there’s nothing to do but pull up the ladder and order the funeral wreath. Fourgues said that voyages at sea were beginning to offer a little too much variety for him to follow secret routes, and as long as he was not absolutely forced to do so, he would look a little farther and avoid submarines. So he struck the Spanish coast a little south of the Balearic Isles and we hugged it as far as Lisbon. He said that, perhaps, it made him lose a day, but that there is less danger near the coast, for if you are torpedoed, you may have time to beach the ship and save it later, or, at any rate, the crew and lifeboats are almost sure to be saved, having only to row a bit to reach land. Fourgues added that this ought to be the general rule. At Lisbon we coaled, and the _Pamir_ took the stuff the Portuguese Navy gave us for the Expeditionary Corps Portugal is forming in France. We were well received in Lisbon--not as in other Allied countries, where people are jolly lukewarm. The Portuguese are all out. They aren’t rich and their army is not huge, but all they ask for is to have a smack at the Germans and bash them in, which ought to be the ideal of all the Allies, instead of going in for shady diplomacy like some. We filled only our aft hold at Lisbon with Portuguese war-material, going on to Bilbao to stuff the forward hold with steel. We fairly rushed it in. The Spanish--I mean the Spanish ship-owners--have begun to hang fire a bit about shipping us ore; for they say the Boches are going to send all ships to the bottom, and Spain doesn’t want to lose her fleet. So they ask enormous prices, and that means endless bargaining, while the ore piles up on the docks. That’s why the _Pamir_ loaded so fast. I’m writing this as quickly as I can because I want to get to what we’re at now and the Norwegian rumours, and the mail-boat leaves the day after to-morrow. We lit out for Brest where the _Pamir_ left the Portuguese stuff and the Spanish metal. During the passage we sailed near a wreck, or rather fifty bits of wreck--wood, logs, buoys, etc.--scattered over half-a-mile of the sea. Fourgues made us search all the afternoon to see if we could find a raft or the lifeboats of the torpedoed ship. But it must have been as it was with the _Suffren_, which left nothing but her absence as proof of shipwreck. We were unsuccessful. When you come upon a tragedy like that and tell yourself that your turn may come, perhaps in a quarter of an hour--well, you are not so chirpy about the success of our Naval strategy as they are in Paris.