Now, it was quite obvious that the information of these incidents would not be long in reaching Germany from an agent via Norway. The German Captain Gayer has stated since the war that news reached Germany that ‘an English auxiliary cruiser was permanently stationed’ off West Fjord, whose task, he says, was ‘to seize and sink the German steamers coming with minerals from Narvik.’ Therefore, on August 3, Germany despatched U 22 from Borkum to West Fjord, and this craft had scarcely taken up her position when she saw the armed merchant cruiser _India_ enter West Fjord and torpedoed her at long range, so that _India_ was sunk. Gayer, who occupied during the war a high administrative position in the U-boat service, adds the following statement: ‘It was,’ he remarks, ‘one of the few instances in which a submarine found with such precision the object of attack really intended for it, when the information had been given by an agent.’
We pass over the intervening years and come to February, 1918. On the nineteenth of that month the Q-ship _Tay and Tyne_ had left Lerwick, in the Shetlands, to perform similar work off the Norwegian coast, where she arrived on the twenty-second. This was a little 557-ton steamer, which had been requisitioned at the end of the previous July and fitted out at Lowestoft with a 4-inch gun aft, suitably hidden, and a couple of 12-pounders. She was a single-screw ship, built at Dundee in 1909, having a funnel, two masts, and the usual derricks. In addition to her guns she carried one torpedo tube and also smoke-making apparatus. She was commanded by Lieutenant Mack, R.N., with whom Lieutenant G. H. P. Muhlhauser, R.N.R., went as second in command, both of these officers, as the reader will remember, having served together in the Q-sailing-ship _Result_. Having commissioned the new ship, Lieutenant Mack then took her from Lowestoft to the secluded area of the Wash in order to practise gunnery and the ‘panic’ party arrangements. Months passed, but on February 22 something of interest happened, for some distance below the Vigten Islands a couple of steamers were sighted, so course was then altered to cut off the one that was bound to the southward. When 1,000 yards away the latter hoisted German colours, so _Tay and Tyne_ (alias _Cheriton_ and _Dundreary_) hoisted the international signal ‘M.N.’ to stop immediately. This ship was the _Dusseldorf_, a nine-year-old, typical German flush-decked tramp of 1,200 tons, with 1,700 tons of magnetic ore on board. As she disregarded the signal, a shell was fired across her bows, and this caused her to stop and hoist the answering pennant. Lieutenant Mack then steamed round the stern, keeping her covered all the time with his gun, and now took up station inshore of the German.