Everyone has heard of the light cruiser _Glasgow_, how she fought at Coronel, and then escaped, and is now the sole survivor among the warships which then represented Great Britain and Germany; how she fought again off the Falkland Islands, and with the aid of the _Cornwall_ sank the _Leipzig_; how after many days of weary search she discovered the _Dresden_ in shelter at Juan Fernandez, and with the _Kent_ finally brought that German cruiser to a last account. These things are known. But of her other movements and adventures between the declaration of war in August of 1914 and that final spectacular scene in Cumberland Bay, Juan Fernandez, upon March 14th, 1915, nothing has been written. It is a very interesting story, and I propose to write it now. I will relate how she began her fighting career as the forlorn solitary representative of English sea power in the South Atlantic, and how by gradual stages, as if endowed with some compelling power of magnetic attraction, she became the focus of a British and German naval concentration which at last extended over half the world. This scrap of a fast light cruiser, of 4,800 tons, in appearance very much like a large torpedo-boat destroyer, with her complement of 370 men, worthily played her part in the Empire’s work, which is less the fighting of great battles than the sleepless policing of the seas. The battleships and battle cruisers are the fount of power; they by their fighting might hold the command of the seas, but the Navy’s daily work in the outer oceans is done, not by huge ships of the line, but by light cruisers, such as the _Glasgow_, of which at the outbreak of the war we had far too few for our needs. In July, 1914, the _Glasgow_ was the sole representative of British sea power upon the Atlantic coast of South America. She had the charge of our interests from a point some 400 miles north of Rio, right down to the Falkland Islands in the cold south. She was a modern vessel of 4,800 tons, first commissioned in 1911 by Captain Marcus Hill, and again in September, 1912, by Captain John Luce, and the officers and men who formed her company in July nearly four years ago, when the shadow of war hung over the world. She was well equipped to range over the thousands of miles of sea of which she was the solitary guardian. Her turbine engines, driving four screws, could propel her at a speed exceeding twenty-six knots (over thirty miles an hour) when her furnaces were fed with coal and oil; and with her two 6-inch and ten 4-inch guns of new pattern she was more than a match for any German light cruiser which might have been sent against her.