ats Numbers 46 and 48, it appeared, were engaged in
sweeping for mines when the accident happened. They had already found
and destroyed three mines, and had discovered a fourth, which they fired
several rounds at without result. Then Number 48 imprudently approached
the mine with the intention of securing it, when it exploded, blowing
her in two, and killing or wounding fourteen of her crew of
twenty-three.

It was two days later when the _Mikayo_, believing the bay to be clear,
entered it to make sure. She was passing in through the channel
supposed to have been cleared by our torpedo-boats, when she, too,
struck a mine; there was a terrific explosion, and she went to the
bottom, with eight casualties in her crew of two hundred. She was a
useful little ship, having a speed of over sixteen knots when she was
destroyed, although she had been known to achieve as much as twenty.
She mounted two forty-sevens and ten 3-pounders, and was therefore not a
very formidable fighting craft.

The story told by the Russians concerning her destruction was to the
effect that she fell a victim to a mine, placed overnight, in the
channel previously cleared by our boats, by a young Russian naval
officer, who stole out from Port Arthur in a small steam launch, under
the cover of night. Whether the story is true or not, I cannot tell,
yet there is nothing very improbable about it, for it is indisputable
that many of the Russians displayed as fine a courage as even the
Japanese themselves.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

AT WORK IN KINCHAU BAY.

Meanwhile, I was spending my days poring over the maps and charts of
Kinchau and its neighbourhood with which I had been supplied, leaving
Commander Tsuchiya to carry on the work of constructing the long boom,
and merely visiting it in a picket boat at the close of each day, to see
how the work was progressing. My study of the maps and charts had
reference to a scheme which had come into my head whereby it might be
possible to determine the ranges of the several Russian positions from
certain fixed points in the bay with the utmost accuracy, thereby
greatly increasing the effectiveness of the naval fire when our flotilla
should be called into action. The map in particular which had been
issued to me was drawn upon a scale so large that even comparatively
insignificant distances could be closely measured upon it, and it was so
full of detail that apparently every building, however unimportant, was