Reilly, at the British Admiralty's request, located William D'Arcy at Cannes in the south of France and approached him in disguise. Dressed as a Catholic priest, Reilly gate-crashed the private discussions on board the Rothschild yacht on the pretext of collecting donations for a religious charity. He then secretly informed D'Arcy that the British could give him a better financial deal. D'Arcy promptly terminated negotiations with the Rothschilds and returned to London to meet with the British Admiralty. However, biographer Andrew Cook has questioned Reilly's involvement in the D'Arcy Affair since, in February 1904, Reilly might still have been in Port Arthur. Cook speculates that it was Reilly's intelligence chief, William Melville, and a British intelligence officer, Henry Curtis Bennett, who undertook the D'Arcy assignment. Yet another possibility advanced in "" by writer Daniel Yergin has the British Admiralty creating a "syndicate of patriots" to keep D'Arcy's concession in British hands, apparently with the full and eager co-operation of D'Arcy himself.