ess to me, though to my disgust I heard my officers
snoring all round me, nothing happened (though, as I heard afterwards, a
good deal had been going on outside the harbour), when, at about three
o'clock in the morning of the third or fourth night after I had received
the warning, I heard a row going on in the direction of the guard-boats
and an explosion near to one of the outlying ships. I had hardly time to
think, when something struck the chain of my flagship and seemed to spin
past, like a fish in the water. Then dead silence. I immediately sent
orders to the two fast cruisers, which were lying with steam up, to go
to sea and reconnoitre.

Suddenly I heard people on shore calling out (I forgot to mention that
ships in Batoum harbour are always lashed to the shore). I sent my
officer to reconnoitre, who found a gaping crowd standing round what
they thought was a large fish lashing his tail, but what in reality was
an unexploded torpedo with the screw still in motion. On things being
calm I went myself to see what had happened generally during the attack,
and found that a torpedo had struck the bows of one of the ironclads on
the belt, at the waterline at an angle, had exploded, and scarcely left
a mark; that a second torpedo had, after passing through the planks on
the defensive barrier I had placed, _diverged from its course_, and gone
quietly on shore as far as the left of the squadron; that a third, as I
said, had struck the chain of the flagship and not gone off, but had run
on to the beach. The parts of another torpedo were afterwards picked up,
it evidently having exploded somewhere down below. So we could account
for four torpedoes having been fired at us without effect; probably
there were more. Those that were on the beach were in a very perfect
state, and as soon as we had rendered them harmless, we made prisoners
of war of them. Now I have been since informed of what went on outside
Batoum. It seems that for three nights two fast Russian steamers,
carrying torpedo boats, had been looking for Batoum, and as one of my
informants said, 'We could not find it for love or money.' A couple of
hours before daylight they had steamed off, so as to be out of sight
before break of day. At last they had bribed a man to light a fire in
the hills behind the town, and so on the fourth night they got
somewhere near it, but they could not make out the ships on account of
the _dark land behind_ them. The time for steaming of