rial Navy, who would scarcely be connected with a commercial
enterprise which could conceivably be reduced to forwarding its
objects in such a fashion. It was shocking enough to find him in
relations with such a scoundrel at all, but it was explicable if the
motive were imperial--not so if it were financial. No; to accept the
suggestion we must declare the whole quest a mare's nest from
beginning to end; the attempt on Davies a delusion of his own fancy,
the whole structure we had built on it, baseless.

'Well,' I can hear the reader saying, 'why not? You, at any rate,
were always a little sceptical.'

Granted; yet I can truthfully say I scarcely faltered for a moment.
Much had happened since Schlei Fiord. I had seen the mechanism of the
death-trap; I had lived with Davies for a stormy fortnight, every
hour of which had increased my reliance on his seamanship, and also,
therefore, on his account of an event which depended largely for its
correct interpretation on a balanced nautical judgement. Finally, I
had been unconsciously realizing, and knew from his mouth to-day,
that he had exercised and acted on that judgement in the teeth of
personal considerations, which his loyal nature made overwhelming in
their force.

What, then, was the meaning of Memmert? At the outset it riveted my
attention on the Ems estuary, whose mouth it adjoins. We had always
rather neglected the Ems in our calculations; with some excuse, too,
for at first sight its importance bears no proportion to that of the
three greater estuaries. The latter bear vessels of the largest
tonnage and deepest draught to the very quays of Hamburg,
Bremerhaven, and the naval dockyard of Wilhelmshaven; while two of
them, the Elbe and the Weser, are commerce carriers on the vastest
scale for the whole empire. The Ems, on the other hand, only serves
towns of the second class. A glance at the chart explains this. You
see a most imposing estuary on a grander scale than any of the other
three taken singly, with a length of thirty miles and a frontage on
the North Sea of ten miles, or one-seventieth, roughly, of the whole
seaboard; encumbered by outlying shoals, and blocked in the centre by
the island of Borkum, but presenting two fine deep-water channels to
the incoming vessel. These roll superbly through enormous sheets of
sand, unite and approach the mainland in one stately stream three
miles in breadth. But then comes a sad falling off. The navigable
fairway shoal