Fifthly, come the seaplanes, that is, aircraft which can light on the water as well as fly. We began the war with a fair number of comparatively small planes and ended it with a great number of large ones, a few of which could drop a ton-weight bomb fit to sink most battleships if the shot went home. But these monsters of the air were something more than ordinary seaplanes. For out of the seaplane there gradually grew a regular flying boat which began to make it hot for German submarines in 1917. Commander Porte, of the Royal Navy, went on inventing and trying new kinds of flying boats for nearly three years before he made one good enough for its very hard and dangerous work. He had to overcome all the troubles of aircraft and seacraft, put together, before he succeeded in doing what no one had ever done before--making a completely new kind of craft that would be not only seaworthy but airworthy too. Porte's base was at Felixstowe, near the great destroyer and submarine base at Harwich on the east coast of England. Strangely enough, Felixstowe was a favourite summer resort of the Kaiser whenever he came to the British Isles. Felixstowe is within a hundred miles of the Belgian coast, where the Germans had submarines at Ostend and Zeebrugge. It is only fifty from the Dutch lightship on the North Hinder Bank, where German submarines used to come up so as to make sure of their course on their way between the English Channel and their own ports. The neighbourhood of this lightship naturally became a very favourite hunting ground of the new flying boats, which used to bomb the Huns whenever one of their submarines was sighted either on or below the surface. Forty flying boats were launched in 1917, and forty-four submarines were bombed. The "Porte Baby," as the flying boat of '17 was called, measured a hundred feet across the wings and carried a small aeroplane, complete with its own airman, on top. The "Porte Super-Baby" of 1918 could lift no less than fifteen tons and was easily the strongest aircraft in the world. The "Baby's" crew was four--pilot, navigator, wirelesser, and engineer. The "Super-Baby" carried more. Two gigantic Zeppelins and several submarines were destroyed by the "Babies." The "Super-Babies" had no proper chance of showing what they could do, as the Armistice came (11 November 1918) before they were really at work. Porte had many Canadians in his crews; and Canadians brought down the first Zeppelin and sank the first submarine.