re, but were told there was no need for it, or for any
similar preparations till after Cape Town, which, alas, never was
reached. Accordingly passengers had no places given to them in the
boats; the boats were not ready, and confusion, instead of order,
prevailed. It was nothing short of a miracle that more people were not
drowned.

If the ship had only stopped when ordered by signals to do so, there
would have been no firing at all. Even if she had stopped after the
warning shots had been fired, no more firing would have taken place and
nobody need have left the ship at all. What a vast amount of trouble,
fear, anxiety, and damage to life and property might have been saved if
only the raider's orders had been obeyed! It seemed too, at the time,
that if only the _Hitachi_ had turned tail and bolted directly the
raider's smoke was seen on the horizon by the officer on watch on the
bridge--at the latest this must have been about 1.30--she might have
escaped altogether, as she was a much quicker boat than the German. At
any rate, she might have tried. Her fate would have been no worse if she
had failed to escape, for surely even the Germans could not deny any
ship the right to escape if she could effect it. Certainly the seaplane
might have taken up the chase, and ordered the _Hitachi_ to stop. We
heard afterwards that one ship--the _Wairuna_, from New Zealand to San
Francisco--had been caught in this way. The seaplane had hovered over
her, dropped messages on her deck ordering her to follow the plane to a
concealed harbour near, failing which bombs would be dropped to explode
the ship. Needless to say, the ship followed these instructions.

"There was no panic, and the women were splendid." How often one has
read that in these days of atrocity at sea! We were to realize it now;
the women were indeed splendid. There was no crying or screaming or
hysteria, or wild inquiries. They were perfectly calm and collected:
none of them showed the least fear, even under fire. The women took the
matter as coolly as if being shelled and leaving a ship in lifeboats
were nothing much out of the ordinary. Their sang-froid was marvellous.

As we thought the ship was slowly sinking, we pushed off from her side
as quickly as possible. There were now four lifeboats in the water at
some distance from each other. The one in which we were contained about
twenty-four persons. There was no officer or member of the crew with us,
while another boa