"the very highest expectations that I had formed of them."
An officer on one of the flotillas has described that uneasy darkness. "We couldn't tell what was happening. Every now and then out of the silence would come bang, bang, boom, as hard as it could go for ten minutes on end. The flash of the guns lit up the whole sky for miles and miles, and the noise was far more penetrating than by day. Then you would see a great burst of flame from some poor devil, as the searchlight switched on and off, and then perfect silence once more." The searchlights at times made the sea as white as marble on which the destroyers moved "black," wrote an eye witness, "as cockroaches on a floor."
At earliest dawn on June 1st, the British Fleet, which was lying south and west of the Horn Reef, turned northward to collect its light craft and to search for the enemy. But the enemy was not to be found. Partly he had already slipped in single ships astern of our fleet during the night; partly he was then engaged
