and the South Atlantic. The great interocean waterway had been formally opened on August 16, 1914. Since that day, the British Foreign Office had been pressing to discover what rules the Americans would impose on the traffic of belligerent warships. The U.S. State Department refused to give a straightforward answer, although it seemed that the Americans would agree to a maximum of three of a belligerent power’s ships at one time, enough for Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and one other ship—a light cruiser or a collier—to pass through.]

Cradock’s question about Defence was prompted by the Admiralty’s continuing failure to keep him informed as to her whereabouts. In fact, despite Whitehall’s new assessment that Spee probably was approaching South America, there had been no renewal of orders for Defence to join Cradock. Yet no one had told Cradock that the powerful, modern armored cruiser on which he was counting would not be coming. By not mentioning Defence in any of its messages to Cradock, the Admiralty now appeared to assume that four ill-matched vessels—a stumbling, elderly battleship, an old armored cruiser, a fast, modern light cruiser, and an armed merchant liner—would be enough to deal with Spee if the German squadron turned up.

The Admiralty had not answered Cradock’s October 8 signal when, on October 11, he sent another. In this message, the admiral made a sound suggestion of benefit to the navy’s overall strategic deployment, but one that ultimately damaged his own situation. He pointed out the risks of a single British squadron attempting to cover both the east and west coasts of South America. If Spee was indeed on his way to South American waters, and if the only available British squadron was concentrated on the west coast off Chile, the Germans might manage to evade this squadron and slip around Cape Horn into the South Atlantic. Once there, they could destroy all British coaling bases—the Falklands, the river Plate, and the Abrolhos—and ravage British trade all the way up to the West Indies. To guard against this eventuality, he suggested that a new backup squadron of additional ships be formed on the east coast. In retrospect, it seems probable that when Cradock spoke of forming a new squadron, he assumed that he would control the operations of both the east and west coast squadrons. The bulk of his present squadron—Glasgow, Monmouth, and Otranto—was already on the west coast. The new east coast squadron he had in mind would consist of a grouping of Good Hope (now at the Falklands),Canopus (on the way), Defence (which he believed was on the way), and Cornwall (brought down from the mid-Atlantic).

The Admiralty decided to follow Cradock’s suggestion. The admiral obviously was right in saying that if he took his present squadron up the Chilean coast and Spee went around him into the South Atlantic, the Germans could create havoc on the river Plate. The Admiralty’s decision, transmitted on October 14, was to form a strong, new east coast squadron, as Cradock had recommended. This new squadron would include the old ar-mored cruisers Carnarvon and Cornwall, the new light cruiser Bristol (a sister ofGlasgow), two armed merchant cruisers, and Defence, which now was once again summoned from the Mediterranean. The new squadron would be based at the river Plate, not at the Falklands, and it would be commanded by another rear admiral, not by Cradock.

Had Cradock been left to decide whether, where, and when the two squadrons should be concentrated, he might have beaten the enemy. But with no additional ships and no single commander to determine how the available ships should be deployed, the plan was inadequate. Luce was to write:

It always appeared to me that we fell between two stools. There was not force available at the moment to form two squadrons of sufficient strength and speed and we should not have advanced into the Pacific until this was forthcoming, but [should] have concentrated in the Straits using the Falklands as a base. The [British] trade on the west coast was not of vital importance and could have been kept in harbor until von Spee’s position was revealed—which was bound to happen if he was to do anything. Cradock seems to have thought, however, that the Admiralty were pressing him to attack and his ardent fighting spirit could not brook anything in the nature of defensive strategy.

