The wonderful and brave story of ships and men here presented needs but the briefest introduction. The deeds will forever remain one of the most glorious chapters in the chronicles of the sea. No excuse is offered for adding another volume to the literature of the war, for the subject is deserving of greater attention than has hitherto been possible. Lord Jellicoe once remarked that he did not think English people realized the wonderful work which these mystery ships had done in the war, and tha

All warfare is merely a contest. In any struggle you see the clashing of will and will, of force against force, of brain against brain. For the impersonal reader it is this contest which has a never-ending interest. A neutral is just as keenly entertained as the playgoer who sits watching the swaying fortunes of the hero in the struggle of the drama. No human being endowed with sympathetic interest, who himself has had to contend with difficulties, fails to be moved by the success or disaster of

We turn now to the northern mists of the Orkneys, where the comings and goings of the Grand Fleet were wrapped in mystery from the eyes of the world. In order to keep the fleet in stores—coal, oil, gear, and hundreds of other requisite items—small colliers and tramp steamers brought their cargoes northward to Scapa Flow. In order to avoid the North Sea submarines, these coal and store ships used the west-coast passage as much as possible. Now, for that reason, and also because German submarines

Within five weeks of her victorious fight Baralong had done it again. After the war it was definitely announced in the public Press that U 27 had been sunk by H.M.S. Wyandra on August 19. Under this name the ship’s crew were awarded the sum of £185 as prize bounty, and in the same court Wyandra , her commanding officer this time being Lieut.-Commander A. Wilmot-Smith, R.N., was awarded £170 prize bounty for sinking U 41 on September 24, 1915. It was an open secret that Baralong and Wyandra were

Two days before the end of February, 1916, I happened to be returning from leave in England to my ship, which was in Queenstown for boiler-cleaning. In the Holyhead-Kingstown steamer I found myself in conversation with a junior lieutenant-commander, R.N., who also was returning to his ship at Queenstown. We talked of many things all the way down across Ireland, but this quiet, taciturn officer impressed me less by what he said than by what he left unsaid, and it took me a long time to guess the

Most people would have thought that the sail-driven decoys would have had a very short life, and that they would speedily have succumbed. On the contrary, though their work was more trying and demanded a different kind of seamanship, these ‘mystery’ ships went on bravely tackling the enemy. The Lowestoft armed smacks, for instance, during 1916 had some pretty stiff tussles, and we know now that they thoroughly infuriated the Germans, who threatened to have their revenge. Looked at from the enemy

It was the activities and successes of the submarines in the western end of the English Channel that had made these small Q-sailing-ships so desirable. The first of these to be used in that area was the Mary B. Mitchell . She was a three-masted topsail steel schooner owned by Lord Penrhyn. Built at Carrickfergus in 1892 and registered at Beaumaris, she was 129 feet in length, and of 210 tons gross. In the middle of April, 1916, she happened to be lying in Falmouth with a cargo of china clay, and

During the ensuing months many demands were made on the sailing-ship man-of-war. There were pressed into the service such vessels as the schooner Result , the 220-ton lugger Bayard , the three-masted schooner Prize , the motor drifter Betsy Jameson , the ketch Sarah Colebrooke , the auxiliary schooner Glen (alias Sidney ), the brigantine Dargle , the Brown Mouse yacht, built on the lines of a Brixham trawler, and so on. The barquentine Merops , otherwise known as Maracaio and Q 28, began decoy w

In order properly to appreciate the difficulties of the Q-ships, it is necessary to understand something of the possibilities and limitations of the U-boats. No one could hope to be successful with his Q-ship unless he realized what the submarine could not do, and how he could attack the U-boat in her weakest feature. If the submarine’s greatest capability lay in the power of rendering herself invisible, her greatest weakness consisted in remaining thus submerged for a comparatively short time.

