“Let’s see,” pondered Harry, “the Thames is the river leading to London, while the Mersey is the river leading to Liverpool.”
“Right you are, Old Scout, go to the head of the class!”
“Hush, Jimmie, no nonsense!” cautioned Ned.
“What I was thinking about,” continued Harry, “is the distance a boat would have to travel to get from one place to the other. It must be all of seven hundred miles around Land’s End. A boat would have to be speedy to cover that distance so quickly!”
“How quickly?” demanded Jimmie. “The paper says the three ships were sunk at the Mersey on Wednesday morning. Those at the Thames, or rather ‘off Margate,’ as the article states, were sunk Thursday afternoon. That wouldn’t be such an impossible feat after all!”
“Twenty miles an hour sustained speed for about twenty-eight hours is running along at a pretty good clip, just the same!”
“Well, the vessel did it!” declared Jimmie. “The paper says that about six o’clock Wednesday morning the Wanderer, a vessel laden with foodstuffs from Australia, was hailed by the crew of a submarine. They were permitted to take to the small boats and then the Wanderer was torpedoed, going down at once. The submarine was positively identified as the ‘U-13.’ Then the other paragraph says that at about eight o’clock on Thursday evening the steamer Adventure from Buenos Ayres with a cargo of flour for London was treated in the same manner off Margate by the ‘U-13’!”
“Isn’t it a little strange that the submarine should have attacked a peaceful merchant vessel?” inquired Jack. “That isn’t war!”
“Evidently it is the intention to blockade all English ports and shut off the food supply of the nation,” ventured Ned. “You see the article relates that all the ships were loaded with food and destined to English ports. It must be a blockade movement!”
“Here’s an account,” announced Harry, “that says a steamer was hailed by a submarine a few miles off the Lizard Head. It escaped by its superior speed, but only by a narrow margin, for the submarine launched a torpedo that barely missed striking the after portion of the ship!”