from Plymouth, England, on July 20 for Newport News. All went well until a quarter past nine on Sunday morning August 4, when, some seventy miles off the Virginia coast, the captain of the tanker saw the wake of a torpedo coming towards the port beam. The helm was at once put over, the Jennings swung to port, and the torpedo barely missed her. The four-inch gun in the stern was quickly put into action, and the fight began. At a quarter before twelve a shell struck the main steam pipe in the engine room, and the tanker was helpless. The crew went over the starboard side into their boats, and about one o'clock pulled away from the ship. The submarine, which by that time had ceased firing, and was circling around the Jennings, changed her course and headed for the third boat commanded by the second officer, Mr. Rene Henry Bastin. When a hundred feet away some one sang out, "Where is your captain?" Nobody answered, whereupon the guns of the submarine were pointed at the little boat, and the question repeated. Mr. Bastin replied, in English, "The captain is dead." Again the question was repeated, and supposing the questioner did not understand English, Mr. Bastin replied in Flemish, that the captain was on the deck of the Jennings under the flag. "If you do not know where the captain is, you come here," was the order now received. On boarding the submarine, which proved to be the UK-140, the captain said, "You are an officer of the ship, so I must keep you as a prisoner of war." The Jennings was then bombarded until about a quarter to five o'clock when she turned bottom up, but did not sink. Finally, two torpedoes were fired, and at half past five she went down.

The UK-140 was the finest and latest of the German submarines. She was finished in 1918, and put in commission in June. She was 380 feet in length, carried a crew of 102 men and six officers, was armored with two and a quarter inch plate, and had a diving depth of four hundred and ninety-five feet. Her armament consisted of two six-inch, and two fourinch, guns and twelve machine guns. In her hold were thirty

five torpedoes, each twenty-four feet long; four thousand rounds of ammunition; and enough oil to cover thirty-two thousand miles at a speed of three knots. Submerged, she could make twelve, and on the surface, twenty-six knots.

One of the two remaining boats from the Jennings was picked up by a patrol boat. The other reached Norfolk in safety. On the morning of August 5, Mr. Bastin heard firing from nine until ten o'clock, and, during the afternoon, learned from other prisoners that the submarine had sunk a four-master schooner, the Stanley W. Seaman of Boston. An account of what happened to the Seaman was given by her captain when a British vessel reached Newport News with the crew of the destroyed vessel. She was fired on, the captain said, without warning when about one hundred and ten miles east of Cape Hatteras. Her crew at once took to their small boats, but were allowed to return for provisions, and then put off in the gasoline launch. After three days in the Gulf Stream the men were rescued by the British vessel. Before the Seaman was sunk, by a bomb, she was looted in the good old-fashioned pirate way. "While below that day," says Mr. Bastin, “I saw a lot of stores, provisions, clothes, and various things brought aboard from the Seaman." Strangely enough, the Captain of the Seaman described the submarine as the U-132, with four guns, one fore, one aft, and one on each side.

Cruising westward, the UK-140 fell in with the small unarmed steamship Merak, three miles north of the Diamond Shoal Lightship 71, anchored twelve miles off Cape Hatteras. What then happened was described by an officer of the Merak, a Dutch vessel taken over by the Shipping Board and at the time of her destruction under the American flag.

noon.

We were fired on by the submarine at 1.40 o'clock in the afterWe were within three miles of the lightship, and we took up a zigzag course toward the shore, hoping to escape. We hit on the shoals, however, and as shells from the submarine were falling all about us, some striking the bridge, we abandoned the ship, taking to the boats.

The submarine then desisted in her fire on us, turned its attention to the lightship, and with a few shots put the wireless out of commission. A boat with several men was then sent from the submarine to the Merak, and in a few moments she blew up. The Germans then began shelling the lightship, and soon sank her.

As we were rowing away, the U-boat started after us and hailed us to stop. The submarine came to within a boat's length, and an officer, speaking perfect English, asked our name, nationality, cargo, and where we were from. He did not seem to place us, and he told one of his men, speaking in English, to go below and get him Lloyd's register. Examining the book, he said:

"Oh! Your ship was a Hollander, was it?" He then asked if we had a sail, and on being told we did, he advised us to hoist it, with the remark that the coast was only ten miles to the westward.

He wished us good luck, waved his hand, and then started after two ships that were visible about four or five miles away. He soon came within shooting distance, and we could see shells falling about both vessels, and puffs of smoke from both guns on the deck of the submarine.

The crews of the Merak and the Lightship reached the shore in safety. Again a wrong description of the UK-140 was given. There were no numbers, nor marks, on the submarine by which it could be identified, the officer reported. It was, he said, 200 feet long, was very rusty and slimy, had no periscope in sight, and nothing on deck save a chain railing, a range finder, and two six-inch guns, one fore, and one aft, the conning tower.

Mr. Bastin, in his account of the attack on the Lightship, says:

In the afternoon everybody of the crew was on deck, and heavy gunfire was heard. Different shells, from other ships, I suppose, were bursting around the submarine. As we sat inside we could hear the shells bursting around us. We were called on deck (five prisoners), lined up, and the first thing I saw that struck me was Diamond Shoal Light Vessel at a distance of about 150 yards. At the same time I saw three steamers on fire, and the submarine was shelling the Light Vessel with her two 6-inch guns at 150 yards.

I noticed the smoke of these shells was yellow, and I think the shells fired on the O. B. Jennings were smokeless. I concluded, there