On November 9, 1915, the Admiralty, who had taken up the steamer Penshurst (1,191 gross tons), commissioned her at Longhope as a Q-ship, her aliases being Q 7 and Manford . This inconspicuous-looking vessel thus began a life far more adventurous than ever her designers or builders had contemplated. Indeed, if we were to select the three Q-ships which had the longest and most exciting career, we should bracket Penshurst with Farnborough and Baralong . The following incidents illustrate that no pa

One of the great lessons of the Great War was the inter-relation of international politics and warfare. It was an old lesson indeed, but modern conditions emphasized it once more. We have already seen that the torpedoing in 1915 of the Atlantic liners Lusitania and Arabic caused pressure to be put on the German Government by the United States of America. In the spring of 1916 the submarine campaign, for the Germans, was proceeding very satisfactorily. In February they had sunk 24,059 tons of Bri

In the summer of 1914 I happened to be on a yachting cruise in the English Channel. In July we had seen the Grand Fleet, led by Iron Duke , clear out from Weymouth Bay for Spithead. In single line ahead the battle squadrons weighed and proceeded, then came the light cruisers, and before the last of these had washed the last ounce of dirt off her cable and steamed into position, the Iron Duke and Marlborough were hull down over the horizon: it was the most wonderful sight I had ever witnessed at

Independence of character is a great asset in any leader of men, but it is an essential, basic virtue when a man finds himself in command of a ship: without such an attribute he is dominated either by his officers, his own emotions, or the vagaries of chance. In the case of a Q-ship captain, this aloofness was raised to a greater degree of importance by reason of the special nature of the work. Can you think of any situation more solitary and lonely than this? There are, of course, all kinds and

If , in accordance with the delightful legend, Drake during the recent war had heard the beating of his drum and had ‘quit the port o’ Heaven,’ come back to life again in the service of his Sovereign and country, he would assuredly have gone to sea in command of a Q-sailing-ship. His would have been the Victoria Cross and D.S.O. with bars, and we can see him bringing his much battered ship into Plymouth Sound as did his spiritual descendants in the Great War. And yet, with all the halo of his na

It was on February 17, 1917, that Commander Gordon Campbell, still in command of Farnborough , now named Q 5, again sank a submarine, but in circumstances which, hid from publication at the time, sent a thrill through the British Navy and especially among those who had the good fortune to be serving in that area. The scene was again off the south-west Irish coast, and the enemy at the beginning of the month had commenced the unrestricted warfare portion of their submarine campaign. The Germans,

In history it is frequently the case that what seems to contemporaries merely ordinary and commonplace is to posterity of the utmost value and interest. How little, for example, do we know of the life and routine in the various stages and development of the sailing ship! In a volume entitled ‘Ships and Ways of Other Days,’ published before the war, I endeavoured to collect and present the everyday existence at sea in bygone years. Some day, in the centuries to come, it may be that the historical

In the spring of 1917 there was a 2,905-ton steamship, called the Bracondale , in the employment of the Admiralty as a collier. It was decided that she would make a very useful Q-ship, so at the beginning of April she was thus commissioned and her name changed to Chagford . She was fitted out at Devonport and armed with a 4-inch, two 12-pounders, and a couple of torpedo tubes, and was ready for sea at the end of June. Commanded by Lieutenant D. G. Jeffrey, R.N.R., she proceeded to Falmouth in or

The unrestricted phase of submarine warfare instituted in February, 1917, had, apart from other means, been met by an increase in the number of Q-ships, so that by the end of May there were close upon eighty steamers and sailing craft either being fitted out as decoys or already thus employed. By far the greater number of the big Q-ships were serving under Admiral Bayly, the other large craft being based on Longhope, Portsmouth, the south-east of England, and Malta. Of the smaller types, such as

One of the effects of the British blockade on Germany was to prevent such valuable war material as iron reaching Germany from Spain. Now Spanish ores, being of great purity, were in pre-war days imported in large quantities for the manufacture of the best qualities of steel, and it was a serious matter for Germany that these importations were cut off. But luckily for her she had been accustomed to obtain, even prior to the war, supplies of magnetic ore from Sweden, and it was of the utmost impor