The weekly Alaska citizen., 1918-01-14

with the crew of the British subma. rine ELY, wrecked and finally sunk, after gallant fight for life. off the coast of Holland. according to the story of her commander now for the first time told. His account gives a vivid picture of an all night struggle to save the submarine and her com pany from the battering of the waves which hammered the little vessel upon the shoals. of a fight with fire in her hold. against leaks that threat |ened to i'll her with water and to catch and secure torpedo thrown from its lashings with it's war-head in place, menacing all with instant destruction.
 Freed from the shoal only to be confronted by an apparently hostile cruiser bent on their destruction, the submarine commander tells how he was driven to the desperate resource of submerging in waterlogged craft and of the suspense of the critical moments when he discovered that his vessel was filling at the bottom of the ocean and of fight back to the sur face to face the guns of the cruiser. Writing from a Dutch internment camp, the E-17's commander, after telling of the stranding of the subma. rine and the vain struggle to float her, adds:
 "The antics of the boat proved too much for the lashings of one of the spare torpedoes; the tail held firm, but the nose. with the heavy war.head in place, commenced threshing about in the boat. and would have done a lot of damage If 1t had not been rapidly re-secured.
 Large quantities of water had come down the coming tower and made an awful mess of things. It got at the electric light switchboards, fused the police-lights and started 8 fire behind the switchboards. which had to be put out with one of the patent fire extinguishers. The re. sulting fumes of burnt rubber and fire extinguisher made a most un- pleasant combination, with which we were bottled up for the rest fo the night.
 Ut was a terrible time, that period of waiting for the down. None of us thought that the boat could last out. and take my hat off to the men that made her; 1t was simply wonderful the amount of hammering she took. My inspection showed that the rudder had gone, and the after compartments had large direct connection with the sea. probably through the hole where the rudder had been. The bulkhead of this compartment had also been strained and was leaking Both propeller shafts had been slight ly bent by the pumping. and both main engines had got damp and were full of electric leaks; six of the big main tanks were holed, and the ship was leaking internally in about a dozen places.
 "It looked pretty hopeless. SO started to destroy all confidential papers. charts and instructions. the most secret things being baked in the electric oven until brittle and then powdered up. Then I held a council of war upon what we should do if we could get afloat in the morn ing. l had enough faith in the Ger man spy system to expect that we had been observed as we were threshing about in the night and could expect trouble soon after day break.
 When dawn came I found we bare. ly fifty yards from shore at point about midway along the island of Texel, had a clear sea behind us without shoals, and that the sea had gone down a lot. We were leaking SO badly that I felt that diving would be a risky experiment, only to bs tried in the extremest case, with probably a 5 to 1 chance against us. I was quite satisfied. however. that we could get back to England if the weather held good and we were not interfered with.
 About 9:45 we sighted a cruiser coming along the coast and steaming very fast. A rain squall was coming up behind her which plotted her out before we could distinguish details. but she altered her course toward land just before going out of sight.
 "The most hopeful scheme seemed to be to get straight out seaward. in hope of slipping away unobserved in the mist. It was painfully slow work; ages passed. and we began to cheer up, thinking all was well. Then sud denly we spotted her. She had alter ed course again. and was now driving up at a great rate on a course that looked as if she meant ramming.
 When she was short half-mile away l made out the blurred out line of her guns, and immediately