On the other hand, it was an enterprise as liable to complete disaster as any that could easily have been {223} imagined; and but little instruction and no great encouragement could be drawn from similar adventures in the past. Though scarcely comparable, perhaps, Nelson's expedition against Boulogne, while commanding in the Straits, had lamentably failed, resulting in the death of his close friend and valued subordinate, Captain Parker; while the sinking of block-ships both by Lieutenant Hobson at Santiago in the Spanish-American War, and by the Japanese at Port Arthur in their campaign against Russia, had shown how innumerable were the possible mischances that could rob such efforts of success. Nor had our own experiences, during the war, against land-fortifications, been very satisfactory; and both Zeebrugge and Ostend, and particularly the former, were, as was well known, armed to the teeth. On the other hand, neither was a natural harbour. Each had been carved, as it were, out of the sand; and, given but a chance, nature was always ready to obliterate the channels upon which they depended. Let us consider for a moment the problem that they presented to an Admiralty desirous of sealing them. Situated on the Belgian coast, some twelve miles apart and facing a little to the west of north, each was in reality but a sea-gate of the inland port of Bruges--the latter being the station to which the enemy destroyers and submarines were sent in parts from the German workshops; where they were assembled; and whence, by canal, they proceeded to sea by way of Zeebrugge and Ostend. Of these two exits, Zeebrugge, the northernmost, was considerably the nearer to Bruges and the more important--Zeebrugge {224} being eight, while Ostend was eleven miles distant from their common base--and to receive an adequate impression of what was subsequently achieved there it is necessary to bear in mind its salient features. Unlike Ostend, apart from its harbour, it possessed no civic importance, merely consisting of a few streets of houses clustering about its railway-station, locks, wharves, and store-houses, its sandy roadstead being guarded from the sea by an immensely powerful crescentic Mole. It was into this roadstead that the Bruges canal opened between heavy timbered breakwaters, having first passed through a sea-lock, some half a mile higher up. Between the two light-houses, each about twenty feet above high-water level, that stood upon the ends of these breakwaters, the canal was 200 yards wide, narrowing to a width, in the lock itself, of less than seventy feet.