At the beginning of September the _Glasgow_ and the _Monmouth_ shifted down south, in the hope of catching the _Dresden_ at work off the River Plate. There they arrived on the 8th, but found no prey, though rumours were many, and unrewarded searches as many. The _Otranto_ came down to join them, and down also came the news that Cradock in his new flagship, the _Good Hope_, sent out to him from England, was also coming to take charge of the operations. Upon September 11th the _Dresden_ was reported to be far down towards the Straits of Magellan and for the time out of reach, so the _Glasgow’s_ squadron returned to its northern Lair and the junction with the _Good Hope_. From Cradock the officers learned that the _Cornwall_ and _Bristol_, with the _Carmania_ and _Macedonia_, had arrived on the station, and that the old battleship _Canopus_ was coming out. At the beginning of the war there had been one ship only in the South Atlantic, the _Glasgow_; now there were no fewer than five cruisers and three armed liners, and a battleship was on the way. One ship had grown into eight, was about to grow into nine, and before long was destined to become the focus of the most interesting concentration of the whole war. We have now reached September 18th, by which date the _Dresden_ was far off towards the Pacific. She reached an old port of refuge for whalers near Cape Horn, named Orange Bay, on the 5th, and rested there till the 16th. At Punta Arenas she had picked up another collier, the _Santa Isabel_, and, accompanied by her pair of supply vessels passed slowly round the Horn. At the western end of the Magellan Straits she met with the Pacific liner _Ortega_, which, though fired upon and called to stop, pluckily bolted into a badly charted channel and conveyed the news of the _Dresden’s_ movements to the English squadron, which for awhile had lost all trace of her. It was not yet clear to Cradock, who was now in command of the Southern Squadron—to distinguish it from the Northern Squadron, which presently consisted of the armoured cruiser _Carnarvon_ (Rear-Admiral Stoddart), the _Defence_, the _Cornwall_, the _Kent_, the _Bristol_, and the armed liner _Macedonia_—it was not yet clear that the _Dresden_ was bound for the Pacific, and a rendezvous with von Spee. It seemed more probable that her intention was to prey upon shipping off the Straits of Magellan. In order to meet the danger, he set off with the _Good Hope_, _Monmouth_, _Glasgow_, and the armed liner _Otranto_ to operate in the far south, employing the Falkland Islands as his base. The _Glasgow’s_ Lair of the north now remained for the use of Stoddart’s squadron.