Much of the confusion in London and the Falklands can be blamed on the lack of clarity in the signals passing between the two points. Churchill, forwarding Cradock’s October 11 message to Prince Louis, clearly did not understand Cradock’s thinking: he minuted his copy to the First Sea Lord, “It would be best for the British ships to keep within supporting distance of one another, whether in the Straits or near the Falklands, and to postpone the cruise along the west coast until the present uncertainty aboutScharnhorst-Gneisenau is cleared up. They and not the trade are our quarry for the moment. Above all, we must not miss them.” Battenberg, satisfied that Cradock knew this, replied to Churchill’s note with the single word, “Settled.” Nevertheless, from this memorandum, it is obvious that Churchill was unaware that three of Cradock’s four ships were already far up the Chilean coast. Then two days later, Churchill and Battenberg again discussed the situation and the First Lord subsequently minuted to the First Sea Lord:

I understand from our conversation that the dispositions you proposed for the South Pacific and South Atlantic were as follows: 1) Cradock to concentrate at the Falklands Canopus, Monmouth, Good Hope and Otranto. 2) To send Glasgow to look forLeipzig and attack and protect trade on west coast of South America as far north as Valparaiso. 3) Defence to join Carnarvon in forming a new combat squadron on the trade route from Rio. . . . These arrangements have my full approval. I presume Cradock is aware of the possibility of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau arriving on or after the 17th in his neighborhood and that if not strong enough to attack he will do his utmost to shadow them, pending the arrival of reinforcements.

There was much in these two memoranda that would have confused and upset Admiral Cradock had he been able to read them. He had never been told merely to “shadow” Scharnhorst and Gneisenau; on the contrary, on September 14, he had been given an order, never countermanded, to “destroy the German cruisers.” Churchill spoke to Battenberg of “pending . . . reinforcements”; Cradock long ago had asked for reinforcement and Defence had been promised, then, without his knowledge, withdrawn. The memorandum makes clear that the Admiralty now believed that Canopus was sufficient reinforcement.

The Admiralty’s October 14 signal reached Cradock at Port Stanley on October 15. Defence, he now learned, was to join Stoddart, not him, but at least Defence was coming to the South Atlantic. As Stoddart was junior to him on the Navy List, he still might order Stoddart to send Defence to join him at the Falklands. And with Defence in mind, Cradock had not yet begun to protest against the Admiralty’s exaggerated opinion of the value of Canopus. It was Canopus’s four 12-inch guns that encouraged Churchill to believe that Cradock would have superiority over Spee’s two armored cruisers. All other considerations—her age, her tired boilers and machinery, her raw crew—were set aside. In fact, Canopus’s 12-inch shells certainly would have harmed the German armored cruisers—if they had hit them. Many doubted their ability to do that. The battleship’s two 12-inch turrets were in the charge of Royal Navy Reserve lieutenants who, before the war, had never stepped inside a battleship gun turret. Nevertheless, Churchill, in sending Canopusto Cradock, colorfully described the old battleship as “a citadel around which all our cruisers in those waters could find absolute security.” With Canopus in company, the First Lord proclaimed, Admiral Cradock’s squadron was safe;Scharnhorst and Gneisenauwould never dare venture within range of those 12-inch guns. Lieutenant Hirst of Glasgow held “entirely a contrary opinion. . . . [Canopus] was seventeen years old. Her antique 12-inch guns . . . had a maximum range of . . . three hundred yards less than those of the German heavy cruisers, and they were difficult to load and lay on the heavy sea way prevalent in the South Pacific.”

The Admiralty had told Admiral Cradock on September 14 that he was to “break up German trade and destroy the German cruisers.” On October 5, he was instructed, “You must be prepared to meet them [Scharnhorst and Gneisenau] in company . . . Canopus to accompany Glasgow, Monmouth and Otranto.” But how could he accomplish this with a squadron tied to Canopus? The old battleship’s best official speed was 16 knots; the speed of the German armored cruisers was over 20. Then came the discovery thatCanopuscould not make even 16 knots. The Admiralty had calculated that Canopus would reach the Falklands on October 15, but she did not leave the river Plate until October 17. The following day, her captain, Heathcoat Grant, signaled Cradock at Port Stanley that he hoped to arrive on the twenty-second and that his ship’s best speed was 12 knots.

