Page:Barbour--For the freedom from the seas.djvu/118



HE captured steamship proved to be the Mahlow, before the war a French passenger ship plying between Marseilles and Spanish ports under the name of the Golfe du Lion. She was of some thirty-seven hundred tons. She had been armed with small caliber guns in profusion, for her main deck fairly bristled with them and a multiplicity of ports had been cut on the lower deck. The latter were not apparent when closed, and, as the deck guns were easily hidden, she doubtless looked quite harmless when posing as a merchantman. She was credited by Lloyds with being a fast ship, and her inability to get away from the Gyandotte was later explained by her engineer force as due to poor coal taken aboard at a South American port. She had been at sea two months and had in that time caused considerable havoc from Rio de Janeiro north to the Caribbean. When taken she had on board twenty-six men of the crews of the San 95