her at 16:00 on the day after the raid when she was north of the Dutch island of Ameland. She reported three out of four engines had failed and her Telefunken radio equipment was malfunctioning. Around an hour later, the Zeppelin drifted low over the island, and Dutch units on the ground opened fire on her. The Netherlands was a neutral country and Dutch forces had standing orders to fire on overflying, foreign aircraft. A south wind blew the L 19 offshore and, some time during the night of 1–2 February, the Zeppelin came down in the North Sea. Löwe dropped a bottle into the sea, with a report on his situation and with letters to his family; this was found a few weeks later by a yacht near Gothenburg, Sweden. The German Navy put ships to sea that night to search for the L 19, but they only discovered one of her fuel-tanks, still containing fuel. This was likely dropped as a desperate measure to save weight and remain aloft. King Stephen incident The next morning, the floating wreck of the airship was discovered by a British steam fishing trawler, King Stephen, of 162 tons, commanded by William Martin. The vessel had sighted distress signals during the night and had spent several hours steaming towards them. Clinging to the wreck were the airship's 16 crew. The normal complement of a P-class Zeppelin was 18 or 19, but Zeppelins flying on air-raids often flew short-handed, with two or three of the least needed crew members left behind in order to save weight. The fishing vessel approached and Kapitänleutnant Löwe, who spoke English well, asked for rescue. Martin refused. In a later newspaper interview, he stated that the nine crew of King Stephen were unarmed and badly outnumbered and would have had little chance of resisting the German airmen if, after being rescued, they had hijacked his vessel to sail it to Germany. This fits the known facts, but an alternative explanation for his action was suggested by a 2005 BBC documentary on the incident. This was that King Stephen was in a zone in which fishing was prohibited by the British authorities and that Martin feared that if he returned to a British port with a large number of German prisoners, attention might have been drawn to this and he would have been banned from fishing. Ignoring the Germans' pleas