The story begins with the SMS Emden, a German light cruiser that had spent the autumn of 1914 terrorizing Allied shipping across the Indian Ocean. On 9 November, Captain Karl von Muller dispatched a landing party under Lieutenant Hellmuth von Mucke to Direction Island in the Cocos-Keeling chain, a remote British territory whose cable and wireless station relayed communications across the Empire. The raiders went ashore to destroy the equipment. While they worked, HMAS Sydney, an Australian light cruiser, appeared on the horizon. The battle was brief and decisive. Sydney's guns wrecked the Emden, which was beached and set ablaze. The sailors still aboard were killed or captured. Von Mucke and his forty-six men - three officers, six sergeants, and thirty-eight sailors - were stranded on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, with an enemy warship circling offshore.

The Ayesha had belonged to the Clunies-Ross family, the hereditary rulers of the Cocos-Keeling Islands. At thirty meters long and seven and a half meters wide, the three-masted topsail schooner had once carried copra to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies. By 1914, regular steamer service had made her obsolete. She sat dismantled in Port Refuge, slowly rotting. Von Mucke saw what he needed: a vessel with masts and a hull, however compromised. The British radio station personnel, in an oddly gentlemanly gesture, provided the Germans with food for their journey. The landing party loaded 2,000 rounds of ammunition, twenty-nine Mauser rifles with sixty rounds each, and twenty-four pistols into the hold. Then they sailed, leaking badly, into the Indian Ocean.

Every mile was an argument with the ship. Water poured through the hull faster than the broken bilge pumps could remove it, forcing the crew into relentless manual bailing. The contaminated drinking water meant rationing from the single clean tank. Ayesha was a vessel designed for short supply runs between islands, not an ocean crossing of nearly two thousand miles. The men were sailors trained on a modern warship, not a wooden schooner from another century - yet they adapted, trimming canvas, working the pumps, navigating by the stars across open ocean that offered no landmarks and no rescue. On 27 November 1914, eighteen days after leaving Direction Island, the Ayesha limped into Padang on the west coast of Sumatra. But neutrality provisions in this Dutch port gave them only twenty-four hours before they had to leave again.

During those twenty-four hours in Padang, von Mucke managed to meet with the German consul, who slipped him a note containing coordinates for a rendezvous with a German merchant vessel. After departing, the Ayesha sailed to the appointed spot and on 14 December met the North German Lloyd steamer Choising. The crew transferred to the larger ship, and at 4:58 in the afternoon on 16 December 1914, the Ayesha was scuttled - sent to the bottom of the Indian Ocean after completing her improbable 1,709-mile voyage. But the journey was far from over. The Choising carried the men to the Arabian Peninsula, where they disembarked and began an overland trek through the desert and across the Ottoman Empire. In May 1915, six months after abandoning their cruiser in the Cocos Islands, von Mucke and his men walked into Constantinople. From there, they returned to Germany as heroes.

Von Mucke published his account of the voyage in 1915, and the tale of the Ayesha became one of the enduring adventure stories of the First World War. In 2012, the German film The Men of Emden dramatized the escape, using the schooner Raja Laut to portray the Ayesha. The appeal is easy to understand: forty-seven men, a disintegrating ship, an ocean, and no good reason to believe they would survive. The Ayesha herself was nothing special - a worn-out island trader that nobody had bothered to maintain. What made her remarkable was circumstance. She became the right ship in the right harbor at the worst possible moment, and the men who sailed her treated the impossible as merely difficult.