BACK TO CIVILIZATION 
377 
crossed this selfsame stretch of sea to find and de¬ 
stroy the Spanish ships. I lived over again those 
boding days when the air was electric with impend¬ 
ing danger. 
It was long before daylight when the Yuen Sang , 
at half-speed, arrived at Corregidor. The captain 
wished to report his number to the signal station, 
and we had to wait until light had come before the 
ship could enter. So the engines were stopped and 
for an hour we drifted on under the ship’s mo¬ 
mentum. The silencing of the engines on a ship is 
always ominous, and just now, with the dim bulk 
of Corregidor looming grimly before us, it seemed 
as if there was something particularly sinister about 
our stealthy approach. 
From five o’clock onward we stood on the bridge, 
our voices unconsciously hushed as we spoke. Here 
was where the Baltimore had dropped a Greek fire 
life preserver and for a long time it had bobbed 
about on the tumbling sea, weird and terrifying to 
those who didn’t know what it was. There was 
where the soot in the McCulloch’s funnel had sud¬ 
denly blazed up like the chimney of a blast furnace. 
And over there on the lower edge of the black bulk 
of the island was where a little signal light had 
flared up and then died out, leaving every man on 
our ships tense with expectant dread, and all about 
us here had reigned a silence so penetrating that it 
in itself was harder to bear than the thunder and 
flash of guns. 
And still we drifted on, nearer and nearer to 
