guarded by a heavy battery of 12 in. and 6 in. guns, and the ten-mile
long ship-channel inside the reefs from St. George's to the Dockyard
is very difficult and complicated, though I imagine that, with modern
guns, a ship could lie outside the reefs and shell the islands to
pieces.

The first time that I was in Bermuda, a German Training Squadron
arrived, with a number of naval cadets on board, and announced their
intention of remaining ten days. The German officers at once exhibited
a most un-Teutonic keenness about sea-fishing. The Governor, fully
alive to the advantage a possibly hostile power might reap from an
independent survey and charting of the tortuous and difficult
ship-channel between St. George's and the Dockyard, at once held a
consultation with the Senior Naval Officer, in the Admiral's absence,
and, as a result of this consultation, three naval petty officers were
detailed to show the Germans the best fishing-grounds. At the same
time naval patrol boats displayed a quite unusual activity inside the
reefs. Both patrol boats and petty officers had their private orders,
and I fancy that these steps resulted in very few soundings being
taken, and in the ship-channel remaining uncharted by our German
visitors. I was returning myself, after dark, in the ferry-boat plying
between the Dockyard and Hamilton, when there were four German
officers on the bridge. Imagining themselves secure in the general
ignorance of their language, they were openly noting the position of
the leading lights, as the little steamer threaded her way through the
smaller islands and "One rock" and "Two rock passage," and all these
observations were, I imagine, duly entered in their pocket-books after
landing. In conversation with the German officers I was much struck
with the essentially false ideas that they had with regard to the
position of the motherland and her dependencies. They seemed convinced