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Updated: May 21, 2025
You may perhaps have observed a steamer shipping mines You did? Yes, I thought you would. Well, that steamer is the Koryu Maru, a very smart boat, steaming twenty-two knots, which I have had fitted as a mine-layer.
"In this area on the 24th March, in the middle of the English Channel, a long, black vessel, flying no flags, with a gray funnel, small gray superstructure and two high masts was hit by a German submarine. The German captain was definitely convinced that she was a ship of war, and indeed a mine-layer of the newly-built English Arabic class. He was led to this conviction: "1.
On her recapture by the Germans, she was equipped as a raider and mine-layer, and sent off on an expedition by herself. But soon afterwards near Aden she encountered a British warship, when the prize crew scuttled her and surrendered. The Germans were now getting very anxious as they approached the blockade zone.
And once, with a light cruiser snapping at her heels, a drab Norwegian tramp plodded sullenly into port, a mine-layer caught red-handed, plying its assassin's trade beneath a neutral flag. Not long after its crew had been landed, volleys of musketry crashed in the town gaol-yard.
This affair caused Admiral Stark to be superseded; his successor being Admiral Makarov, said to be the finest seaman Russia then possessed. At the same time General Kuropatkin was appointed commander of the Russian land forces. Two days later, the Russians lost the mine-layer Yenesei in Dalny Bay.
As darkness came on, Jellicoe, declining to risk his ships under conditions most favorable to torpedo attack, arranged his battleships in four squadrons a mile apart, with destroyer flotillas five miles astern, and sent a mine-layer to lay a mine field in the neighborhood of the Vyl lightship, covering the route over which the Germans were expected to pass if they attempted to get home via the Horn Reef.
There did not seem to be very much doing at the rendezvous when I arrived, beyond the rebunkering of such craft as needed it; but I noticed a rather smart-looking steamer of about four thousand tons, fitted as a mine-layer, with lighters on both sides of her, out of which a number of very business-like-looking mines were being hoisted.
On occasions such as this, however, the vast Fleet came together; Light Cruiser met Destroyer with a sidelong jerk of the head and a "Hullo, Old Thing..." that spanned the years at a single leap; Submarine laughed across the room at Seaplane-carrier; Mine-sweeper and Mine-layer shared a plate of sandwiches with a couple of Sloops and discussed the boxing; but they were no more than a leavening amid the throng of "big-ship folk" who reckoned horse-power by the half hundred thousand and spoke of guns in terms of the 15-inch.
On May 14, on the other hand, the Russian mine-layer Amur slipped out in a fog, spread her mines in the usual path of Japanese vessels off the port, and thus on the same day sank two of their best ships, the Hatsuse and Yashima.
All the passengers transferred were given cabins on board the Hitachi. We learnt from these passengers that the Wolf was primarily a mine-layer, and that she had laid mines at Cape Town, Bombay, Colombo, and off the Australian and New Zealand coasts.
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