It's funny what can trigger a memory.
Only recently I was watching an old 1955 movie called The Sea Chase, the sort of thing you might watch on a wet Sunday afternoon before the Paris Olympics dominated TV screens.
It starred John Wayne as the captain of an ageing German tramp steamer just trying to sail home while avoiding Australian and British warships. He was being hunted across the world's oceans after his ship escaped from Sydney Harbour at the outbreak of World War 2 in 1939.
It's all fiction but was loosely based on a real steamer trying to get home at the start of World War 1.
But as they say, truth is far stranger than fiction. Take the case of the real-life swashbuckling German pirate Count Felix von Luckner (1881-1966). He was nicknamed the "Sea Devil" for his widely publicised exploits in World War 1.
Described now as a braggart and a showman, Captain von Luckner was certainly extraordinary. Colourful, flawed and charismatic, this larger-than-life character had commanded a three-masted, steel-hulled sailing ship converted to a merchant raider. It captured and sank 15 ships in 225 days under the German Imperial flag.
His armed raider was an 1888 Glasgow-built sailing vessel, grabbed and converted by the Germans to wreak havoc on Allied shipping. It was possibly the last fighting sailing ship deployed in war.
She was called SMS Seeadler (or sea eagle) and while the disguised 245-foot (75 metre) windjammer would normally be at the mercy of trade winds, she was actually equipped with twin engines, secret compartments, two concealed 105-millimetre guns and two heavy machine guns plus rifles for boarding parties.
Between December 1916 and September 1917, the Seeadler's crew seized and scuttled ships in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Captain von Luckner's ship, flying a decoy flag of a friendly nation, would sail the high seas until able to lure an unsuspecting victim close by on some pretext and then raise their real German flag and reveal their guns.
The "gentleman pirate" then took hundreds of prisoners onboard, later releasing them safely in Brazil. Only one enemy seaman died and that was blamed on a shrapnel fragment.
On one occasion, it was said he delayed sinking an American cargo ship until he could send a lifeboat over to rescue the master's false teeth still onboard!
The Seeadler's voyage only ended when the ship was controversially wrecked at Mopelia atoll (now French Polynesia) on August 2, 1917. Embarrassing for von Luckner, his ship was swept up onto a reef to crunch down on the coal, her keel broken in five places.
The vessel was stripped of stores and abandoned, later exploding in flames during a botched attempt to demolish the wreck's main mast, visible for a distance of 15 nautical miles to any pursuing Allied warship.
Meanwhile, von Luckner set off in a lifeboat with five others to seize another ship to collect his crew and captives. Instead, they sailed about 2300 miles in an open boat only to be caught in Fiji and sent to New Zealand.
But Luckner made a daring escape from Lyttelton Harbour, making world headlines and becoming a folk hero in NZ. Recaptured, the war then ended and in 1921 he published a book on his adventurous life which became an international bestseller.
Amazingly, some souvenirs still survive today von Luckner's privateer. They include the ship's carved wooden figurehead of a woman in Scottish highland dress reflecting the ship's origin. It's now held at the Australian War Memorial along with one of the raider's brass shell cases.
They were salvaged by crew from the cruiser HMAS Encounter, alerted by mystery smoke on the horizon and sent to investigate. That was in September 1917.
What follows though is a little-known story of war relics and a Newcastle link with the raider.
Back in 1985, while editor of The Newcastle Post, I took a phone call from a person who cryptically referred to a "Seeadler". He lived near Hamilton racecourse.
Recognising the name, I took a gamble that it wasn't a wild goose chase and discovered a trove of material, including historic photos, old RAN service papers and some old, mystery flags still in a family's possession.
Remembering back then, the collection had once belonged to seaman Harry Dagwell who had been a sailor on HMAS Encounter in 1917. The Aussie warship had been hunting the German raider in the South Seas for three months without success.
During that time, on high alert, the sailors had been warned to be prepared to fight at a moment's notice.
When the gutted raider was then located and boarded, the Aussie sailors were uncomfortable. The ship was still smouldering, causing its ammunition to explode.
Dagwell was one of the RAN Inspection party. Fellow sailors scrambled to salvage items. He later told family that one of the raider's two 4.7-inch guns "fell into the water" while it was being recovered for ship-to-ship transfer.
Looking around on the ship's quarter deck, Dagwell found a smaller souvenir, a decoy flag (a British Union Jack) along with another flag, both of which he quickly hid under his jacket before leaving the scene.
The British flag was of rough material, faded in colour and damaged. When I was shown the flags and RAN papers relating to HMAS Encounter in 1985 I had no reason to doubt their authenticity.
I still don't know what happened to the prized war relics, but it seemed they should have gone to the Australian National Maritime Museum to be preserved, at the very least.
The Seeadler was only able to roam free by slipping through a British blockade in 1916 disguised as a neutral Norwegian sailing ship. One of the Germans had even dressed up as the captain's wife.
Felix von Luckner's family had wanted him to become a cavalryman but instead he ran away to sea and square-riggers at the age of 13. He jumped ship in Australia and stayed on, doing everything from selling The War Cry newspaper for the Salvation Army, to being a lighthouse keeper, joining the circus, hunting kangaroos and training as a boxer.
After World War 1, he arrived in Sydney on a yacht in May 1938 as a representative of the new, modern Germany. A Nazi spy on board, however, later reported von Luckner was only interested in promoting himself, not Hitler.
A favourite trick on tour, to show his strength, was tearing hefty telephone books in half.
Back in Germany, von Luckner, a freemason, fell out with the Nazi party, but his world-wide fame shielded him.
In the closing months of World War 2, as about 960 Allied aircraft prepared to burn and flatten his home city of Halle, near Leipzig, von Luckner negotiated a surrender of most of the city, probably saving the lives of 100,000 residents, including refugees and wounded.
Hitler then ordered the Nazi underground "Werewolf" movement to execute Luckner for treason. In response, the Americans gave him a bodyguard.
Luckner died of old age in Sweden in 1966. He was 85 years old.
