We were fortunate enough to make another catch on this same day, just as darkness was setting in, a steamer loaded with meat, inward bound from Sydney. We continued for several days through this fruitful field of operation in every direction and had both good and bad luck. Schweckerle had to bite into a bitter apple several times, as one after another of his children faithlessly abandoned him. But he had the joy of knowing that none of them went contrary to his good bringing-up and the care it had received. Many successes we put down in our log and sometimes exciting episodes and narrow escapes, when our enemy’s destroyers and patrol ships came across our path of daily toil, so that we should not be too presumptuous and careless. Then at last came the day when we decided to start our homeward journey. The torpedoes and shells were exhausted. Of oil, fresh water, and provisions we had such a scanty supply left that it was necessary for us to return. It was impossible to tell what kind of weather we would have on our return trip, and, if it did not storm, there might be strong head winds to hold us back. I decided to take a new route for our journey home. The Witch-Kettle with its horrors was still fresh in our minds and we preferred to take a roundabout way, rather than to run risks which could be easily avoided after a successfully completed task. In this period of thirteen days our nerves had been affected and there was little power of resistance left in them. It would not be advisable to put them to another severe test. So it came to pass on the fifteenth day after the start of the voyage, that a great storm hit us and for several days kept us hard at work. We found ourselves far up in the North Atlantic where the warm spring for a long time still wears its winter’s furs, and the sun never rises high. The icy, north wind, which blows three-quarters of the year, would in any event devour all his warmth. Repentantly, we had again picked up our thick camel’s wool garments which we had laid off in the southern waters. The further we went north, the heavier the clothes that we donned. In addition to the cold there came a storm, the like of which I had never seen during my entire service on the sea, and to describing which I will devote a few lines, because a storm on a U-boat is altogether different from a storm at sea in any other vessel. The barometer had been uncertain for two days. Its hasty rising and falling in accordance with the changes of the atmosphere made us suspect we would soon get rough weather. It was the night between April twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth. We traveled submerged to a considerable depth, and I was lying in my bunk asleep, partly undressed. At about two o’clock I was awakened and received the report: “Lieutenant Petersen asks that the Captain-Lieutenant kindly come to the ‘Centrale,’ as it is impossible for him to steer the boat any longer alone.”