ned off.

Not always did the German submarines themselves succeed in escaping
unharmed in their raiding of allied merchantmen. Rewards were offered
in Great Britain for the sinking of German submersibles by the
commanders of British merchantmen. Instructions were issued in the
British shipping periodicals, showing how a submarine might be sunk by
being rammed. It was officially announced on the 5th of March, 1915,
by the British admiralty, that the _U-8_ had been rammed and sunk by a
British warship. The crew of twenty-nine was rescued and brought to
Dover. For the British this was a stroke of good fortune, for while
the _U-8_ was of an earlier type it was a dangerous craft, having a
total displacement of 300 tons, a radius of operation of 1,200 miles,
a speed of 13 knots when traveling "light" and a speed of 8 knots when
submerged. On the same day the French minister of marine announced
that a French warship had come upon a German submarine of the type of
the _U-2_ in the North Sea and that after firing at the hull of the
vessel and hitting it three times it was seen to sink and did not
reappear.

During the last week of February and the first week of March, 1915,
bad weather on the waters surrounding the British Isles hampered the
operations of German submarines to an extent which led the British
public to believe that the submarine warfare on merchantmen had been
abandoned, but they were disillusioned when on the 9th of March, 1915,
three British ships were sunk by the underwater craft. The steamship
_Tangistan_ was torpedoed off Scarborough, the _Blackwood_ off
Hastings and the _Princess Victoria_ near Liverpool. Part of this was
believed to be the work of the _U-16_.

In the three days beginning March 10, 1915, eight ships were made
victims of German submarines in the waters about the British Isles.
Most novel was the experience of a crowd gathered on the shore of one
of the Scilly Islands on March 12, 1915, when two of these eight
ships, the _Indian City_ and the _Headlands_, were torpedoed. At about
eight in the morning the islanders on St. Mary's Island saw a German
submarine overtake the former and sink her. The German vessel then
remained in the adjacent waters to watch for the approach of another
victim, while two patrol boats near by put out and opened fire on her.
The crowd saw the enemies exchange shots at a distance of ten miles
off shore. But neither side put in any effective shots, and the combat
en