hickly populated river estuary in the
world.

They were prosaic, snub-nosed-looking little craft, short and squat,
with high, upstanding bows, prominent wheelhouses, and stumpy
mizzen-masts abaft all. They hailed from many ports and still bore the
letters and numbers of their peace-time vocation: F.D. for Fleetwood,
G.Y. for Grimsby, B.F. for Banff, and P.D. for Peterhead. They were
steam herring drifters in the ordinary, common, or garden, piping times
of peace; little vessels which went to sea for days on end to pitch,
wallow, and roll at the end of a mile or a mile and a half of buoyed
drift-net, in the meshes of which unwary herring, in endeavouring to
force a way through, presently found themselves caught by the gills.

But now, each one of them flew the tattered, smoke-stained apology for
a once White Ensign, and they were men-of-war, very much men-of-war.
They had been at the game for nearly twenty-four months, and, through
long practice, they elbowed their way in and out of the traffic with
all the fussy, devil-may-care assertiveness of His Majesty's destroyers.

Their admiral, a Royal Naval Reserve lieutenant, who, in peaceful 1914,
was still the immaculate third officer of a crack Western Ocean
passenger liner, looked out of his wheelhouse windows and surveyed the
potbellied, lumbering cargo carriers steaming by with all the kindly
tolerance of the regular man-of-war's man. He, though he did not look
it, for they had been coaling an hour before and he was still grimy
about the face, was the only commissioned officer in the squadron,
fleet, flotilla, or whatever you like to call it. All the other craft
were commanded by skippers, ex-peacetime-captains of the fishing craft,
who were used to the sea and its vicissitudes, and knew the ins and
cuts of their vessels far better than they could tell you. The men,
for the greater part, were also fishermen enrolled in the Reserve, with
here and there an ex-naval rating in the shape of a seaman gunner or
signalman.

They may have lacked polish. They knew little about springing smartly
to attention and nothing whatsoever about the interior economy of a
6-inch gun. Their attire was sketchy, to say the least of it. Even
the admiral wore grey flannel trousers, a once white sweater, and
coloured muffler, and it is to be feared that an officer from a
battleship might have referred to them collectively as a "something lot
of pirates." Pirates they may have been, bu