"Two of the crews of starboard guns had been badly knocked about by the explosion of shells striking the deck at the end of their long high-angle flight. Among these was the chap I had seen apparently cooling his feet in a water-bucket. As a matter of fact, it was no foot at all he was dabbling, but only a maimed stump. The foot had been carried away by a shell fragment, and the brave chap, not wanting to be put on the shelf by going down to the Surgeon, had--all on his own--scooped up a canvas bucket full of salt water and was soaking his stump in it in an endeavour to stop the flow of blood. He was biting through his lip with the smart of the brine on the raw flesh as I came up, but as I turned and looked back from the ladder leading up to the bridge I saw him hobble painfully across the deck and climb back into his sight-setter's seat behind his gun. I have forgotten now whether it was another wound, or further loss of blood from this one, which finally bowled him over and put him out of the fight he wanted so much to see through to a finish. "These I have mentioned were the several shots from the _Emden_ which were responsible for our total casualties of four killed and eleven wounded. Of other hits, one took a big bite out of the mainmast, but not quite enough to bring it down. Another scooped a neat hollow out of the shield of the foremost starboard gun and bounced off into the sea, leaving two or three of the crew who had been in close contact with the shield half paralysed for a few moments from the sharp shock. "Still another ploughed through a grating, two bulkheads and the Commander's cabin, and finally nipped into the sea, all without exploding. Next to the knocking out of the range-finders, perhaps our most troublesome injury was from a shell-hole in the fo'c'sle deck, through which the water from the big bow wave the _Sydney_ was throwing up entered and flooded the Boys' Mess deck. By means of the water-tight doors we managed to confine the flooding to that flat only. "There is no doubt that for the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the fight the _Emden_ had the best of it. This was probably due mainly to her luck in putting both our range-finders out of action in what were practically her opening shots. "It took her three ranging shots to find us, though, and, once we started, we did the same with her. Our first salvo fell beyond her, the next both short and wide, but two or three shells from the third found their mark. And we were no less lucky than the _Emden_ with our first hits, for where she knocked out our gunnery control by disabling our range-finders, we did the same to her by shooting away the voice-pipes of her conning tower, from which Captain Von Müller directed the action.