The escape of von Luckner.

Count Felix von Luckner The Seeadler
The Moa

Plans for escape were well underway when von Luckner arrived on Motuihe Is. There were other Germans there who had been captured in other parts of the Pacific. The phone line had already been tapped into and the prisoners were well aware of coming events. The Pearl figured large in the plans so they manufactured a sextant for navigation and also a wooden machine gun. They cut the phone line, set fire to the barracks, loaded stores and clothing on the Pearl and took off. They were long gone by the time that word of their escape spread. They even had a German flag which they hoisted when they captured the scow Moa with their pretend machine gun.

Scows were the work horses of the sea right up into the thirties. They were wind powered barges with an almost flat bottom. They moved huge quantities of timber, gravel and farm product. They would be grounded on a sandy beach, loaded or unloaded in double quick time so that they could be floated off as high tide approached. The Moa had been in sevice for ten years at this time and she was of a good size, over 90ft long and 30ft in the beam. She was loaded with 80,000 lineal feet of sawn rimu timber when she was captured and heavy in the water. Von Luckner new that the hunt would be on very shortly and they needed to make haste. As they proceeded north he had the load lightened. The sea would have been littered with floating planks.

The Moa eventually reached Curtis Is. in the Kermadecs. Here there were stores for the use of shipwrecked sailors and these were seized and loaded on board. The hunt had been on for quite a while. A companion scow to the Moa, called the Rangi, had seen it's capture and it came ashore at Port Charles to pass the word. Thirty vessels were involved in the hunt and eventually a cable layer made the arrest, and spent the Xmas of 1917 sailing back to Auckland with their prisoners.

Von Luckner did not escape again. He spent some time at Lytellton as a P.O.W. and then returned to Motuihe. At the end of the war he was repatriated to Germany. He was a charismatic man and a hero to many, regardless of nationality because of the moral way he had conducted himself in the war. He was feted alround the world, Henry Ford even gave him a motorcar! He sailed round the world with his wife and revisited NZ in 1937 and 1938. His great stature would have been of considerable publicity value to Germany in the 2ND WW. However he refused involvement and his bank account was frozen. He survived the war, then moved to Malmo in Sweden where he died in 1966.

The scow Moa had a shorter life. It came to grief on the Hokitika bar in 1935 when transporting Kahikatea logs to be made into butterboxes. The scow Rangi capsized off Motutapu Is. with the loss of four lives. It would be nice to say that both were built locally in Kennedy's Bay but in fact they were made in Auckland. The only scows made on the Coromandel came from Cabbage Bay, Colville. The Pearl was lost whilst being towed behind the Moa on the way to the Kermadecs.

Today Red Mercury is recovering from a devastating fire about thirty years ago. It is now rat free and home to many sea birds. Above Von Luckners Cove there is a nesting colony of Pycrofts petrels. Some of the 500 or so that exist in the world. Petrels have a period before they fly when they are left by their parents to fledge, the mutton bird stage. It was thought to be a good stage to move them to birdless islands like Cuvier. The birds did survive to make their first flight but did not return to their adopted island to nest. They always go back to where they were nestlings. If Captain Cook had had a GPS system like that he wouldn't have had to hang around until the Transit of Mercury!