Commander Wharton of the _Kent_ has memorably described the final scene. "It was strange and weird, all this aftermath, the wind rapidly arising from the westward, darkness closing in, one ship heaving to the swell, well battered, the foretop-gallant mast gone. Of the other, nothing to be seen but floating wreckage, with here and there a man clinging, and the ’molly hawks’ (vultures of the sea) swooping by. The wind moaned, and death was in the air. Then see! Out of the mist loomed a great four-masted barque under full canvas. A great ghost-ship she seemed. Slowly, majestically, she sailed by, and vanished in the night." The battle-cruisers’ fight had been visited, earlier in the day, by the same ghost-ship; manned, it might easily be imagined, by phantom seamen of the Nelsonian age. Not since that age, and seldom even then, had so impressive a victory been won at sea: it was not a defeat of the enemy, it was his annihilation. Admiral Sturdee had seized all his opportunities, surmounted all his difficulties, and attained all his objects; he was even able to return his most valuable ships to the Grand Fleet practically intact and in the shortest possible time. It may be added that in a fine dispatch he showed once more how a British admiral writes of his enemy’s fate and of his own achievement. *CHAPTER XXIV.* *MYSTERY SHIPS.* It was towards the end of 1914 that the German Admiralty conceived the idea of blockading the British Isles by means of a submarine fleet. The enterprise was a difficult one; for the pursuit and capture of commerce a submarine is very ill fitted. A frail boat with a small crew cannot afford to hold up and examine a ship on the surface; still less to put a prize crew on board and send the captured vessel into port. It was therefore decided that to carry out the blockade merchant ships must be sunk without examination and without warning. If crews, passengers, or even neutrals perished in this process, the "blame," says Admiral Scheer, "would attach to those who despised our warnings." No civilized power had ever before threatened to kill non-combatants on logical principles of this kind, and as soon as it was seen that the German Admiralty were attempting to carry out their murderous intentions it became necessary to devise means of destroying their U-boats wherever they could be found. They were accordingly hunted by destroyers, by trawlers, by submarines, and by airships and seaplanes; they were destroyed by gun fire, by mines, by nets, by torpedoes, and by depth charges, and all these were used with the greatest skill and success. Of all the hunting methods, perhaps the most attractive to the English sporting instinct was that of the Mystery Ships, or Q-boats. This was at first merely the use of a simple trap, but was developed by the genius of a single man into an entirely novel campaign of the most heroic kind.