With regard to the difficulty of turning and sinking the vessel satisfactorily, this is largely a matter of seamanship. With wind and tide both affecting a vessel it is seldom possible either to keep her stationary over a particular position or to turn her through a large angle without such aids as tugs, hawsers, and anchors, etc. But a ship does not go down instantaneously, nor is it a simple matter to sink her in an upright position. One end of the ship is likely to sink before the other: most of us have seen photographs of a ship with her bows or stern standing vertically in the water just before the vessel makes her final plunge. Whilst the ship is actually sinking the local current is apt to move her considerably before she is resting on the bottom throughout her whole length. Thus the third difficulty can only be surmounted by a specially fine display of seamanship, and, in such cases as we are {58} reviewing, this display must be rendered under the most trying conditions imaginable. Now, in the case of the blocking attempt at Santiago the _Merrimac_, Lieutenant Hobson of United States Navy, failed to reach her desired destination after it had been located. The attempt could scarcely have been more gallantly made, but the difficulties, arising from insufficient opportunity to make complete preparations, almost foredoomed the operation to failure. At Port Arthur, the Japanese made three attempts to block the exit against the egress of the Russian Fleet. No less than eighteen blockships were used. In spite of great determination and splendid self-sacrifice on the part of all concerned no blockship managed to sink herself in the correct position. During the late war the difficulty of sinking the ship satisfactorily, after reaching the desired position, was made manifest both in the River Tigris and in the Cameroon River. In each case our enemies, the Turks and Germans respectively, _endeavoured to block their own channels before we even arrived on the scene_. In the absence of all opposition from an enemy, in broad daylight, and at their own leisure, they sunk their ships and _failed to block the channels_--two clear illustrations of seamanship difficulties. All the searchings into past history failed to discover one single occasion in which a blocking enterprise of any real similarity to that desired had succeeded. That fact, taken into conjunction with the difficulties brought to light by a detailed consideration of the problem, was neither productive of encouragement nor conducive to optimism. {59} The reader will probably admit, at this stage, that the difficulties of blocking the highly fortified canal entrances at Zeebrugge and Ostende appeared almost insuperable. But where there's a will there's often a way. A way had to be found. _A way was found_. [Sidenote: The Use of Artificial Fogs]