His majesty's armoured cruiser Antares, her engines pounding out a hard nineteen knots, blustered through a choppy sea in a mine-protected area adjoining the north-east coast of Scotland. Astern, the broken waters of her wake swirled and boiled, an irregular lane of flatter and whiter water, to be lost at length in the rolling surges on either side, succumbing, as it were, to their ceaseless assaults. A division of destroyers, strung out in a single line on her port quarter, nosed their swifter way through the whitecapped billows, throwing clouds of smoke-like spray over their high focuses, their tiny bridges, and sometimes over their fore funnels.

The time was a quarter past four in the afternoon. The watches had just been changed. 

The engine room hands off watch had bathed themselves and were taking their well-earned tea. Second-class Stoker Tug Wilson emerged from the stoker's wash-place and walked along the mess deck to his mess number twenty-five on the starboard side. Grabbing a basin containing a few dregs of tea leaving