“I am asked in committee whether she can be beaten. She can be beaten. I am then asked where, and I say that it will not be in black water in the winter, and the committee writes down that the Admiral was confident. I have asked for the minute to be corrected twice.”
As the Admiralty men and the station papers tell it
Admiralty men tell it whenever northern winter convoy comes up, and they tell it as a reason for caution. It was the dark months, and the coast had closed, and every other force in the north was ashore. A convoy was in black water with the weather rising, weather in which a British commodore would have been entitled by his own instructions to break off. And her squadron was there. It had found the convoy in weather that made finding it unlikely, and it pressed the attack.
The popular accounts make more of her than that, and southern men who have never seen her point to her cold sea discipline when they call northerners inhuman. The officers who tell it do not. They say she keeps her articles and exchanges her prisoners properly, and that she has twice gone to the help of British hulls in distress and been thanked for it in proper form. There is no war. The trade runs heavily both ways.
What the officers will not say is what the callers aboard her ships do. The station papers will not say it either. They record that the callers were aboard, and advise that the weather be assumed to be no accident, and the men who wrote that meant it.
What is known
Ingrid Skall commands from a fjord fleet base in the far north under a regular commission from a northern power. The northern powers and the island are at peace. Hers is one northern name spoken in Britannia with unmixed respect. The station papers record two things, with dates: she can work a squadron in black water in the dark months, on a coast that closes, when every other force in the north is ashore; and she presses convoy attacks in weather in which a British commodore could break off, with callers aboard.
The papers do not say what the callers are and do not deny that they matter. They note repeated contact in weather that made contact unlikely. What a caller does is argued four ways, by the raiders, the British yard masters, the insurers and the White Eagle. The caution attaches to that coast in winter, not to her flag.