In February, 1874, blue-eyed, brown haired Helmuth Seefeldt was born in Demmin, on the West Pomeranian plain of northeastern Germany at the confluence of three rivers. Little is known about his childhood there or his reasons for leaving his birthplace behind. At twenty he set out to explore the world, sailing from Hamburg on July 17, 1894. By the end of the month he'd made his way to Glasgow, Scotland, where he purchased a ticket in the forward section of the State of California, bound for New York City. He eventually reached California and became a naturalized U.S. citizen at San Francisco in 1902.
His wanderlust drove him over the seas, farther west, to the South Pacific. He might have lived his life unnoticed on the property he acquired at Papeete, Tahiti, but for an encounter there in 1908. By chance he happened to meet the owner of a yacht. The vessel was named for Lewis Carroll's poem, “The Hunting of the Snark.” The craft possessed two sails, ran forty-five feet at the waterline, fifty-five feet on deck, had a seventy horsepower engine that seldom worked, and leaked worse than an extremely old bucket. In short, it badly needed repair and Helmuth was just the man for the job. Thus began a friendship with the ship's owner. The craft was the Snark, the owner: Jack London, already world renowned for Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf.
Departing in April, 1907, London had sailed the Snark from San Francisco Bay to Hawaii and beyond with limited navigational skills and a skeleton crew that included his wife, Charmian, her uncle, a former Stanford athlete, a Japanese cabin boy, and twenty-three year old Kansan, Martin Johnson. The cabin boy and Stanford man quit in Hawaii. Only Johnson accompanied the Londons throughout their South Seas journey until the couple became too ill to go on. Johnson sailed the ship from the Solomon Islands to Sydney while Charmian and Jack London traveled on a steamship to Australia, where they recouped for months before taking passage on a liner back to California.
The Snark was sold in Sydney, but Johnson continued his travels and eventually circumnavigated the globe, which had been Jack London's original goal for the craft and himself. London's book on the adventure, The Cruise of the Snark, is still relatively well known. Johnson, too, wrote about the voyage. His account, Through the South Seas with Jack London, is a worthy read as well.
Martin Johnson and his wife, Osa (they married in 1910), went on to a lifetime of adventures. Starting with Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Seas, their silent wildlife documentaries, filmed by air and waterways, though smacking of western colonialism by twenty-first century standards, proved groundbreaking in both the silent and early sound eras of film making.
Leaving the Johnsons many adventures for another page, let's turn back to Helmuth Seefeldt. His repair work on the Snark began a relationship with Jack London. Despite the fact that when the famed author returned to California to live at his thousand acre ranch near Glen Ellen, Seefeldt remained in Tahiti. He might have stayed indefinitely but for the outbreak of World War I in August, 1914. Tahiti was a French colony. As soon as word reached Tahiti about the conflict in Europe, French officials rounded up every German national in French Polynesia. Helmuth Seefeldt, along with seventeen other German born men, abandoned nearly all their belongings as the French herded them as prisoners into an abandoned barracks. Several days later they were transferred to confinement on an isolated reef a few miles from Papeete. The American consul and Captain J.H. von Dahlren of the barkentine S.N. Castle heard about the prisoners' plight and began negotiations with French authorities.
The French colonials finally allowed Captain von Dahlren to sign all eighteen Germans on as crewmen. Devoid of cargo, other than its newfound sailors, some of them bankers and government bureaucrats, the S.N. Castle took twenty days to reach Honolulu. From there, Seefeldt and others, were given passage on to San Francisco.
Like Jack London, Seefeldt settled in Sonoma County. He purchased property on Creghton Ridge, fifteen miles northwest of Cazadero in western Sonoma County.
Seefeldt was a guest of Charmian and Jack London several times and London visited Seefeldt's place as often as he could before the famous man died at age fifty a mere two years later in November, 1916. Helmuth Seefeldt carried on at his ranch, though by then he was defined by locals as something of an eccentric for not only hanging bells around his lead cow's neck, but bells also hung at the front gate, as well as the door of the dilapidated, cobweb strewn cabin he lived in. Cowbells dangled at other strategic spots Helmuth deemed important warning areas. Perhaps due to his sudden imprisonment by the French in Tahiti, Seefeldt seemed to grow extremely wary of strangers showing up unannounced. An assortment of guns and knives decked the interior walls and shelves of his cabin.
By the beginning of World War II, the main house at the Seefeldt property was occupied by sheepherder and ranch foreman Roy Cornett along with his wife and nine children. In late August, 1942, Helmuth Seefeldt appeared to simply vanish from the place. The only trace of him showed itself in a handful of checks, totaling $390, cashed by Roy Cornett, bearing the sixty-eight-year-old world traveler's signature. Cornett said that he didn't think it all that unusual that the aging rancher would go away and not tell anyone about his plans.
When Seefeldt did not return home for some weeks, Cornett shot two of Helmuth's sheepdogs and buried them. The disappearance went unresolved until January, 1943, when newly elected Sonoma County Sheriff Harry Patteson first arrested Roy Cornett for forging the checks. Next, the sheriff employed three of his deputies and about twenty Cazadero area residents in an all out search of Seefeldt's property. Several hours into the search, forty-five year-old woodsman Julius Johnson noticed sprouts growing out of the ground at what he considered an odd angle near the base of a redwood stump. Dropping down on hands and knees, Johnson used his spade to brush through twigs and sticks, finding what seemed to be loose dirt. When he jabbed his spade into the earth, the first shovelful of overturned soil turned up a human skull.
The two foot deep grave, only fifty yards from the rundown cabin, produced Seefeldt's remains as well as those of another of his pet dogs. Later, thirteen year old Roy Cornett, Jr. led deputies to a place where he witnessed his father bury the other two sheepdogs. Ex-convict Roy Cornett, Sr., who had years before been found guilty of cattle rustling, was held on a charge of murder.
Cornett's trial commenced in the final week of February, 1943. In the second week of March a jury of seven women and five men convicted him and recommended life imprisonment for the murderer of Helmuth Seefeldt. The sentence was affirmed the following Monday by a Sonoma County Superior Court judge. Cornett was sent to San Quentin to serve out his sentence.
A funeral service for Helmuth Seefeldt was conducted late in March. About six weeks later his 321 acre ranch was sold to a Mr. Jones of the Western Wax Corporation. Jones owned an adjoining property where he ran a sizable flock of sheep.
*More sails and tales at malcolmmacdonaldoutlawford.com
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