[Soon after sending this signal to Cradock, Grant discovered that his engineer officer was a sick man whose health had been so undermined by the strain of maintaining the battleship’s ancient machinery with a scratch crew that he had deliberately exaggerated her mechanical difficulties. This engineer commander, William Denbow, who for two years had been responsible for Canopus’s engines while she was laid up in Care and Maintenance, was unwillingly sent off to war along with the old ship and her old engines. When he found himself bound on a long voyage for the South Atlantic, his nerves failed. During the voyage, he never left his cabin, never inspected the engines, and never spoke to his subordinates. Captain Grant, apparently, knew nothing of this. Not until after Cradock had been told that the ship’s engines were suffering from faulty condensers and could produce no more than 12 knots did a junior officer find the courage to tell the captain that Denbow “lived in his cabin. The day before we reached Port Stanley, I sent to the Captain . . . a written report about the Engineer Commander’s strange behavior.” By the time Grant knew, Cradock had sailed from Port Stanley, and Grant decided not to pass along the story. Denbow was placed under medical surveillance and, at Vallenar on the Chilean coast, he was transferred to a supply ship, to be invalided out of the navy.]

Dismayed, Cradock passed this news to the Admiralty on October 18, advising, “I trust circumstances will enable me to force an action, but fear that strategically, owing to Canopus, the speed of my squadron cannot exceed twelve knots.”

Cradock may have assumed that the absurdity implicit in the idea of a 12-knot British squadron attempting to intercept and “force an action” with a 20-knot German squadron was so obvious that someone at the Admiralty would grasp it. Then, either London would issue a new set of orders, assigning him a different mission, or send him immediate reinforcements, instructing him to await their arrival before accepting action. Unfortunately, the Admiralty simply took Cradock at his word, interpreting his message to mean that the admiral intended to keep Canopus with him as he had been told to do and that he would travel at her best speed. Churchill confirmed this after the war, writing, “It is clear that up to this date the admiral fully intended to keep concentrated on theCanopus, even though his squadron speed should be reduced to twelve knots.” Cradock thus faced a painful choice: he could obey Admiralty instructions and operate in company with Canopus, thereby forfeiting any chance of bringing the Germans to action; or he could fight without Canopus and face the probability of defeat. Churchill considered the second alternative—fighting without presence of Canopus—illogical and disobedient; Cradock considered the first—letting the Germans slip by unmolested—cowardly and unthinkable.

When Canopus finally appeared at Port Stanley on October 22, Captain Grant confirmed to Cradock that his old battleship’s best speed was 12 knots. Worse, Grant reported that he could not leave port at any speed until he repaired his leaking condensers and cleaned his boilers; even then, he would be restricted to 12 knots. Disgusted, Cradock ordered Canopus to remain at Port Stanley until she was ready and then to follow him—he would pause to allow her to catch up—and escort his colliers around to the west coast. That afternoon, Cradock himself sailed in Good Hope to join the rest of his squadron. The time for Spee’s appearance was already past; he felt that he could not leave his detached ships—Glasgow, Monmouth, and Otranto—exposed any longer on the Chilean coast without the support of Good Hope. Before leaving, he sent a simple report to London: “Good Hope left [Port Stanley] 22 October via Cape Horn. Canopus following on 23rd via Magellan Straits with three colliers for west coast of South America.”

At fifty-two, Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock was a small, immaculately dressed bachelor with wide-set eyes and a neatly trimmed, pointed beard; a diplomat’s wife in Mexico described him as “shining with that special, well-groomed English look.” He lived alone except for his dog, who accompanied him everywhere, but he thrived on human society. Often on board Good Hope, he left his admiral’s quarters and joined the ship’s officers for a drink in the wardroom. An aide to the governor of the Falklands remembered that while Cradock was at Port Stanley, he and his dog “would come wandering up to Government House every day for a yarn and a meal or else the Governor would go off to Good Hope. He was a dear old bloke and keen as a terrier.”

