The vessel which he placed at our disposal was a screw steamer of about 2000 tons, long, low, and sharp; an exceedingly fast boat, capable of doing her twenty knots an hour even when heavily laden, as, in a desperate emergency, we were soon to find out. Articles signed, our cargo was procured and shipped--cannon, rifles, revolvers, cartridges, fuses, medicines, etc., etc. We cleared without difficulty, weighed, stood out, and laid our course straight across the North Pacific. Our ship, the _Columbia_, proved a beauty, in every way fit for the risky business we were engaged upon. Needless to say she had not only been selected for speed, but was rendered in appearance as unobtrusive as possible. Besides lying low in the water, she was painted a dead grey, funnels and all. The sort of coal we used, anthracite, burned with very little smoke, and even that little was obviated, as we approached the seat of war, by a hood on the smoke-stack. She slipped through the water silently and noiselessly as one of its natural denizens, and on a dark night, with all lights out, could hardly have been perceived, even at a short distance, from the deck of another vessel. Without the ship's log to refer to, I cannot be certain of dates and distances, but it was in the latter days of August that we were steaming up the Yellow Sea, where, by the way, the water is _bluer_ than I have ever seen it elsewhere. In some places it presents, on a moonlit night, the appearance of liquefied ultramarine, though it certainly is muddy enough about the coasts. Our destination was Tientsin, one of the most northern of the treaty ports, and of course we kept in with the Chinese mainland as closely as possible to avoid the Japanese cruisers. All had gone well, and we were fast approaching the entrance to the Gulf of Pechili, when we encountered one of those tempests which are only to be met with in the Eastern seas--pitch-black darkness, rain in one sheeted flood, like a second Deluge, blinding flashes of forked lightning more terrific than the gloom, and an almost uninterrupted crash of thunder amidst which the uproar of a pitched field would be inaudible. With our enormous steam-power we held our own for a while although unable to make much headway; but at last a tremendous sea took us right abeam on the port side; the main hatch had been left open, a small Niagara poured down it, and doused our fires. No canvas would have stood the hurricane that was blowing, and for some time we were in a serious way. Before our engines, which fortunately held firm, were working again, we had drifted helplessly over to the Corean coast, and it was all we could do to claw off-shore until the tempest abated, which it did very suddenly, as it had risen.