"... The number and dissemination of your external interests throws England largely on the defensive, necessarily so. It was so in the great days of Pitt and Nelson, though the fact is obscured by the great naval preponderance you then had. You have now greater and more extensive interests to defend....--Believe me to be, very truly yours, "A. T. MAHAN" {378} CHAPTER XXXVIII H.M.S. UNDAUNTED (_Continued_) II. THE SALVING OF THE SEIGNELAY The _Undaunted_, lying at Alexandria in 1891, was being rigged up for a ball; when a telegram arrived ordering her to go to the rescue of the French cruiser _Seignelay_, which had gone ashore near Jaffa, on 26th April. The telegram arrived at one o'clock in the morning of the 28th April. Before daylight, the ball-room was unrigged, the decorations were taken down, 300 guests were put off by telegram, and we were steaming at full speed to the _Seignelay_, distant 270 miles. In a private letter printed in _The Times_ of 20th October, 1894, describing the affair, the anonymous writer says: "It was a good sample of the vicissitudes of naval life, and I think we all rather enjoyed it." (I do not know who wrote the letter, but it must have been one of my officers; who, without my knowledge, published it, or sanctioned its publication, more than a year after the _Undaunted_ had paid off. The proprietors of _The Times_ have kindly given me permission to quote from the document, which was written at the time of the occurrence of the events which it describes, and which contains details I had forgotten.) At daylight on 29th April, we found the _Seignelay_ driven high up on a sandy beach, embedded in five and a half feet of sand in shallow water. She had parted her cable in a gale of wind, had driven on shore, and had scooped out a dock for herself. Had she been built with a round stern {379} each succeeding wave of the sea would have lifted and then dropped her, bumping her to pieces. But as she had a sharp stern, the breakers lifted her bodily and floated her farther on. The _Seignelay_ was a single-screw wooden cruiser, of 1900 tons displacement and 18 feet 4 inches draught. When his ship struck, the captain telegraphed to his admiral saying that he feared she was hopelessly lost. The French admiral dispatched a squadron of three ships to take off the men and stores; but by the time they arrived the _Seignelay_ was afloat again and lying at her anchor almost undamaged; and the senior French captain amiably remarked: "You English do not know the word impossible." The British sloop _Melita_, Commander George F. King-Hall (now Admiral Sir G. F. King-Hall, K.C.B, C.V.O.), was already endeavouring to help the _Seignelay_ when the _Undaunted_ arrived; but the water was so shallow that the _Melita_ could not approach nearer than 300 yards, and the _Undaunted_ 850 yards, to the _Seignelay_.