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Crew of a U-boat Surrendering to U.S.S. " Fanning " 
bound. We had expected to leave this in home waters that 
were usually " safe," but on the eighth morning out we 
received a wireless that they were " closed." Fritz had broken 
in and was shooting right and left like drunken cowboys on 
the Fourth of July. 
This meant that each ship in the convoy must be delivered 
at its individual port. While this was in course, submarines 
were operating all around us. Often we crossed their courses ; 
we must have been under their observation most of the time. 
But though they torpedoed five ships, two of which were 
safely beached, they would take no chances with our destroyers. 
Already the " blimps," hydroplanes and patrols were after 
them like swarming hornets. The piratical nest would soon 
be exterminated. In the meantime, we lived amidst alarms. 
Twice we were called to " General Quarters " in the night — 
to find the alarm was due to porpoises charging the ship along 
phosphorescent wakes. Each time a certain correspondent's 
hair stood on end, but without hitch or mishap we delivered 
our last ship and started back to pick up a third convoy and 
take it back to our Base. 
All that last day the wind had been stiffening, and as we sat 
at supper in the wardroom, the twinkle in Admiral Sims' eye 
was suddenlyrecalled when, with celerity that equalled sleight 
of hand, the tablecloth slid with its load of food and dishes 
gracefully to the floor. The casual manner in which the 
steward cleared up the ruin betrayed perfect familiarity with 
the phenomenon. Next time we held the cloth down and had 
got in safety to the coffee when, with cup poised at his lips, 
the commander tobogganed on his chair-back to the transom. 
Swallowing the coffee while hanging in balance, he came back 
to us on the return roll. Profiting by experience, the exe- 
cutive officer, who sat opposite, had hooked his feet around the 
table legs — and so took it with him on the opp<isite swing. 
Its further joumeyings were then restrained by a rope lashing ; 
but that, alas, had no effect on the motion, which grew 
worse and worse. 
By midnight the vessel was rearing like a frightened horse 
and rolling like a barrel churn, a queer mixture of metaphor 
and motion. A western bronco was nothing to that boat. 
She would rear, shiver with rage as though trying to shake the 
bridge off her back, then plunge forward in a wild leap and 
throw her sorrows high in the air. It was sickening. When 
she did her best and beastliest, the waves would drop from 
under ; leaving her standing on her heel, two-thirds of her 
length exposed ; then when the thousand tons of her fell 
flat on the water, she lifted everything, animate and inanimate, 
that was not bolted down to the deck. I, for instance, spent 
a large fraction of the night in mid air above my bunk ; am 
now quite convinced of the possibility of levitation. By 
morning my sides were sore, my bones ached, my skin was 
bruised from blows and shaking. 
I confess to making a modest breakfast on one green 
pickle, and while I was engaged in the gingerly consumption 
thereof, the skipper comforted me with a vivid description 
of a " real gale " they had been out in for nine days on a 
previous trip. 
" You could neither sit down, stand up, walk nor sleep. 
I was thrown off that transom eight times in one night, and 
each time I fell almost plumb to the opposite side. I might 
just as well have dropped down a well, I was so bruised and 
shaken that I gave it up after that, though I was dying for 
sleep. When she'd rear up and fall, we always expected her 
to break her back, and she'd quiver like a shaken lance for 
five minutes afterward. The waves were enormous ; bases 
dark green, tips light jade against the sky and so clear that we 
often saw porpoises shooting along like fish seen through the 
plate glass of an aquarium. When we tried to signal another 
destroyer only three hundred yards away, we'd get out a 
couple of letters, then down she'd go, lost to the tips of her 
masts in the trough of a wave. Next day it grew worse. 
The wind blew a hundred and twenty miles an hour ; the 
ocean was one huge mountainous sea. Our decks were swept 
of every movable object, tool chests, boats, everything. All 
of the living compartments were flooded and the thermometer 
was below freezing point. For thirty-six hours we had to ride 
it out, hove-to, before we could go ahead with our duty ; 
and in all that nine days, we had neither bath, wash, shave, 
nor a hot meal." He concluded this Homeric recital, " If a 
destroyer had been sent out in such weather before the war, the 
man responsible would have been court-martialled for need- 
lessly imperilling the lives of his men. But we go out in it 
and stay out now as a matter of course." 
I will admit that my storm was not quite so bad as that. 
Nevertheless, the ends of the bridge seemed to be dipping 
when I climbed up there after — after the pickle. At every 
plunge her nose would go under a solid sea. The tips of the 
waves were veiled in water mists. Ail night we had been 
shoved along by a heavy sea. It was now impossible to 
" take a sight," so just as a lost boy might inquire his way 
from a policeman, we ran inshore to a lightship to find out 
where the dickens we were at. 
The keeper bellowed through a megaphone directions that 
amounted to this in unofficial language : if we would proceed 
so many city blocks to the northward, then take the first 
turning to the left after we passed a lighthouse, we could come 
into the harbour where lay the convoy we were to take back 
to our Base. We did, and as the ships came filing out to join 
us, I saw for myself one of the humorous flashes that lighten 
the gloom of wireless messages. \t\ answer to a polite inquiry 
from our skipper as to whether she would not avail herself of 
our escort, a vessel that had remained at anchor made equally 
courteous answer. 
" Thanks very much. Think I'll stay in. I was torpedoed 
yesterday." 
The delivery of this convoy at the Base completed my 
cruise. In ten days we had escorted a total of fifty-six 
vessels a distance of sixteen hundred miles through the danger 
zone without a mishap. These vessels were one small item 
in a total of thousands that have been convoyed by the 
destroyers with a loss of only one-eighth of OHe per cent. In 
the course of its duty the flotilla has steamed over a million 
miles in eight montlis, a distance equal to the circumnavi- 
gating of the earth forty tirnes ; and these journeyings have 
been made constantly in mined seas subject to the attacks of 
submarines. Than this no better testimony could be given, 
either to its labour or the worth of the convoy system. 
