and transports conveyed
the whole of Suleiman Pasha's army, consisting of forty thousand men,
from the coast of Albania to Salonica, a distance of some eight hundred
miles, within the short space of twelve days, a feat, I venture to say,
unheard of in the naval annals of this century. Sulina was held safely
by the Turkish fleet until the end of the war.

Batoum could not have been held by Dervish Pasha and his army had not
the Turkish fleet been there to help him. In short, that fleet kept the
command of the Black Sea during the whole of that disastrous war,
cruising at times in the most fearful weather I have ever experienced,
for twelve months in a sea almost without ports of refuge; and it is a
remarkable fact that the Turks never lost a ship, constantly attacked
though they were, as I shall show hereafter, by the plucky Russian
torpedo boats, who frequently made rushes at them from Muscovite ports,
and only saved from destruction through the precautions taken against
these diabolical machines, which come and go like flashes of lightning.
It is true that _in the Danube_ two small Turkish vessels of war were
destroyed by torpedoes, but it must be borne in mind the Danube was
under _military_ law, and that the look-out kept on board these vessels
was not by any means what it should have been.

But I must repeat, as so many contrary reports have been spread, that no
Turkish ironclad was injured by torpedoes in the Black Sea.

I will explain hereafter how many attacks were made with no result
whatever. Some few days before the war broke out I was sent to examine
the Danube from a professional point of view, and it was soon made clear
to me that much could be done, in the way of defending that great
estuary, had nautical experience and the splendid material of which the
Turkish sailor is made of been properly utilised. But alas! I found
that, contrary to the views of His Majesty the Sultan, a line of action
was followed showing that pig-headed obstinacy and the grossest
ignorance prevailed in the councils of those who had supreme command in
that river. I found that my advice and that of competent Turkish
officers, in comparatively subordinate positions like myself, was
entirely ignored, and that few, if any, proper steps were taken to
prevent the enemy's progress into Roumania, and later on, to his
passing the Danube almost unopposed.

On the day that war was declared I was at Rustchuk, the headquarters of
the Turkis