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[Page 20]
In the evening it came on to blow fresh and at dusk as we were proceeding towards Gallipoli we sighted a ship coming towards us. We dived and prepared to attack when the ship came up. She was seen to be one of the old type of cruisers. We fired a torpedo, but missed, it being rather too dusk for a good shot. The same evening 29.4.15 some ship was seen to be making our number in the morse code to try and get us to answer or else come up close to them, but we were not to be caught like that as we knew there were no more English ships in the Sea of Marmora. This shows that the Turks had good spies. Probably E 14. This night we lay on the bottom as we did not want anymore experiences like we had on the previous night, so we selected a nice little bay on the European shore which we knew had a good sandy bottom, and there we lay in peace.
The next morning the Captain decided to go down to Gallipoli to see if there were any transports there which may have passed us during the night. This meant a very long dive, so we charged our batteries up to all it would carry. During the time we were charging the battery we were all the time steaming towards Gallipoli. When we were just out of range of the forts we dived and proceeded towards the harbour. There was nothing there except a gunboat and a number of small craft. We spent an hour in trying to get a shot at the gunboat but without success. It was a beautifully fine day and not a ripple on the water, and of course every time we showed our periscope we were seen and the gunboat had time to alter course before we could get a shot in. After putting in an hour we decided to go back to the Sea of Marmora, but just as we were leaving the harbour a transport was coming in escorted by destroyers. We fired our starboard torpedo but missed. We immediately turned a little and fired our stern torpedo. On firing this torpedo we had to immediately go down out of sight, as the destroyers were attempting to ram us. We showed our periscope 5 minutes later but there was no transport to be seen only the destroyers. We had to dive a long way on this occasion, as we were followed by destroyers who were trying to locate us. However we got well clear of them and came to the surface (at this stage our battery was getting very low), and commenced to steam on the surface with our gas engine, at the same time charging our batteries. We had been under way about half an hour when we sighted four or five different jets of smoke on the horizon. At first it was not certain whether these ships were going away from us or coming towards us but it was not long before we saw that they were coming towards us from Constantinople. These were six destroyers escorting two or three small transports. At this stage we had only one torpedo left and as these were only small transports the Captain decided to keep our only torpedo for something larger, but just show ourselves as much as possible so as to frighten them. When they were about 2000 yards