FISHERMEN IN WAR TIME 



other ships of unexpected passengers. The trawler 

 was able to take the survivors to port and the neutral 

 steamer was at liberty to continue her voyage un- 

 encumbered and unembarrassed. These survivors, 

 the skipper stated, had escaped in an overcrowded 

 boat, but nothing could be done to save the men who 

 were floating in the water with cork jackets or who 

 were on rafts. The periscope of the attacking sub- 

 marine disappeared immediately after the explosion. 

 There was practically no form of warfare in which 

 fishermen did not take a part of some sort, and the 

 raids by German airships were not an exception. 

 On the night of January 31, 1916, some of the 

 Eastern and Midland counties of England were 

 raided by enemy airships, and a number of men, 

 women and children were killed and property was 

 seriously damaged. The airships escaped from 

 England, but one of them was found floating on the 

 North Sea, a helpless wreck. All that was known 

 at the time was that the discovery was made by the 

 skipper and crew of the King Stephen, a Grimsby 

 steam trawler, that the circumstances prevented the 

 skipper from doing more than reporting the matter 

 to the Naval authorities, and that the wrecked 

 raiders perished. It soon became known, however, 

 that the occurrence was one of the most dramatic 

 happenings of the aerial warfare and that the Ger- 

 man raiders in this case had met a terrible but well- 

 deserved fate. 



The published details showed that the wrecked 

 airship was seen by the King Stephen, and that on 



94 



