In the old sailing-ship days it was more common than it is now for fighting ships to pass close to one another without detection. Whole fleets used then to do it in a way which now seems always unbelievable. The classical example is that of Napoleon and Nelson in June, 1798. On the night of June 30th-July 1st, Napoleon with a huge fleet of transports, escorted by Admiral Brueys’ squadron, crossed the Gulf of Candia and reached Alexandria on the afternoon of the 1st. Nelson, who had been at Alexandria in search of his enemy, left on June 29th, and sailed slowly against adverse winds to the north. Though the French and British fleets covered scores of miles of sea they passed across one another, each without suspicion of the presence of the other. Nelson was very short of frigates. It is not remarkable that the British convoy and the _Emden_ on the night of November 8th, 1914, should so nearly have met without mutual detection; what is wonderful is that the _Emden_ should have chosen the day and hour for raiding the Cocos Islands when a greatly superior British force was barely fifty miles distant and placed by accident in a position which cut off all prospects of escape. It was a stroke of Luck for us which exactly paralleled the occasion of von Spee’s raid a month later upon the Falkland Islands. By seven o’clock Glossop and the _Sydney_ were ready to leave upon their trip of investigation—they had no knowledge of what was before them—and during the next two and a quarter hours they steamed at twenty knots towards the distant cable station. In the meantime the _Emden_ had sent a boat ashore and the work of destruction of the station was completed by 9.20 a.m. Everything fitted exactly into its place, for the Fates are very pretty workmen. The _Emden_ knew nothing of the _Sydney’s_ coming, but as Glossop sped along his wireless receivers took up the distress calls from Cocos. He learned that the enemy warship had sent a boat ashore—and then came interruptions in the signals which showed that the wireless station had been raided. Naval officers do not get excited—they have too much of urgency upon which to concentrate their minds—but to those in the _Sydney_ must have come some thrills at the unknown prospect. Their ship and their men were new and untried in war. Their guns had never fired a shot except in practice. Before them might be the _Emden_ or the _Königsberg_ or both together. They did not know, but as they rushed through the slowly heaving tropic sea they serenely, exactly, prepared for action.