Todd war diary, 3 August 1914-29 February 1916 / Arthur Todd - Page 40
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[Page 40]
From what I saw of the Emden's officers and from the wonderfully plucky fight they put up against every disadvantage, I am quite prepared to believe that they were willing to drown rather than submit to the indignity of hauling down their ensign.
It is an unwritten law amongst the big Navies of the world that one never surrenders.
Just imagine what insufferable Hell these Germans went through. A smallish ship with open decks and unarmoured sides pierced through with shell and plastered with red hot jagged splinters, with fires all round and the air filled with the choking fumes of lyddite - imagine this, and then the three great glowing funnels lying on the deck and messmates being blown to pieces and over the side literally by the score; add the smell of blood and burning flesh, the heat and the roar of guns, and the reader will have some idea perhaps of the inferno which reigns in a defeated ship.
Of the executive officers, only two remained alive, the Captain and the Kaiser's nephew who were in the conning tower.
With the Emden well on the beach and incapable of further action, the Sydney steamed away after another ship which had been lurking on the horizon during the action and which now seemed disposed to disappear.
On chasing her we found her to be the Buresk, a British collier which the Emden had captured some days before, and whose Welsh coal had formed a welcome addition to her bunkers.
There was a prize crew aboard of two officers and ten men from the Emden, and a miscellaneous assortment of Chinamen.
The Buresk hove to, and a boat was sent off there to discover that the Germans had opened the sea cocks and flooded the Engine room, and that the
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