The captain of the HNMS Abraham Crijnssen devised a plan that sounded so crazy that it might actually work ― he decided that the ship should be camouflaged as a floating island. Don’t forget, this ship was 184 feet (56m) long, with a beam of 25 feet (7.6m) and a draft of 7 feet (2.1m). She weighed 525 tons.The personnel gathered large branches from a nearby island and arranged them so they could look as realistic as it was possible. They also painted the hull of the ship in shades that resembled rocks and cliffs. The ship was to remain close to shore at all time and traveled only by night.The minesweeper ship was relatively slow ― it could reach a maximum speed of only 15 knots. Also, it was poorly armed, carrying only a single 3-inch gun and two Oerlikon 20mm cannons. It was an easy prey for the Japanese bombers that circled the archipelago. So, the ship decided to find cover somewhere among the 18,000 islands in Indonesia. Since they moved only by night, they proved to be undetectable.HNMS Crijnssen and its crew of 45 managed to avoid a Japanese destroyer that had sunk several Dutch ships in the Battle of Java Sea and the Sunda Strait, which was patrolling the waters in search of the remaining Dutch ships. The voyage lasted for eight days, and the HNMS Abraham Crijnssen was the last ship that managed to escape the Japanese from the Dutch East Indies.