d five wounded.

[Sidenote: The _Intrepid_ follows.]

_Intrepid_, smoking like a volcano and with all her guns blazing,
followed; her motor launch had failed to get alongside outside the
harbor, and she had men enough for anything. Straight into the canal she
steered, her smoke blowing back from her into _Iphigenia's_ eyes, so
that the latter, blinded and going a little wild, rammed a dredger with
a barge moored beside it, which lay at the western arm of the canal.
She got clear though, and entered the canal pushing the barge before
her. It was then that a shell hit the steam connections of her whistle,
and the escape of steam which followed drove off some of the smoke and
let her see what she was doing.

[Sidenote: Sinking of the _Intrepid_ and the _Iphigenia_.]

Lieutenant Stuart Bonham-Carter, commanding the _Intrepid_, placed the
nose of his ship neatly on the mud of the western bank, ordered his crew
away, and blew up his ship by the switches in the chart-room. Four dull
bumps was all that could be heard; and immediately afterwards there
arrived on deck the engineer, who had been in the engine-room during the
explosion and reported that all was as it should be.

[Sidenote: Probable that the canal is effectively blocked.]

Lieutenant E.W. Billyard-Leake, commanding _Iphigenia_, beached her
according to arrangement on the eastern side, blew her up, saw her drop
nicely across the canal, and left her with her engines still going to
hold her in position till she should have bedded well down on the
bottom. According to latest reports from air observation, the two old
ships with their holds full of concrete are lying across the canal in a
V position; and it is probable that the work they set out to do has been
accomplished and that the canal is effectively blocked.

A motor launch, under Lieutenant P.T. Deane, R.N.V.R., had followed them
in to bring away the crews, and waited further up the canal towards the
mouth against the western bank. Lieutenant Bonham-Carter, having sent
away his boats, was reduced to a Carley float, an apparatus like an
exaggerated lifebuoy with a floor of grating. Upon contact with the
water it ignited a calcium flare, and he was adrift in the uncanny
illumination with a German machine-gun a few hundred yards away giving
him its undivided attention.

What saved him was possibly the fact that the defunct _Intrepid_ was
still emitting huge clouds of smoke, which it had been worth nobody's
w