Whilst researching maritime history relating to the First World War, I came across an original 1914 Musterrolle (the crew list) for the German iconic four-masted barque Herzogin Cecilie.
Upon reviewing the detailed document, I found my grandfather’s name among the young German naval cadets on board, July 1914.
That discovery opened up a much broader line of inquiry. In August 1914, when the First World War broke out, the Herzogin Cecilie was in the waters of the South Pacific, in the Chilean coast. The war transformed what had been a training voyage into an unexpected situation: 52 German cadets were stranded in Chile, a neutral country, thousands of miles from Germany and with no safe route home. What struck me most was how little this episode features in general accounts of the war, despite the fact that it involves young naval cadets trapped on the other side of the world by a conflict they were only just beginning to understand.
During my research, I gathered photographs, nautical charts, naval records, family documents, maritime letters and historical background material from German and Chilean archives. The Musterrolle was particularly important as it enabled me to identify specific names, ages, ranks and the actual connections of these young men to the ship and to the historical context in which they found themselves trapped.
I find this case interesting because it highlights a lesser-known consequence of the war: not just the major naval battles or diplomatic decisions, but also the fate of very young people who, having found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, saw their lives put on hold for 4-6 years in a distant country.
Sources:
I am particularly interested in gaining a better understanding of how these peripheral episodes, which took place far from the main European fronts, have been treated or ignored in the historiography of the First World War.