lag hauled
down, to be replaced by the Union Jack. The Germans taken prisoners
were rewarded for the kind treatment they had accorded British
residents before the appearance of this British force, and were
sent to New Zealand.

The next German possession to be taken was that in the Bismarck
Archipelago. It was known that there was a powerful wireless station
at Herbertshoehen, the island known as New Pomerania. A small landing
party was put ashore on the island in the early morning of September
11, 1914, and made its way, without being discovered, to the town.
The surprised inhabitants were too frightened to do anything until
this party left to go further on to the wireless station. By that
time it met with some resistance, but overcame it. A few days later
another landing party had captured the members of the staff of the
governor of New Pomerania, together with the governor himself, at
Bougainville, Solomon Islands, whence they had fled. The wireless
stations on the island of Yap, in the Carolines, and on Pleasant
Island were destroyed during the following month.

Perhaps the strangest operations of naval character ever performed
were the inland "sea" fights in Africa. The great Nyassa Lake in
Africa was the scene of this fighting. With its entire western
shore in British possession and with a goodly part of its waters
within the territory of German East Africa, it was not unnatural
that fighting should take place there. Both countries maintained
small armed vessels on the lake. The British ship _Gwendolen_,
a 350-ton craft, had been built on the Clyde and had been sent
to Nyassa Lake in sections and there assembled and launched in
1898. During August she fought with a German ship and captured
it. The fighting on the lake could not, however, determine the
success of the military operations taking place in those regions.

The preponderance of British naval strength was beginning to tell
severely upon German trade by the end of 1914, and her boast that
through her navy she would starve out Germany aroused the German
Government greatly. In answer to these British threats, Grand Admiral
von Tirpitz, German Secretary of Marine, in an interview given
to an American newspaper correspondent, hinted that Germany's
retaliation would be a war on British merchant ships by German
submarines.

The interview at the time aroused but mild comment; the idea was
a new one, and the question immediately arose as to whether such
act