Kit Cradock had joined the navy at thirteen and had served afloat and ashore for forty years. In 1900, as an officer in the China Squadron, Cradock was playing polo in Hong Kong with his friends Beatty and Keyes when the Boxer Rebellion broke out. He went ashore with the British naval brigade to capture the Taku forts and, under heavy fire, led a company of British, German, and Japanese sailors across a sunbaked mud flat to storm the west gate of a fort. For this, the kaiser gave him the Prussian Order of the Crown with Swords. In 1910, Fisher, as First Sea Lord, announced that Captain Cradock is “one of our very best officers.” He was promoted to rear admiral and knighted, and in February 1913 took command of the prestigious North American and West Indies Station.

The navy was Cradock’s life. The majesty and invincibility of the Royal Navy formed the bedrock of empire and the cornerstone of his beliefs. For him, said the contemporary naval writer Sir Archibald Hurd, “the navy was not a mere collection of ships, but a community of men with high purpose”; in this brotherhood, tradition, courage, honor, and discipline counted more than ships, boiler power, and gun calibers. In his leisure, Cradock wrote three books about the navy, including Whispers from the Fleet, a volume of avuncular advice for young officers. Among topics considered, Cradock counseled on burials at sea: “When a hammock is being used as a shroud, the last stitch of the sailmaker’s needle is neatly popped through the tip of the nose. Then there can be no mistake.”

Cradock was known in the fleet as a man who “fought hard, played hard, and did not suffer fools gladly.” His favorite signal was said to be “Engage the enemy more closely.” Home from the sea in his native Yorkshire, he hunted with near recklessness and he told a friend and fellow admiral that he hoped when his time came it would be in action at sea or by breaking his neck on the hunting field. By 1914 when he went to war, Cradock was one of the Royal Navy’s most decorated admirals. Among the three rows of ribbons on the left breast of his jacket, however, one was stained with ink. “That ribbon,” he told the governor’s aide at Port Stanley, “belongs to the First Class Order of the Blue Ape, or something, that the kaiser gave me. I couldn’t tear it out without ruining all the others; so I got an ink bottle and made it look as unpleasant as possible.”

According to Luce, Cradock knew when he left Port Stanley that he was going to his doom. Sir William Allardyce, the governor of the Falklands, later told Luce that “Cradock thought his chances were small and that he had been let down by the Admiralty especially when his request for Defence had been denied.” Bidding Allardyce farewell, Cradock said that he would never see him again and gave him a large sealed packet to be sent home to the Admiralty as soon as his death was confirmed. The packet contained a letter to his friend Admiral Hedworth Meux, to be forwarded “only in case . . . my squadron disappears—and me too—completely. I have no intention, after forty years at sea, of being an unheard victim.” To Meux he vowed, “I will take care I do not suffer the fate of poor Troubridge.” The governor’s aide at the Falklands had a similar recollection of Cradock’s mood: “The admiral was a very brave old man; he knew that he was going to almost certain death in fighting these new and powerful ships and it seemed to be quite all right as far as he was concerned. . . . He knew what he was up against and asked for a fast cruiser with big guns to be added to his squadron for he had nothing very powerful and nothing very fast, but the Admiralty said he’d have to go without. So old Cradock said, ‘All right; we’ll do without,’ and he slipped off quietly early one morning and left Canopus to look after the colliers and transports and picked up Glasgow and Monmouth and set off to look for these crack Germans.”

