The fact is that the popular mind, in its attitude toward this new type of craft, is still too much under the spell of Jules Verne. There is still the disposition to look upon the submarine as an insidious vessel which spends practically all of its time under the water, stealthily slinks along, never once betraying its presence, creeps up at will to its enemy and discharges its torpedo. Yet the description which these pages have already given of its operations shows the falsity of this idea. It is important that we should keep constantly in mind the fact that the submarine is only occasionally a submarine; and that for the greater part of its career it is a surface boat. In the long journeys which the German U-boats made from the Heligoland Bight around Scotland and Ireland to those great hunting grounds which lay in the Atlantic trade routes, they travelled practically all the time on the surface of the water. The weary weeks during which they cruised around, looking for their victims, they also spent almost entirely on the surface. There were virtually only two circumstances which compelled them to disappear beneath the waves. The first of these was the occasion on which the submarine detected a merchant ship; in this case it submerged, for the success of its attempt to torpedo depended entirely upon its operating unseen. The second occasion which made it necessary to submerge was when it spied a destroyer or other dangerous patrolling craft; the submarine, as has been said, could not fight a vessel of this type with much chance of success. Thus the ability to submerge was merely a quality that was utilized only in those crises when the submarine either had to escape a vessel which was stronger than itself or planned to attack one which was weaker.