then, as we shall presently see, she was to carry out some first-class work. There is no person more conservative than the seafaring man; the whole history of the sailing ship shows this clearly enough, and it is curious how one generation is much the same as another. It was Lord Melville who, in the early years of the nineteenth century, stated that it was the duty of the Admiralty to discourage, to the utmost of their ability, the employment of steam vessels, as they considered the introduction of steam was calculated to strike a fatal blow to the naval supremacy of Great Britain. A hundred years later, although the Q-sailing-ship had justified herself, yet there was a sort of conservative prejudice against her development. ‘The small sailing vessel,’ complained a distinguished admiral, ‘will develop into a sailing line-of-battle ship with an electric-light party reefing topsails and a seaplane hidden in the foretopmen’s washdeck locker, and everybody seasick.’ Yes: there was much in common between this flag-officer and the noble lord, in spite of the intervening century. CHAPTER VI THE ‘MARY B. MITCHELL’ 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 it was decided to requisition her. The difficulty always was to preserve secrecy during her fitting out, but in this case, luckily, she had recently suffered some damage, and this afforded an excellent excuse for paying off the mercantile crew. A new crew was selected for her and was trained specially for the work while she was being got ready for her special service. She was commissioned on May 5, and left Falmouth for her first cruise on June 26, and then operated for a month on end in the western approaches between Ushant, the Irish coast, and Milford. Her captain was Lieutenant M. Armstrong, R.N.R., and she was known officially as the _Mitchell_ and Q 9. During her cruising she sailed also under three different neutral flags, as convenient. Armed with three guns, her 12-pounder was hidden in a dummy collapsible house on the poop, and under each of the two hatches was a 6-pounder mounted on a swinging pedestal. There were also a couple of Lewis guns, some small arms and Mills hand-grenades. In spite of the thoroughness with which the guns were concealed, the collapsible arrangements had been made so ingeniously that all guns could be brought into action under three seconds. Before leaving Falmouth she was painted black with a yellow streak and bore the name MARY Y. JOSE VIGO