While the experts will dwell upon the brilliant feat performed by the salvors in righting and raising the _St. Paul_, the average person will think of the strangeness of the case. That the liner should sink without cause on the tenth anniversary of the day that she sank the warship, that she should overturn like the warship, that pontoons, coffer-dams and legs erected on the hull should play so important a part in both cases, are all links in a chain of remarkable coincidences, the final link of which is provided by the fact that the salvage operations on liner and warship each took five months to complete. These are the incidents which make the case of the _St. Paul_ so noteworthy. The blizzard which caused the collision between the _St. Paul_ and the _Gladiator_ cost Great Britain a considerable sum, but not so much as the fog which led to the wreck of H.M.S. _Montagu_ on the Shutter Rock at Lundy Island. The British Admiralty spared no effort or expense to get the battleship off, but after spending £85,000 in salvage work the navy had to confess itself beaten. So the proud battleship which cost over £1,000,000 was sold for the trifling sum of £4250 and was broken up for the sake of the metal she contained. But for the genius of Commodore Young, the dreadnought _Britannia_ might have met with a similar fate. Returning from a sweep of the North Sea during the war to her anchorage in the Firth of Forth, she was thrown by a heavy squall hard on the rocky island of Inchkeith. Tugs and torpedo boats failed to move her, and when Commodore Young came on the spot he found the rocks had not only pierced her bottom, but had also fractured her double bottom. Hopeless though her position seemed to others, the Director of Salvage considered it possible to refloat her. All her stores, ammunition and coals were hauled out to lighten her. Still she sat tight, held firmly in the grip of the rocks. So a poultice of cement was fixed over the fractured plates in the second bottom to enable the engine-room to be pumped out, after which were made many connections leading into the flooded bottom. The air-pumps were linked up and set going, and as the air was driven into the flooded bottom it formed a belt which increased in depth until it expelled all the water through the holes made by the rocks. Directly the salvors felt the battleship stir, they towed her off the rocks into dry dock, where the damage was quickly repaired. Duty called her later to the Mediterranean, where she was caught by a German torpedo and this time sent to the bottom for good. CHAPTER XIII