On October 26, as Good Hope was steaming north up the coast of Chile, Cradock signaled his intentions to the Admiralty. He confirmed his determination to find and to fight Spee, but he also made clear his distaste for Canopus and his desire for Defence: “With reference to orders to search for the enemy and our great desire for early success, I consider it impractical on account of Canopus[’s] slow speed to find and destroy enemy squadron. Have therefore ordered Defence to join me after calling for orders at Montevideo.Canopus will be employed in necessary work of convoying colliers.” This message arrived on October 27, at a time of turmoil at the Admiralty. Battenberg was about to resign and, on October 30, Churchill recalled Fisher. Thus it was that on the days whenGlasgow was off Coronel, Good Hope, Monmouth, and Otranto were steaming north to join her, and Canopus was laboring up from the Magellan Straits, Churchill was, in his own words, “gravely preoccupied.” He passed Cradock’s signal to the War Staff with the minute, “This telegram is very obscure and I do not understand what Cradock intends or wishes.” In fact, Cradock’s message angered the First Lord. The admiral appeared either to have obtusely misunderstood or to be deliberately thwarting Admiralty orders. Cradock was saying that Canopus, the “citadel” around which he had been told to concentrate his squadron, was useless to him and that he was relegating this “citadel” to convoy work. Further, Cradock was telling Stoddart to send himDefence, the ship around which the new east coast squadron was to be built. Indeed, Stoddart immediately protested that if Defence was taken from him, he must immediately be sent two additional fast cruisers to replace her. On the evening of Octo-ber 28, Churchill abruptly countermanded Cradock’s orders to Stoddart to send him Defence: “Defence is to remain on east coast under orders of Stoddart,” decreed the Admiralty. “This will leave sufficient force on each side in case the hostile cruisers appear there on the trade route.” Regarding Cradock’s decision to relegate Canopus to convoy work, the Admiralty made no comment.

The words “sufficient force” emphasized that the Admiralty did not consider that Cradock required any addition to his squadron in order to fulfill his mission. But had Defence been present at Coronel, the outcome might have been different. Her guns matched those of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and her presence would have given Cradock a second regular Royal Navy ship and a second fully trained Royal Navy crew. It still would been two professionally manned British ships against five Germans, but with Good Hope andMonmouth adding their guns, the scale might have been balanced. This was Cradock’s view.

[In the end, Defence was an unlucky ship. As Troubridge’s flagship in the Mediterranean, she had played an unheroic role in the Goeben fiasco. Now as Cradock went to meet Spee, Defence remained idle at the river Plate. Eighteen months later, she blew up and sank at Jutland.]

The Admiralty’s message probably reached the admiral around one p.m. on November 1, when Glasgow brought it out to the flagship from Coronel. If he read it, the signal would explain his subsequent behavior. His decision to leave Canopus behind apparently had been approved for the Admiralty had made no comment. Defence had again been denied him. And he had been assured that, without these two ships, his squadron still constituted a “sufficient force.”

Thus, five ships, of which only one—the smallest—was ready to fight a modern, well-trained foe, represented the Royal Navy off the west coast of South America on November 1, 1914. “The words ‘sufficient force’ must have seared the soul of a fearless and experienced officer whose impetuous character was well-known at the Admiralty,” Hirst wrote later. Churchill was to argue that the “sufficient force” signal never reached Cradock, who was therefore not influenced by it in reaching his bold and suicidal decision. But Hirst said it reached Glasgow during her visit to Coronel, that his ship brought it out to Good Hope just before the action, and that he was certain that Cradock read it. Thereafter, “tired of protesting his inferiority, the receipt of this telegram would be sufficient to spur Cradock to hoist, as he did half an hour later, his signal, ‘Spread fifteen miles apart and look for the enemy.’ ” Three hours later he met the East Asia Squadron. Cradock’s last signal, wirelessed to Canopus, was a proper epitaph for a man who had always hoped he would break his neck on the hunting field or be killed in battle: “I am going to attack the enemy now.”

Churchill later admitted that, had he not been distracted by the Admiralty upheaval over Battenberg’s departure and Fisher’s arrival, “I am sure I should have reacted much more violently to the ominous sentence ‘shall employ Canopus convoying colliers.’ ” October 30 was Fisher’s first day back in office as First Sea Lord and Churchill gave the old admiral a two-hour briefing on the worldwide deployment of the Royal Navy. “The critical point,” Churchill recalled, was in South American waters. “Speaking of Admiral Cradock’s position, I said, ‘You don’t suppose he would try to fight them without the Canopus?’ He did not give any decided reply.”

