While these and other minor expeditions were going on, the department of expeditions in New York was busy with a more extensive enterprise. An order was placed for 3000 rifles, 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition, 3 12-pound Hotchkiss field-guns and 600 shells, _machetes_, and several tons of dynamite. The steamer _Laurada_ was chartered, and the ocean-going tug _Dauntless_ was bought in Brunswick, Georgia. A part of the purchased munitions was ordered to New York, and the remainder, two car loads, shipped to Jacksonville by express. Ostensibly, the _Laurada_ was to sail from Philadelphia to Jamaica for a cargo of fruit, a business in which she had at times engaged. Her actual instructions were to proceed to the vicinity of Barnegat, about forty miles from New York, and there, at sea, await orders. The arms and ammunition came down from Bridgeport on the regular boat from that city, and were left on board until night. There was no particular secrecy about the shipment, and detectives followed it. But when, at dark, the big gates of the dock were closed and locked and all seemed over for the day, the watchers assumed that nothing would be done until the next day, and went away. But, immediately after their departure, a big lighter slipped quietly into the dock across the wharf from the Bridgeport boat, a swarm of men appeared and, behind the closed gates, in the semi-darkness of the wharf, rushed boxes from steamer to lighter. The work was finished at midnight; a tug slipped up and attached a hawser to the lighter; and the cargo was on its way to Cuba. Johnny O'Brien was on the tug. The _Laurada_ was met off Barnegat, as arranged, and the cargo and about fifty Cubans put on board of her. She was ordered to proceed slowly to Navassa Island where the _Dauntless_ would meet her. General Nuñez and O'Brien returned to New York on the tug, and while the detectives suspected that something had been done, they had no clue whatever to guide them. Nuñez and O'Brien started immediately for Charleston, with detectives at their heels. The _Commodore_, a tug then owned by the Cubans, lay in the harbor of that city, with a revenue cutter standing guard over her. She was ordered to get up steam and to go through all the motions of an immediate departure. But this was a ruse to draw attention away from the actual operations. Rubens, meanwhile, had gone to Jacksonville where he busied himself in convincing the authorities that the tug _Three Friends_ was about to get away with an expedition. With one revenue cutter watching the _Commodore_ in Charleston, the other cutter in the neighborhood was engaged in watching the _Three Friends_ in Jacksonville, thus leaving a clear coast between those cities. In Charleston were about seventy-five Cubans waiting a chance to get to the island. O'Brien states that about twenty-five detectives were following their party. Late in the afternoon of August 13, while the smoke was pouring from the funnels of the _Commodore_, the