"After each boat had been examined in detail, we began to fill them with supplies for the voyage. The crew spent days manoeuvring cases of condensed milk, cans of butter, meat, and chocolate, down the hatchways--food which the boat swallowed up as if she had been a kind of steel stomach. Until we had it all neatly and tightly stowed away, the _Z_ looked like a corner grocery store. Then, early one December morning, we pulled out of the harbor. It wasn't very cold, merely raw and damp, and it was misty dark. I remember looking at the winter stars riding high just over the meridian. The port behind us was still and dead, but a handful of navy-folk had come to one of the wharves to see us off. Yes, there was something of a stir--you know, the kind of stir that's made when boats go to sea: shouted orders, the plash of dropped cables, vagrant noises. It didn't take a great time to get under way; we were ready, waiting for the word to go. The flotilla--mother-ship, tugs and all--was out to sea long before the dawn. You would have liked the picture: the immense stretch of the grayish, winter-stricken sea, the little covey of submarines running awash, the gray mother-ship going ahead, as casually as an excursion steamer, into the featureless dawn. "The weather was wonderful for two days,--a touch of Indian summer on December's ocean; then, on the night of the third day, we ran into a blow, the worst I ever saw in my life. A storm--oh, boy!" He paused for an instant. One could see memories living in the fine, resolute eyes. The broken noises of the restaurant, which had seemingly died away while he spoke, crept back again to one's ears. A waiter dropped a clanging fork-- [Sidenote: A terrific storm comes on toward night.] "A storm. Never remember anything like it. A perfect terror. Everybody realized that any attempt to keep together would be hopeless. And night was coming on. One by one the submarines disappeared into that fury of wind and driving water, the mother-ship, because she was the largest vessel in the flotilla, being the last we saw. We snatched her last signal out of the teeth of the gale, and then she was gone, swallowed up in the storm. So we were alone. [Sidenote: Rough water the next day.] "We got through the night somehow or other. The next morning the ocean was a dirty brown-gray, and knots and wisps of cloud were tearing by close over the water. Every once in a while a great hollow-bellied wave would come rolling out of the hullabaloo and break thundering over us. On all the boats the lookout on the bridge had to be lashed in place, and every once in a while a couple of tons of water would come tumbling past him. Nobody at the job stayed dry for more than three minutes; a bathing-suit would have been more to the point than oilers. [Sidenote: The boat registers a roll of seventy degrees.] [Sidenote: The cook provides food after a fashion.]