Morale aboard the German cruiser was sky high. Not only was Emden wreaking havoc in the sea lanes, but in the raid on Madras it had struck the enemy in its most prized colony. But some crewmen may have reflected that their prospects for a safe return to Germany were slight to nonexistent. After attracting the full attention of the world’s greatest navy, Emden was surely a vital target. That navy could never permit the cruiser to make its way home. Continuing to attack the enemy’s commerce, Emden could operate only in the same busy sea lanes that the Royal Navy patrolled, and had to be accompanied by a collier on which the cruiser was totally dependent.

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Off Ceylon, Emden again found good hunting. In the last days of September the raider captured six prizes, including a collier, Buresk, filled with high-quality Welsh coal. For the most part, the officers of Müller’s victims had accepted their fate with stoicism, and in return the Germans treated them with courtesy. The master of one prize told newsmen: “The German officers were very polite. I may say extraordinarily polite. Before we left…for Colombo, they all wished us a pleasant journey.”

The master of the steamer Tymeric, however, denounced the “damned Germans” and refused to cooperate with his captors. In return, Müller took the irate skipper aboard the raider under arrest, where he was denounced for his slovenly appearance and for having a cigarette dangling from his lips.

On October 9, Emden dropped anchor at Diego Garcia, a lonely speck of coral in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Although nominally part of the British Empire, it had no radio station, and its few residents were not even aware of the outbreak of war. Müller took advantage of this situation to coal and service his ship, and to give his crew a brief shore leave.

The next day Emden set course again for the waters off Ceylon, and again found the pickings good. On October 10, the raider captured Clan Grant, a thirty-nine-hundred-ton vessel carrying a valuable mixed cargo from England to Calcutta. On the same day, Müller captured and sank a slow dredger en route to Tasmania, and on October 17 the freighter Benmohr became Emden’s seventeenth victim.

On October 18, Müller stopped the Blue Funnel steamer Troilus on its maiden voyage from China to Rotterdam with a cargo of rubber, copper, and tin. Troilus proved to be the raider’s most valuable prize, but Emden now carried so many prisoners that when it captured yet another British freighter, St. Egbert, Müller chose not to destroy it but to use it as a means of getting rid of his prisoners.

The depredations of Emden in the Indian Ocean and the light cruiser Karlsrühe in the Atlantic prompted the Admiralty to issue an embarrassed communiqué in which the navy assured shippers that it was making a maximum effort against Germany’s surface raiders: “Searching for these vessels and working in concert under various commanders in chief are upwards of seventy British, Australian, Japanese, French, and Russian cruisers….The vast expanse of seas and oceans and the many thousands of islands offer almost infinite choice of movement to the enemy’s ships.”

By now Müller had spent as much time off Ceylon as seemed prudent. Yet rather than return to other sea lanes, he implemented a plan that had probably been germinating in his mind for some time. Accompanied by two colliers, he set an easterly course. On October 25, the raider’s crewmen went to action stations, and they spent part of the day in a simulated battle with an enemy warship.

Unknown to his crew, Müller had learned from the skipper of one of his prizes that enemy warships were using the port of Penang, a British colony off the coast of Malaya. The port was largely without land defenses, a fact that made it a tempting target for a raid. Müller raised his dummy funnel to give Emden the silhouette of a Royal Navy four-stacker. In the early morning hours of October 28, Emden steamed unchallenged into Penang’s outer harbor.

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