It was three o'clock in the morning that the _B11_ left her base for the entrance to the Dardanelles, and no Elizabethan captain ever put to sea on a more perilous undertaking than that which faced the crew, less than a score, of the _B11_ in that December darkness. They reached the entrance, however, unobserved, took their bearings with the current streaming past them, and then submerged to sixty feet, and began their blindfold journey toward the minefields. Here they had to rely entirely on their electric motors capable of about 190 horse-power; and so, for hour after hour, they felt their way beneath the five rows of mines that were known to be guarding the Straits, and, when at last they rose again, a little before noon, it was to find themselves bathed in broad daylight, and to discover to their delight, well within reach, the Turkish battleship _Messudiyeh_. Still unnoticed, they submerged immediately, charged the firing-tank, flooded the torpedo-tube, and stood by to fire. Now was the critical moment--not of the journey, perhaps, but to demonstrate beyond question that it had been successfully accomplished. The _B11_ crept up again to within fifteen feet. There was a fraction of a pause, and the torpedo was launched. This meant her discovery, of course, and, had not the torpedo gone home, a second chance could hardly have been expected. But it was a good shot, followed by a loud explosion, and a cautious peep through the periscope showed the _Messudiyeh_, completely surprised, to be sinking by her stern. Built by the Thames Iron Works Company in {154} 1874, she was of no great value as a battleship; and, although she had been reconstructed in Genoa in 1902, and carried two 9.2-inch guns besides a secondary armament, she was not in any sense a serious opponent, and her maximum speed was but 16 knots. But she was one of the only three battleships in the Turkish Navy; she carried a crew of 600 and was guarding the minefields; and the moral effect of her loss in so dramatic a fashion was profound. But a few years before, and this journey of Lieutenant-Commander Holbrook's would have seemed but the vain imagining of a novelist. Now it was a fact, and a fact that could be repeated, as others of his colleagues were to demonstrate.