On the morning of October 27, Good Hope joined Glasgow, Monmouth, and Otranto in the remote fjord of Vallenar roads, where Cradock was beyond wireless contact with the Admiralty. Still hoping to receive further clarification or modification of his orders by way of Montevideo, he dispatched Glasgow back to Coronel to collect any waiting messages that might have come over land wire. Before Glasgow left, she sent a boat around the anchorage to collect outgoing mail from the other ships. Visiting in the wardrooms of the armored cruisers, Hirst found most officers expecting a battle and fatalistic about their prospects. “Two of the lieutenant commanders in Monmouth, both old shipmates, took me aside to give me farewell messages to their wives,” he said. “Glasgow has got the speed,” they told him, “so she can get away; but we are for it.” When the light cruiser departed at 6:30 p.m., she carried Cradock’s last signal to the Admiralty: “Monmouth, Good Hope and Otranto coaling at Vallenar. Glasgow patrolling vicinity of Coronel to intercept German shipping, joining flag later on. I intend to proceed northward secretly with squadron after coaling and keep out of sight of land.” Canopus, then plowing through the Straits of Magellan, was not mentioned.

Two days later, as Cradock and his squadron were leaving Vallenar, Canopus and her two colliers appeared in the fjord. The old battleship, her captain reported, could go no farther without spending another twenty-four hours repairing her high-pressure piston glands. Cradock told Captain Grant to anchor, do the work, and follow as soon as possible. Grant, however, never reported to Cradock that his ship’s potential speed now was higher than 12 knots. Later, he explained that, knowing the admiral’s opinion of his ship, he doubted the squadron would wait for him to catch up. Whether Cradock, knowing the truth about Canopus’s marginally higher speed, would have waited and fought the battle in her company will never be known.

Meanwhile, Glasgow was steaming north, “alone this time, much to my satisfaction,” said Luce. On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, the wireless office began to intercept heavy traffic in German code, indicating that a warship—the signals indicated Leipzig—was not far away. The signals were so strong, Luce said, “that we expected to sight the enemy at any moment.” As a result, Luce hesitated to take his ship into Coronel. He worried that if he entered the neutral port, he might be trapped in a place where his ship’s greater speed would be useless. He signaled Cradock, who gave permission to delay entering the harbor. Accordingly, for two days, Glasgow waited outside Coronel. On the night of the thirtieth, Luce again heard Leipzig’s call sign broadcast from no more than 150 miles away, but at daybreak the ocean was empty.

At twilight on October 31, Glasgow entered Coronel harbor and Hirst, the intelligence officer, went ashore to collect and send messages and mail. In handing over papers, the worried British consul stressed to Hirst the existence of both a strongly German and pro-German minority along the Chilean coast, and the consequent probability that the light cruiser’s presence already had been reported. That night, in full view of the anchored Glasgow, the German consulate and the German merchant ships in the harbor blazed with light. One of these vessels was Göttingen, a supply ship that Spee had sent into Coronel, which promptly signaled her admiral: “British light cruiser anchored in Coronel Roads at 7:00 p.m. on 31 October.” At 2:00 a.m., Glasgow’s wireless room was listening to almost continuous, high-pitched Telefunken signal notes that indicated the presence of enemy ships in the vicinity. The number of wireless messages convinced Luce that the German squadron was approaching, and he decided to sail at nine o’clock the next morning. Cradock, sweeping up from the south and hoping to catch Leipzig, ordered Luce to rendezvous with the squadron forty miles west of Coronel at noon the next day, November 1.

Admiral von Spee, leaving Más Afuera on October 27, had been informed by a German port agent at Punta Arenas that a “British Queen class battleship” had been seen that day headed west through the Straits of Magellan.

[In fact, the ship was Canopus. It was an understandable mistake; the two classes had similar profiles and similar armament. But the Queens were five years younger and the 2,000 additional tons they carried had gone into armor and engines.]

