By September 12, Emden, accompanied by Markomannia and the captured Pontoporos, was approaching Calcutta. That day the Germans stopped a 4,650-ton British freighter, Kabinga, but this latest victim was carrying neutral cargo, and therefore could not be destroyed. Making the best of the situation, Müller transferred his prisoners to Kabinga before continuing his patrol in the busy waters off east India.

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Thus far, Müller knew, none of his victims had been able to radio a warning. But some of the ships he had destroyed would soon be overdue at their ports, and the British would be aware that something was amiss. Determined to make the best use of his presence off Calcutta, Müller stopped the thirty-five-hundred-ton British collier Killin on September 13 and sank it the following day. That afternoon Emden’s lookout spotted smoke off the starboard bow. The cruiser’s sixth victim was its largest, the seventy-six-hundred-ton British-owned Diplomat, carrying a cargo of tea. The German boarding party helped themselves to some of the cargo before dispatching Diplomat with explosive charges.

By then, the British had concluded that there was an enemy cruiser loose in the Bay of Bengal; the Royal Navy’s representative in Colombo, Ceylon, advised London that he was suspending all shipping in that direction. The British dedicated five cruisers to the search for Emden, aided occasionally by French, Russian, and Japanese warships. Meanwhile, Müller loaded additional prisoners onto Kabinga and released the ship, confident that his erstwhile guests could not tell the British anything useful.

Emden captured and destroyed two more ships on September 14 and 18. In its most destructive period, the German cruiser had, over nine days, taken nine prizes and sunk six. Now it was time for a change of venue.

Emden steamed southeast, to waters off the coast of Burma, but when Müller found no prizes there, he changed course to the west. The captain had been considering a raid on some British shore installation, and now put his plan into effect. He wrote: “I intended going from the Rangoon estuary to Madras and, in the dark, shelling the oil-tank installations….I had this shelling in view simply as a demonstration to arouse interest among the Indian population, to disturb English commerce, [and] to diminish English prestige.”

After coaling from Markomannia, Müller steamed southwest, all the while listening to radio traffic between British warships searching for their elusive enemy. By the evening of September 22 the German cruiser was off Madras, with the city’s lights in view to the west. When he was about three thousand yards off shore, Müller turned on his ship’s searchlights and probed for installations of the British-owned Burmah Oil Company.

For ten minutes Emden steamed parallel to the coast, unleashing some 130 shells at the white-painted oil tanks. One of the six tanks exploded in a ball of flame; four others were pierced and damaged but did not catch fire. As a result of the raid, more than three hundred fifty thousand gallons of fuel were destroyed, four people were killed, and British prestige was dealt a considerable blow.

To deceive any observers on shore, Emden changed course to the north. Once out of sight, Müller set his course south, to work the waters off Ceylon. In London the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, fired off a memo to his first sea lord: “The escape of the Emden from the Bay of Bengal is most unsatisfactory, and I do not understand on what principle the operations of the four cruisers Hampshire, Yarmouth, Dupleix and Chikuma have been concerted….Who is the senior captain of these four ships? Is he a good man? If so, he should be told to hoist a commodore’s broad pennant and take command of the squadron which…should devote itself exclusively to hunting the Emden.”

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