oplane. The aviator dropped two bombs which found their mark on the
deck of the submarine and sank her. Austria had, during that month,
made an attempt to capture the Austrian island of Pelagosa, which had
been occupied by the Italians on July 26, 1915. But July 29, 1915, the
fleet of Austrian cruisers and destroyers, which made the attack, was
driven off by unnamed units of the Italian navy. But a loss by the
latter had been incurred on July 7, 1915, when the armored cruiser
_Amalfi_, while scouting in the upper waters of the Adriatic Sea, was
sighted and torpedoed by an Austrian submarine. She sank, but most of
her men were saved. Another Austrian submarine had the same success on
July 17, 1915, when it fired a torpedo at the Italian cruiser
_Giuseppe Garibaldi_, and saw her go down fifteen minutes later. Italy
endeavored to imitate the actions of Germany when, on July 6, 1915,
she proclaimed that the entire Adriatic Sea was a war zone and that
the Strait of Otranto was in a state of blockade. All the ports of
Dalmatia were closed to every kind of commerce.

Near the coasts of Turkey, toward the end of the first year of war,
there was fought the second duel between submarines. This time the
vanquished vessel was the French submarine _Mariotte_, which, on July
26, 1915, was sunk by a torpedo from a German submarine in the waters
right near the entrance to the Dardanelles. Britain ended the first
year of naval warfare by destroying the German cruiser _Koenigsberg_,
which, since the fall of the year before, had been lying up the Rufiji
River in German East Africa, after having been chased thence by a
British cruiser. It was decided to destroy her in order that she might
not get by the sunken hulls that the British had placed at the mouth
of the river in order to "bottle her up." Consequently, on the morning
of July 4, 1915, after her position had been noted by an aviator, two
British river monitors, _Severn_ and _Mersey_, aided by a cruiser and
minor vessels, began to fire upon the stationary vessel. Their fire
was directed by the aviator who had discovered her, but it was at
first almost ineffective because she lay so well concealed by the
vegetation of the surrounding jungle. She answered their fire and
succeeded in damaging the _Mersey_, but after being bombarded for six
hours she was set on fire. When the British monitors had finished with
her she was a total wreck.

CHAPTER XXXI

STORY OF THE "EMDEN"

W