+By Commander R. Dowling, R.N.R. (Captain in the Imperial Ottoman Navy).+ In December, 1900, I left Port Said for London in command of a small "hopper." For the benefit of the uninitiated, I should explain that this is a vessel with a bottom which opens out and allows the contents of the hold to fall into the sea. The "hopper" had formerly been employed in widening the Suez Canal, but had since been converted into a tank steamer for carrying oil. I had undertaken to bring her to England in tow of another steamer of some seven thousand tons burden. [Illustration: COMMANDER R. DOWLING, R.N.R., WHO DESCRIBES A PERILOUS VOYAGE HE MADE FROM PORT SAID TO LONDON IN A "HOPPER." _From a Photo. by Apollon Studio._] I got the crew together with some difficulty. When I explained the project to English-speaking seamen, they all refused, in a most emphatic manner, to have anything to do with it, and in the end I had to fall back on a number of men to whom I was unable to explain it at all properly. They were one Swede, the mate; a Greek and a Frenchman, whom I understood to be engineers; four Italian seamen and four Greek firemen, and an Italian cook. Excepting the Swede, who understood English with difficulty, not one of the crew could make out a word I said, so that during the first part of the voyage I was compelled to give orders to the ship's company in a kind of pantomimic dumb-show. We managed to bend on two five-inch hawsers to the other steamer and started on our voyage, using our own engines to assist the towing ship. The engineer was full of zeal, which he showed by repeatedly "ramming" our consort, through his failure to understand the orders sent below through the tube--we had no telegraph--and this, needless to say, caused a great deal of unpleasantness, shown chiefly in personal abuse of myself from the big vessel, though I repeatedly tried to gesticulate explanations as to the position. The Italian cook turned out an utter fraud, giving repeated proofs of his incapacity. I endeavoured to instruct him by practical demonstration in the art of boiling pork and cabbage, but it came on to blow and, the sea rising rapidly as it does in the Mediterranean, the galley was washed out and the cooking difficulty disposed of for ever, for we had to live on cocoa, biscuit, and onions during nearly the whole of that eventful voyage.