About this time, which was probably an hour after the ship sank, a German submarine approached the scene of the torpedoing and lay to near some of the dories and life-rafts. No effort was made to assist the men freezing in the water. Three Germans, presumably the officers, were visible upon the top of the conning tower as they stood and watched us. The U-boat remained on the surface about half an hour and then steered off and submerged. I then made a further search through the wreckage to be sure that none of my men were left in the water. At 4.30 in the morning we started away from the scene to attempt to make the nearest land. The flare of Penmarch Light was visible and I headed for it, observing the star Polaris and reckoning the light to be about northeast. We rowed the boats all through the forenoon and sighted the Penmarch Lighthouse at 1.15 P.M. Keeping steadily at the oars, turn and turn about, we moved toward the coast until 5.15 in the afternoon when a French torpedo boat took us aboard. There were three officers and forty men of us, who were promptly carried into Brest, where I was informed that two other dories, containing three officers and twenty-five men, had landed at Penmarch Point. This was the first news that these had been saved, for they had not been seen by any of my party near the place of the disaster. It was true of the _Alcedo_ that in the moment of gravest crisis the cohesion and discipline of the Navy manifested itself. Orders were given and obeyed while the shattered yacht was dropping from under the feet of the young men and boys who had worn the uniform only a few months. It was a nightmare of an experience in which panic might have been expected, but officers and bluejackets were groping to find their stations or endeavoring to cut away boats so that others might be saved. Such behavior was fairly typical of the patrol fleet, although no other yacht was doomed to such a fate as this, but there was the stuff in the personnel to stand the test and the spirit of fidelity burned like a flame. The yachts had been playing the game lone-handed, hoping to be reinforced by enough destroyers to move the American convoys which were subjected to long and costly delays in the French ports for lack of escort vessels to carry them out through the danger zone. The news that the United States proposed to build two hundred destroyers sounded prodigious, but it failed to fit the immediate occasion. To the Queenstown base were assigned the up-to-date oil-burning destroyers as fast as more of them could be diverted from home, and they were doing superb and indispensable service in cruising a thousand miles offshore to meet and escort the troop convoys in to France, but they could not tarry to take the ships out again nor to protect the slower supply convoys and undertake the other work of the Breton Patrol.