Folkestone's emergency dash to Tsingtao

A warship can vary its pace more freely than a scheduled merchant vessel, although an escort is still constrained once it joins a slow convoy. Folkestone's stated maximum was about twenty knots. The deliberately imprecise times in the surviving accounts suggest that the sloop sustained roughly twenty-one and a half to twenty-two knots on the run north, with Birmingham probably moving faster. The estimate turns the rapid British response into a concrete ship-performance problem. It also shows how urgently the China Station treated a threat to a British-flagged merchantman.