All this time Commander Stobalt, in command of the _Ulysses_ by the vicissitudes of unexpected war and separated from his squadron on detached service, was supposed to be in Cura Bay, a thousand miles away from Salaveira, flung there with the destroyers _Limpet_ and _Dabfish_ by the mere backwash of the triumphant allied fleet. According to the rules of naval warfare he _ought_ to have been a thousand miles away; according to the report of the allies' scouts he _was_ a thousand miles away. But miraculously one foggy night the _Ulysses_ loomed spectrally through the shifting mist that drifted uncertainly from off the land and rammed the first leviathan that crossed her path, while the two destroyers torpedoed her next neighbour. Then, before leviathans 3 and 4 had begun to learn from each other what the matter was, the _Ulysses_ was between them, sprinkling their decks and tops with small shell, and perforating their water-line and vital parts with large shell from a range closer than that at which any engagement had been fought out since the day when the Treasury had begun to implore the Admiralty to impress upon her admirals what a battleship really cost before they sent her into action. For the _Ulysses_ had everything to gain and nothing but herself to lose, and when morning broke over Salaveira's untidy bay, she had gained everything, and lost so little that even the New Alliance took no pride in mentioning it in the cross account. It was, of course, as every naval expert could have demonstrated on the war-game board, an impossible thing to do. Steam, searchlights, wireless telegraphy, quick-firing guns, and a hundred other innovations had effaced the man; and the spirit of the Elizabethan age was at a discount. What Drake would have done, or Hawkins, what would have been a sweet and pleasing adventure to Sir Richard Grenville, or another Santa Cruz to Blake, would have been in their heirs unmitigated suicide by the verdict of any orthodox court martial. Largely imbued with the Elizabethan spirit--the genius of ensuring everything that was possible, and then throwing into the scale a splendid belief in much that seemed impossible--Stobalt succeeded in doing what perhaps no one else would have succeeded in doing, merely because perhaps no one else would have tried.