ten in the morning the
crowd on the shore saw steam escaping from her in large quantities.
Some time after they saw a large volume of black smoke and debris
fly upward and they knew that another torpedo had found its mark. She
then settled, her crew and the men from the _Indian City_ reaching
St. Mary's in small boats.

To keep British harbors free from the German submarines the British
admiralty had to set their engineers to work to devise some method
of trapping the underwater craft automatically, for there seemed
to be no sort of patrol which they could not elude. Steel traps,
not unlike the gill nets used by fishermen, were finally hit upon
as the best thing to use against the submarines, and by March 13,
1915, a number of these were installed at entrances to some of
the British harbors. They were made of malleable iron frames, ten
feet square, used in sets of threes, so arranged that they might
hold a submarine by the sides and have the third of the set buckle
against its bottom. They were suspended by buoys about thirty feet
below the surface of the water. When a submarine entered one of
these it was held fast, for the frame which came up from the bottom
caught the propeller and made it impossible for the submarine to
work itself loose. The disadvantage to the submarine was that,
while traveling under water, it traveled "blind"; the periscopes
in use were good only for observation when the top of them were
above water; when submerged the commander of a submarine had to
steer by chart. By the end of March, 1915, a dozen submarines had
been caught in nets of this kind.

By the 18th of March, 1915, three more British ships had been made
the victims of German torpedoes. The _Atlanta_ was sunk off the
west coast of Ireland only a day before the _Fingal_ was sunk off
Northumberland. And the _Leeuwarden_ was sunk by being hit from
the deck guns of a German submarine off the coast of Holland. There
was no loss of life except during the sinking of the _Fingal_,
some of whose men were drowned when she dragged a lifeboat full
of men down with her.

By way of variety the Germans attempted to sink a British ship
in the "war zone" with bombs dropped from an airship, the news
of which was brought to England by the crew and captain of the
_Blonde_ when they reached shore on March 18, 1915. This ship had
been German originally, but being in a British port when the war
started was taken over and run by a British crew. Two or t