[Sidenote:  Sinking of the Intrepid and the Iphigenia.]

Lieutenant Stuart Bonham-Carter, commanding the Intrepid, placed the nose of his ship neatly on the mud of the western bank, ordered his crew away, and blew up his ship by the switches in the chart-room.  Four dull bumps was all that could be heard; and immediately afterwards there arrived on deck the engineer, who had been in the engine-room during the explosion and reported that all was as it should be.

[Sidenote:  Probable that the canal is effectively blocked.]

Lieutenant E.W.  Billyard-Leake, commanding Iphigenia, beached her according to arrangement on the eastern side, blew her up, saw her drop nicely across the canal, and left her with her engines still going to hold her in position till she should have bedded well down on the bottom.  According to latest reports from air observation, the two old ships with their holds full of concrete are lying across the canal in a V position; and it is probable that the work they set out to do has been accomplished and that the canal is effectively blocked.

A motor launch, under Lieutenant P.T.  Deane, R.N.V.R., had followed them in to bring away the crews, and waited further up the canal towards the mouth against the western bank.  Lieutenant Bonham-Carter, having sent away his boats, was reduced to a Carley float, an apparatus like an exaggerated lifebuoy with a floor of grating.  Upon contact with the water it ignited a calcium flare, and he was adrift in the uncanny illumination with a German machine-gun a few hundred yards away giving him its undivided attention.

What saved him was possibly the fact that the defunct Intrepid was still emitting huge clouds of smoke, which it had been worth nobody’s while to turn off.  He managed to catch a rope as the motor launch started, and was towed for a while till he was observed and taken on board.  Another officer jumped ashore and ran along the bank to the launch.  A bullet from the machine-gun stung him as he ran, and when he arrived, charging down the bank out of the dark, he was received by a number of the launch’s crew who attacked him with a hammer.

[Sidenote:  Shells make incessant geysers in the harbor.]

The whole harbor was alive with small craft.  As the motor launch cleared the canal, and came forth to the incessant geysers thrown up by the shells, rescuers and rescued had a view of yet another phase of the attack.  The shore end of the Mole consists of a jetty, and here an old submarine, commanded by Lieutenant R.D.  Sandford, R.N., loaded with explosives, was run into the piles and touched off, her crew getting away in a boat to where the usual launch awaited them.

[Sidenote:  An old submarine is blown up.]

Officers describe the explosion as the greatest they ever witnessed—­a huge roaring spout of flame that tore the jetty in half and left a gap of over 100 feet.  The claim of another launch to have sunk a torpedo-boat alongside the jetty is supported by many observers, including officers of the Vindictive, who had seen her mast and funnel across the Mole and noticed them disappear.