The salvors, making the most of favourable conditions after their enforced idleness, were toiling until far into the night on the wreck. They feared a recurrence of bad weather, and their fears were well-founded. Wednesday brought in its train a strong wind that increased in strength all the morning and made work impossible. By the afternoon it was blowing a gale, and so severe was the storm that one of the salvage lighters was unable to withstand its fury. She started to founder, and it was only with the utmost difficulty and in the face of tremendous risk that one of the salvage men managed to get aboard and bring her safely to harbour. The calm courage and confidence of the salvors were things to marvel at. They knew beyond doubt that live mines were aboard, and that these mines were liable to go off at the slightest jar and blow them all to pieces, yet they went about their jobs for hour after hour, day after day, as though such things as mines did not exist. Time after time the sea bumped the submarine against the bottom and, every time it happened, death in its most horrible form hovered near them. Once the submarine dropped sheer from the cables, and no one knows even now why they were not all wiped off the face of the sea. There was just one tense moment, then, as nothing happened and their luck held good, they started to get the submarine back into the slings again. Another lifting craft was brought on the scene and, picking up the wreck again, the salvors went ahead with the work tide by tide. In their passage shorewards they performed the extraordinary feat of carrying the wreck over a bar of sand that rose steeply for 14 feet--an operation requiring the greatest skill and delicacy in adjusting the lifting cables. The nose of the submarine had to be lifted inch by inch until it attained an angle that enabled it to rise up the slope without digging its bow into the sand. Had the nose of the craft been lifted too high, she might easily have slipped backward out of the cables supporting her, and such a slip might not have ended so happily as the previous one. However, Commander Davis succeeded in negotiating this supreme difficulty surely and safely, and his brilliant work was later rewarded with the Distinguished Service Cross. In the end, after making twenty-one lifts in twenty days, the salvors beached the infamous U.44. She proved a golden haul, for the mass of confidential information recovered from her turned out to be of the utmost importance. She had on board nine mines, which were cautiously taken out by Commander Davis and rendered innocuous, besides several torpedoes and a big collection of shells. Followed the grim and ghastly task of disinterring the dead. On September 26, twenty-one bodies were removed under the direction of a surgeon and carefully searched. One by one the dead Germans were sewn in canvas and weighted with firebars.