our speed. A
slight jolt! We filled the ballast tanks and were lying on the bottom
where we could wait for morning at our ease. Who thought that? He who
imagined that we would have any rest was disappointed. We were lying on
a rock, and the tide turned about two o'clock, and the southwest wind
swept the sea fiercely.

At the beginning, it seemed as if we would be all right, down there on
the "St." bottom, but we soon discovered differently--when the rolling
began. There was no chance of gentle resting, as on the soft sand of the
North Sea, but, instead, we banged and racked from one rock to another,
so it was a wonder the boat could stand it at all.

Sometimes it sounded as if large stones were rolling on deck and, again,
our boat would fall three or four meters deeper with a jolt, so that the
manometer was never at rest, and we had to stand this continued rising
and falling between twenty-two and thirty-eight meters.

At last, towards four o'clock, we gave it up. At some of the joints in
the ship, there were small leakages, and none of us had any thought of
sleeping. We, therefore, went up to the surface.

I opened the conning tower hatch and let the fresh air rush against me.
I had a queer sensation. It seemed to me as if we had been buried in the
deep for an eternity and had had a long, bad dream.

But we had no time to dream. The storm had not calmed, but continued in
its fury, and it was not long before we in the tower were soaking wet.
However, to our satisfaction, the water was much warmer than in the
North Sea. We noticed that the last hours had brought us much closer to
our object.

It was the Gulf Stream that was flowing by us and which, in this
section, is really warm, running between two shores close together.

The night was coal black. At a great distance astern, two light-houses
flashed, one white and the other red. It was easy for us to know our
position. No enemy was in sight, so he must have abandoned his search as
useless. Can any one understand with what relief we realized this fact?
Confidently we began to look ahead to success now that, at last, the
dangers of the mine fields, which had been greater than we had expected,
were behind us.

The exhausted batteries were quickly re-charged, in order to be ready
for other emergencies, and then, with our Diesel engines running, we
went out into the open ocean, away from the unfriendly shores, to get
some fresh air and to rest our nerves.

When