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escort we had had so far was somebody's yacht, fitted with a couple of 3-inch guns and renamed the [[underlined]] Gloucester [[/underlined]].

As I stood there I saw six ships appear on the horizon ahead of us, three in the port and three on the starboard bow. (How's that for nautical language?). They were destroyers sent to escort us the rest of the way in. The waters around the British Isles were the favorite hunting ground of the submaribes. One of the destroyers circled through the convoy and came up alongside the [[underlined]] Adriatic, [[/underlined]] perhaps a hundred wards from where I stood. It had instructions to give our captain. Both ships had radio waves emanating from a ship could enable a submarine to follow a beeline to it. Ships at sea in those days used radio only in dire emergency. The radio telephone did not come into use until some time after World War I.

We got our orders by semaphore. A sailor came out on the deck of the destroyer with two flags. I eavesdropped while he spelled out the message. All I remember now is "keep inshore from the skerries". I had not the faintest idea what skerries were, but such later I learned that "skerry2 is a Gaelic word for a rocky reef. "The Skerries" with a capital S means a cluster of rocky islets off the northern coast of Ireland. I suppose the message referred to them, for I do mot recall any way of distinguishing a capital from a lower-case letter in semaphore language.

The destroyer then scurried ahead. From then on, through the next day day, all six of them krpt moving hither and thither in front of us, beating the bushes as it were. Land still was not in sight when I went to to bed on Friday night. But on Saturday morning, the 22nd, I went out on deck early and saw the Irish coast on our right. A mountain of rock rose out of the sea on our left. Our convoy was strung out in single file, the [[underlined]] Adriatic [[/underlined]] in the lead. The destroyers were nowhere in sight.

About the middle of the morning I heard gunfire somewhere behind us. Three of the destroyers then reappared from in front, racing back in the direction of the shooting. We never saw them again, nor did we ever learn what the commotion was about. We had rounded the northern coast of Ireland. In the afternoon we left it and head across the Irish Sea, passing within sight of the Isle of Man. Late that night we entered the mouth of the Mersey, and disembarked the next morning at Liverpool.