He also knew from other German agents that ships of Admiral Cradock’s squadron had appeared farther up the Chilean coast. Accordingly, soon after his men saw the peaks of the Andes, he ordered his two armored cruisers to remain out of sight of the coast and instructed that all wireless communications between warships be preceded by Leipzig’s call sign. Spee realized that the presence of this light cruiser was known and he hoped that this duplicity would keep the presence of his other ships a secret. On October 30, he began sending his supply ships into Valparaíso and Coronel to take on supplies and coal. On the thirty-first, the admiral himself was at sea in Scharnhorst fifty miles off Valparaíso when he learned from Göttingen that Glasgow had slipped into Coronel. As the British ship could not remain in port for more than twenty-four hours without violating Chilean neutrality, Spee decided to trap and destroy this relatively small enemy. If Glasgow used all of her twenty-four hours, she would sail by the end of the afternoon on November 1; accordingly, Spee planned to arrive off Coronel before five p.m. Nürnberg was assigned to steam past the harbor entrance to see whether the British cruiser was there; the remaining ships were to spread in an arc outside with Scharnhorst to the north and Gneisenau to the south. Both admirals, thus, suffered from the same misunderstanding; each believed himself to be pursuing a single enemy light cruiser and neither was aware of the presence of other, larger enemy ships.

Sunday, November 1, was All Saints’ Day, and Spee’s seamen, coming down from Valparaíso toward Coronel, rejoiced in a clear early-spring morning. The sea was dark green and the strong wind from the south tipped the crests of the waves with white foam that sparkled in the sunlight. At 10:30 a.m., the crew of Gneisenau went to church service on deck, but the hymn “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”) was muffled by the sound of the wind howling in the rigging and sending bursts of spray back from the foredeck. The midday meal included special allowances of cocoa and bread spread with marmalade. By noon, the wind, moving around to the southwest, had reached Force Seven—28 to 33 knots, or 31 to 37 miles, per hour—and the ships, plunging south at 14 knots through the heavy swell, began to pitch and roll. The squadron was strung out; Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Leipzig were in front and the other two lightcruisers behind. Toward noon, when Nürnberg stopped to examine two Chilean ships, she fell back twenty-five miles astern of the flagship. At 4:00 p.m., when British wireless signals became very loud, Nürnberg was ordered to rejoin. At 4:17 Leipzig sighted smoke and masts across the stormy seas far to starboard and at 4:20, a drum thundered the order “Clear the decks for action.” Coming closer, the Germans could see the funnels and then the hulls of the British light cruiser Glasgow and the armed merchant cruiser Otranto.

The morning of November 1 dawned bright on board Glasgow in Coronel harbor. Patches of fog lingering on the hilltops around the bay blew away in a strong wind that tempered the warmth of a spring day. At 9:15 a.m., having collected messages and mail for the admiral and the squadron, Glasgow carefully slipped out of the harbor. Out in the open sea, Luce saw nothing. He took his ship north until he was out of sight of land, then turned southwest. As the light cruiser’s bow plunged into the rising sea, green water swept the foredeck, and spray whipped over the bridge. Four hours later, forty miles west of Coronel Bay, Luce sighted Good Hope, Monmouth, and Otranto, coming north at 15 knots. The flagship and Monmouth were already rolling like barrels and Otranto,with the sail area of her tall side broadside to the wind, was even worse. At the rendezvous point, the strong wind and heavy sea made it impossible for any ship to lower a boat. In order to transfer to Cradock the messages and intelligence he had brought out from Coronel, Luce placed the papers in a 6-inch cartridge case, which Glasgow towed slowly across the bows of the flagship, which had come to a halt. Using a grapnel, Good Hope’s crew plucked the case from the sea, an effort that earned both ships Cradock’s signal “Maneuver well executed.”

Meanwhile, strong wireless signals indicated that Leipzig was not far to the north. Having heard nothing from the German armored cruisers, Cradock assumed that they were not nearby. At 1:50 p.m., the admiral signaled his squadron to form a line of search spreading fanwise, east to west, fifteen miles between ships, and to head north at 10 knots. Nearest the coast was Glasgow, with her professional, regular navy crew; next to her was Monmouth, with a reserve crew and twelve young naval cadets; beyond, the thin-skinned Otranto looming like a haystack out of the sea; and farthest west, carrying the only two heavy guns in the British squadron, Good Hope. On board the flagship, as his squadron swept north over the tumultuous seas, Cradock went to his cabin to study his messages and go through his mail.