The first measure set on foot by the Admiralty was to organise a system of search for suspicious craft, and to declare the North Sea a war area, within which it was dangerous for any vessel to navigate except through channels indicated by the naval authorities. The Germans replied with their now famous and futile blockade order of February, 1915. New regulations were issued from time to time regulating navigation through the British mine-fields, and the result has been, in association with the patrols, to exercise a very close supervision over the navigation in home waters. As to distant mining operations of the enemy, the First Lord of the Admiralty stated, on March 8th, 1917, that they had been carried very far, and the P. & O. liner _Mongolia_, sunk off Bombay on June 23rd, 1917, was not the only vessel mined in the Arabian Sea. From time to time it has been announced that mails for and from the East and Australia have been lost at sea. It is an inspiring thing to turn from this picture of mines and the scattering of them by the enemy to another picture—that of the gallant and successful manner in which the Navy, and the mine-trawlers and other vessels embodied in its service and employed in the ceaseless patrols, have grappled with the deadly menace of the mine. Ever patrolling the British coasts, ever facing death, often speeding to the help of vessels mined, torpedoed, or otherwise in distress, the glorious men who man these craft have inscribed their names in letters of gold on the roll of British honour and fame at sea. It was a marvellous thing, this embodiment of the vast mine-sweeping and patrolling service in the work of the Navy in the war. From all the coasts fishermen have come, with their trawlers converted from the craft of winning fish at sea, to the sterner work of bringing up and destroying the strange harvest of deadly mines which endanger all life at sea. Many a trawler has been sunk by contact with her fatal captures; others have been sunk by hostile fire and bombing by enemy aeroplanes, but never have the brave seamen quailed in the service of the country and the Allies, and in every port men are to be met whose craft have been sunk under them, and who have hastened to sea again.