A few days before the cessation of hostilities the British battleship _Britannia_ was torpedoed near the west entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar on November 9, 1918, and sank three and a half hours later. Thirty-nine officers and 673 men were saved. The _Britannia_, which had a displacement of 16,350 tons, was launched at Portsmouth December 10, 1904. She was 453.7 feet in length, had a speed of approximately nineteen knots, and carried a peace-time complement of 777 men. Her main armament consisted of four 12-inch guns. The end was rapidly approaching now, and on November 12, 1918, the Allied fleets passed through the Dardanelles in fine weather. British and Indian troops occupying the forts were paraded as the ships passed. The fleet arrived off Constantinople at 8 a. m. on November 13, 1918. This was the fourth time in a century that British battleships passed through the Dardanelles and arrived before Constantinople on a mission of war. It was 7.30 in the morning, according to the special correspondent of the London "Times," that the flagship _Superb_ was sighted in the Sea of Marmora, steaming slowly toward the entrance of the Bosporus, Behind her came the _Temeraire_, bearing General Sir Henry Wilson, who was to command the garrisons of Allied troops in the forts of the Dardanelles and Bosporus. The _Lord Nelson_ and the _Agamemnon_ were next, and then followed, in an imposing procession of line ahead, the cruisers, destroyers, and other craft making up the British squadron. Half an hour's steaming behind them, a distance that was diminished toward the end, came the French squadron in similar formation. Then followed the Italian and Greek warships. At the entrance to the Bosporus the fleet divided into two parts. The _Superb_ and _Temeraire_, followed by two French battleships, came on as a silent line of great gray ships and anchored close to the European shore of the Straits, within near view of the Sultan's palace and the Turkish Chamber of Deputies. The two French battleships dropped anchor astern of them, and then followed the battleships of Italy and Greece. The rest of the Allied fleet was placed round the corner of the Bosporus in the Sea of Marmora, and at noon the whole fleet was to weigh anchor again and go to its prepared base in the Gulf of Ismid. General Sir Henry Wilson soon afterward landed on the quay. He was received by Djevad Pasha, Turkish Chief of Staff, and on the quay were drawn up a guard of honor of several hundred British and Indian prisoners of war in their light-colored clothes of blanket cloth. Massed everywhere, as near as the Turkish police would let them come, were dense crowds of the population of Constantinople.