ey, with five
others, landed in a small boat on the Scilly Islands while other
survivors reached shore in various ways. The _Jacob Jones_ was regarded
by superstitious navy men as something of a Jonah, she having figured in
one or two incidents involving German spies while in this country.

The first and to date the only American war-ship lost in American waters
as a result of submarine attack was the armored cruiser _San
Diego_--formerly the _California_--which was sunk by a mine off Point o'
Woods on the Long Island coast on the morning of July 19, 1918. Facts
associated with the disaster, involving the loss of some fifty lives,
are illuminated with the light of supreme heroism, gallantry, and utter
devotion. In no single instance was there failure on the part of
officers or crew to meet the unexpected test in a manner quite in
accordance with the most glorious annals of the United States Navy.

Point will perhaps be given to this if we picture Captain Harley H.
Christie pushing his way about the welter of wreckage in a barrel,
reorganizing some 800 of his men, who were floating about on every
conceivable sort of object, into the disciplined unit that they had
comprised before they were ordered overside to take their chances in the
ocean. Or again, taking the enlisted-man aspect of the situation, there
was the full-throated query of a husky seaman, clinging to a hatch as
the _San Diego_ disappeared:

"Where's the captain?"

Then a chorus of voices from the water:

"There he is! See his old bald head! God bless it! Three cheers for the
skip!"

There they all were, some 800 men, survivors of a company numbering
thirteen-odd hundred, in the water, out of sight of land, not a ship in
sight--and twelve life-boats among them, cheering, singing, exchanging
badinage and words of good hope.

The _San Diego_, which was one of the crack shooting-ships of the navy,
and had made seven round trips to France in convoy work without ever
having seen a submarine, was on her way from the Portsmouth, N.H.,
navy-yard, where she had been completely overhauled in dry-dock and
coaled, to New York, where her crew were to have had short liberty,
preliminary to another voyage to France. She carried a heavy deck-load
of lumber which she was to take to France for the Marine Corps. She had
in her bunkers some 3,000 tons of coal.

On the morning of July 19, the cruiser, shortly after 11 o'clock, had
reached a point about seven miles south