BANQUET. 323 



phase of this work. I am here to speak of the freight part of it, that part represented 

 by 85 per cent of the tonnage, which is not commonly mentioned in that total of convoys. 



I was sent over in October, 1917, to relieve my friend here. Admiral Wilson, in the 

 Mediterranean, when he went to the French coast. At the time I arrived in the Mediterranean 

 this convoy system was being put into operation, which required that every ship, instead of 

 going on its own hook, should be formed into a convoy at Gibraltar, which was the main port 

 for the Mediterranean, and which thus suddenly became the greatest convoy port in the world. 

 Of the method of forming the convoys we all know, but the strain that it put on the captains 

 of the merchant ships is not realized. We had to take the captains ashore before each sailing 

 and have a regular school. They had to have rehearsals. They had to learn to handle codes. 

 They had instruction of all kinds, but they had to learn for themselves to keep their position 

 in formation at night at sea without lights, and that is a very difficult thing to do even for 

 ships of the Navy. The merchant marine captains thus had thrown on them a terrible lot of 

 new problems and responsibilities. 



It is all well enough tO' draw word pictures of the modern merchant marine captain and 

 his splendid seamanship, but when four officers of the Navy boarded his ship on arrival at 

 Gibraltar and one inspected his radio, another lined up the crew and gave them a health in- 

 spection, then the gunnery officer inspected the guns and ordnance material of the ship, and 

 other inspections were made, the captains began to feel something in the nature of rigid 

 supervision. Then he had to attend the classes in the schoolroom, so that he might be fully 

 advised as to what was required of him in convoy in the exigencies of war. After all this 

 the convoy started out into the danger zone. There were many sinkings, many more cases 

 than we have heard about, for I think probably there were more sinkings in the Mediter- 

 ranean than in the Atlantic, because of the presence of the submarines, based in the Adriatic. 



One of the things I want to say is something that has not yet appeared in the public print 

 in any way, and that is regarding the convoyed cargo ships which passed between England 

 and the Mediterranean. There were 373 convoys between the Mediterranean and the United 

 Kingdom, of which 300 were escorted entirely by American ships, based at Gibraltar, consist- 

 ing of 4,369 ships, representing 13,000,000 tons of cargo. There were 48 convoys that went 

 from the United Kingdom to Port Said and the Far East, which were escorted entirely by the 

 British Navy and which did not touch at Gibraltar, and there were also 35 convoys which 

 came through escorted entirely by the British Navy from the United Kingdom to Gibraltar, 

 compared with the 300 convoys escorted by us. 



In addition to that work, there was, in the Mediterranean convoy system, a total of 10,- 

 466 ships, representing 30,000,000 tons, escorted by American ships based at Gibraltar, either 

 singly or in conjunction with the Allies. Of these ships, many were taking supplies to the 

 expeditions in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Salonika, to Italy and to North Africa, where 

 the French were fighting the natives in the pay of Germans, and also carrying supplies to our 

 troops in France, which went in by way of Marseilles. Much neutral trade was also in- 

 cluded in the convovs. 



