Nevertheless all the world knows there was great anxiety and even dread lest something serious might happen in navigating this most treacherous and dangerous passage in the world. Even the foreign press said that it would be a supreme test of American seamanship to take a fleet of sixteen battleships, to say nothing of the auxiliaries, through those waters. It is comparatively easy to take one or two ships through the straits. Two or three hundred skippers perform that task with success every year. Time and again have our warships, singly and in groups of two or three, gone through with ease. But here were sixteen monster ships that had to go through in single file and within about 400 yards of one another, with no place to anchor and without the possibility of stopping, buffeted by swift tides and currents, in danger of running into the sheer cliffs of mountains or of striking hidden rocks in fog or possibly snow. If any serious mishap had occurred there was nothing to do but go right on. You couldn't lay to in these waters. If fog hid the way you must keep on and trust to picking up headlands here and there, and you must maintain your sustained speed of ten knots, because each vessel would then know where its immediate predecessor or follower ought to be. Certainly it was a difficult performance, one fraught with great danger and grave responsibility. The chief point is, however, that the fleet got through without the slightest mishap. It was done as easily as entering the harbor of New York. There was not the slightest manifestation of undue concern by any of the officers of the fleet, but it cannot be denied that every one was keyed up to his best and all were glad when the roll of the Pacific was felt. When it was over all hands looked at one another and said, in the French expression, "It is to laugh." But you want to know all about it? Is there an impatient call for details of this much-heralded trip of dread, a breathless demand to know how many close calls and narrow escapes there were from hitting sunken rocks, gliding against precipices, scraping the paint from the ships' sides, dodging willywaws? You want to learn how many men were nearly swept from the decks by overhanging cliffs and limbs of trees, how often icebergs choked the narrow places, how many times the treacherous Fuegan Indians, "the lowest form of humanity on earth," lit their fires as signals that there would be fine plunder and good eating of humans when one or more of these ships went on the rocks; whether it was true that the officers and crews went without sleep or food until all dangers were passed?