Frederic George Trayes

Frederic George Trayes was an English writer born in 1871, remembered today for Five Months on a German Raider. The book grew out of his own experience after he was captured in 1917 while traveling aboard the Japanese ship Hitachi Maru and held on the German raider Wolf during the First World War.

What makes Trayes interesting is the immediacy of his writing. Rather than offering a distant history, he tells the story as someone who lived through the uncertainty, danger, and strange routines of captivity at sea. That gives his work the feel of both memoir and adventure narrative.

Very little biographical information about his wider life was easy to confirm from reliable online sources, so he is best known through this surviving record of his experience. For readers interested in naval history, war memoirs, or true survival stories, Trayes offers a vivid first-person window into an unusual episode of World War I.