One of the most amazing journeys of the Great War was taken by Felix von Luckner, who was born in Dresden, Germany on June 9, 1881.

He was already a member of the German Imperial Navy at the outbreak of the Great War, and saw action at the battles of Heligoland Bight (1914) and Jutland (1916). Shortly after that, Luckner was assigned to command the SMS Seeadler a three-masted windjammer assigned to raid the Atlantic and Pacific in an age of dreadnoughts.

The Seeadler left port on December 21, 1916 and managed to slip through the British blockade disguised as a Norwegian ship. In the following three months, Luckner successfully raided and sunk several merchant ships in the Atlantic Ocean. He also captured 300 prisoners and eventually started having problems feeding them and keeping them safe, which forced him to release them by putting them on another captured ship.

Eventually, the Royal Navy became increasingly aware of the Seeadler, but Luckner managed to avoid capture and eventually made it to the Pacific Ocean by crossing through Cape Horn. By early June 1917, Seeadler was east of Christmas Island and learned that the United States had entered the war. Luckner turned her attention to American shipping, sinking another three merchant ships.

Seadler´s journey came to an end after the ship was struck by a tsunami while anchored in a lagoon in the small island of Mopelia near Tahiti. The waves wrecked the ship on against a coral reef. However, some American prisoners alleged that the ship drifted aground while the prisoners and most of the crew were having a picnic on the island.

The crew plus 46 prisoners were now stranded on an island, but they managed to salvage provisions, firearms, and two of the ship's boats. Luckner decided to sail with five of his men in one of the 10 m (32 ft 10 in) long open boats, rigged as a sloop and named Kronprinzessin Cecilie. Ever the optimist, he intended to sail to Fiji by way of the Cook Islands, capture a sailing ship, return to Mopelia for his crew and prisoners, and resume his raiding career.

Three days after leaving Mopelia, the seamen reached Atiu Island, where they pretended to be Dutch-American mariners crossing the Pacific for a bet. The New Zealand Resident, the administrator of the island, gave them enough supplies to reach another island in the group, Aitutaki, where they posed as Norwegians. The New Zealand Resident in Aitutaki was suspicious but had no means of detaining the group, and Luckner quickly took his party to the island of Rarotonga.

He pressed on to the Fijian Wakaya Island, arriving after a voyage of 3,700 km (2,300 mi) in an open boat. Most people on Wakaya accepted the Germans' story of being shipwrecked Norwegians, but one sceptic called a party of police from the old Fijian capital of Levuka. On September 21st, the police threatened that a non-existent gun on the inter-island ferry Amra would blow Luckner out of the water.

Not wishing to cause bloodshed, and not realizing the police were unarmed, Luckner and his party surrendere and were confined in a prisoner-of-war camp on Motuihe Island, off Auckland, New Zealand. Meanwhile, back on Mopelia, a small French trading ship, the Lutece, anchored outside the reef. Leutnant Kling of Seeadler, having heard on the radio of his captain's capture, sailed out to Lutece and captured her at gunpoint.

The French crew was put ashore with the other prisoners, and all the Germans embarked on the ship, which they renamed the Fortuna, and set course for South America. One of the prisoners left behind, Captain Smith took the remaining open boat from Mopelia with three other American seamen, and sailed 1,600 km to Pago Pago, arriving on October 4, 1917, where they were finally able to inform the authorities of the activities of Seeadler and arrange for the rescue of the other 44 sailors left stranded on Mopelia.

Fortuna, meanwhile, came to grief when she struck uncharted rocks off Easter Island. The crew scrambled ashore, where they were interned by the Chileans for the remainder of the war. Luckner still refused to accept that the war was over for him. The commander of the prisoner of war camp at Motuihe had a fast motor boat, the Pearl, at his disposal, and on December 13 1917, Luckner faked setting up a play for Christmas with his men and used his provisions for the play to plan his escape.

He and other prisoners seized the Pearl and made for the Coromandel Peninsula. Using a machine gun, Luckner then seized the 90-ton scow Moa. With the help of a handmade sextant and a map copied from a school atlas, he then sailed for the Kermadec Islands, which was a New Zealand provisioning station, with larger ships anchored there.

A pursuing auxiliary ship, the Iris, had guessed Luckner's probable destination and caught up with him on December 21, 1917. A year after his mission began, the war finally ended for Felix von Luckner. He spent the remainder of the war in various prisoner of war camps in New Zealand, including Ripapa Island in Lyttelton Harbour, before being repatriated to Germany in 1919.

During the interwar period, Luckner became a global celebrity and travelled around the world giving talks about his adventures. He received several honorary citizenships and even Henry Ford presented him with a motor car. The city of San Francisco made him an honorary citizen and US President Calvin Coolidge wanted to meet him, but Luckner declined at the request of his government.

During the Second World War, Adolf Hitler tried to use Luckner for propaganda purposes, although as a Freemason Luckner was not in one of the Nazis' favoured groups of people. Luckner refused to renounce his membership of the Freemasons and the various honorary citizenships granted in the US, and consequently he suffered by having his bank account frozen.

In 1943, he saved the life of a Jewish woman, Rose Janson, whom he provided with a passport he found on a bombsite, and who subsequently managed to escape to the United States via a neutral country. At the end of the war, the mayor of Halle, where he was living, asked Luckner to negotiate the town's surrender to the approaching American forces, which he did, although he did not return to the town after hearing that the Nazis had condemned him to death.

After the Second World War, Luckner moved to Sweden, where he lived in Malmö with his Swedish second wife Ingeborg Engeström until his death in Malmö at the age of 84 in 1966.

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