In late November 1914, as the Battle of Ypres raged in Flanders, a vague message was received by William Holmes (1862–1917), commander of the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force occupying German New Guinea. Despite the territory’s official capitulation on 21 September, Holmes received startling intelligence of possible German forces up the Sepik River. While Holmes' force had rapidly occupied the colony’s coastal settlements, the Sepik, spanning six hundred miles of primordial jungles in mainland New Guinea, was still shrouded in the fog of war. Holmes ordered Claude L. Cumberlege (1877–1962) of the torpedo boat HMAS Warrego to search out and destroy any threat on the river. Like Marlow’s anabasis in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Cumberlege trudged steadily upriver, ever deeper into the ‘heart of an immense darkness’.