But then, in the late morning the next day, groups of tourists from Puerto Vallarta began arriving by boat, in convoys of kayaks, fast motorboats and even zodiacs launched from a fake pirate ship moored offshore.
With the Nazi naval communications rendered transparent, the British could pinpoint the position of the U-boats, steering convoys safely around them and, taking the offensive, sending destroyers to sink them.
The central Atlantic was out of the normal range of the U-boats, and convoys were therefore lightly defended in the area.
Ordering the ship to be abandoned, Maxwell gave the ship's barge to the ambassador and supervised the construction of a raft which, with the remaining boats, safely convoyed the crew, passengers and a quantity of supplies to a nearby island, formed largely of impenetrable mangrove swamps.
While Indian and Chinese merchants docked their ships on the shores of the Arabian Peninsula, it was the Arab merchants who moved goods on their boats or convoys of camels, using a vast network of land and sea routes to re-export merchandise across the ancient world.
Only one boat in the convoy had an engine, towing the other two smaller vessels.
That afternoon, too, on our radar, we saw the only other boats outside our convoy that we'd encounter on the Northern Sea Route: the Geofizik and the Geolog Dmitriy Nalivkin — the ExxonMobil/Rosneft seismic expedition, searching for oil.
A U-boat reported the convoy's location at 09 00 on 25 December, and Dönitz ordered Scharnhorst into action.
At 06 30 the five German torpedo boats that the convoy had evaded the previous day were sighted by HMS Atherstone and Tynedale.
In a separate operation, 3 Motor Torpedo Boats attacked a convoy of small vessels off Ostend; two of the MTBs then entered the harbour and torpedoed two transport ships.
