CAPTAIN MORS THE AIR PIRATE (1908-1911) STORIES TWENTY-ONE TO TWENTY-FIVE

For Balladeer’s Blog’s overview of the entire Kapitan Mors der Luftpirat series click HERE. For my look at the first five stories in the weekly text series click HERE.

THE PRISON ON DEVIL’S ISLAND – Near the mouth of the Orinoco River in French Guyana a huge deposit of diamonds has been discovered. Inmates of the notoriously hellish prison on nearby Devil’s Island have been making frenzied attempts at escape to go diamond hunting.

From around the world other people with a lust for diamonds are descending on the area. Our hero Kapitan Mors has also gotten word and has flown his air ship and its mixed European and Indian crew to grab their own share of precious gems to share with the world’s poor. The man running Devil’s Island uses the opportunity to try trapping Mors.

CAPTAIN MORS’S HARDEST HOUR – The global manhunt for Kapitan Mors and his crew has intensified by the month. Dozens of nations have forces devoted exclusively to ending the plundering of the Luftpirat. He and his crew are finding prey fewer and farther between.

Even worse, the great powers have resorted to transporting their gold and other riches by way of the experimental vessels called submarines. Mors is unable to raid those underwater craft directly, but he has located a lighthouse off Australia which is really a submarine base that loads and unloads precious metals and more below sea level.

THE SECRET OF THE MOUNTAIN CASTLE – Kapitan Mors has the Luftschiff land in Burma in order to do emergency repairs following the damage inflicted in the previous installment. He is informed that the repairs will take days.

Never one for inaction, the masked air pirate Mors leads his Indian executive officer Lindo and a crew member who is half British and half Indian in a quest to help the mixed-race crewman get revenge on the evil despot in a mountain castle who murdered the man’s true love years earlier.

THE GOVERNOR’S REVENGE – Much time has passed since the previous story. Submarines are proliferating among the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world. Kapitan Mors still needs funds to complete his planned spaceship.

Flying high off the coast of Ottoman Turkey, our hero and his crew are testing ways of detecting submarines deep beneath the sea when they come across a sack containing the dead body of a beautiful Circassian woman. The sack also contains the woman’s hidden account of evils perpetrated against her and her people by the Turks. Mors sets out to avenge the injustice.

THE DEADLY ORE – Safely back on Kapitan Mors’ hidden island lair near New Zealand, construction is nearly finished now on his spaceship called the Meteor. Unusual compass activity under the ocean near the Auckland Islands prompts our hero to investigate.

Under the seabed in that area Mors and his men discover a (fictional) metal that will enable his spaceship to defy gravity. The race is on to mine the ore before other, already curious parties catch on to the metal’s existence.

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*** I’ll examine the next several tales in the near future. FOR THE NYCTALOPE, A NEGLECTED HERO SIMILAR TO CAPTAIN MORS, CLICK HERE.