ing craft very rarely got to work before one or two o'clock
in the morning, that being the hour when human vigilance is popularly
supposed to be least active; I therefore planned to arrive in the
roadstead about midnight, hoping that I should then catch the enemy off
his guard, snatching a rest in preparation for the moment when our
activities usually began.

Now, the thing which we had most to fear was a long-distance searchlight
established in a station on Golden Hill, at a height of some two hundred
feet above the sea-level. This searchlight was generally turned on at
dusk, and was kept unceasingly playing upon the anchorage and its
adjacent waters all through the night. It commanded the entire
roadstead, from a point three miles east of the harbour's mouth, right
round to the south and west as far as the Pinnacle Rock; and the
difficulty was how to avoid being picked up by it before we had
delivered our attack. But by this time I knew the seaward surroundings
of Port Arthur almost by heart. I knew, for instance--and this was most
important--that the searchlight station was placed so far back from the
edge of the crumbling cliff that the water immediately at the foot of
the latter, and for a distance of perhaps a hundred yards to seaward,
could not be reached by the beam of the light, and was therefore
enveloped in darkness, rendered all the deeper and more opaque by the
dazzling brilliance of the light; and I also knew that along the outer
edge of this patch of darkness there was a sufficient depth of water to
float a destroyer, even at dead low water. My plan, therefore, was to
make a wide sweep to seaward upon leaving the blockading squadron,
gradually turning east and north, and thus eventually to get into Takhe
Bay, some five miles east of Port Arthur anchorage, and from thence
creep along the shore to the westward, keeping as close in as the depth
of water would permit. There was only one difficulty about this, which
was that at a certain point not far from where the searchlight station
stood, there was a gap in the line of cliff where the ground sloped
steeply down to the water's edge for a short distance, and here of
course the beam of the light had uninterrupted play right up to the
beach; but I believed I could overcome this difficulty by simply
watching my opportunity and slipping past the gap when the searchlight
was not playing upon it.

All went well with us until about seven bells in the first w