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The result of this skirmish, however, allowed the enemy armoured train to advance to a point dangerously near our defensive works, which, with a little more enterprise and determination, he might easily have enfiladed. But though the enemy train had mounted a 6-inch gun our 12-pounder Navals were too smartly handled to allow any liberties to be taken.
The Cornwallis, which was launched at Blackwell in 1901 and completed in 1904, had a displacement of 14,000 tons, length of 405 feet, beam of 75-1/2 feet, and draft of 26-1/2 feet. Her indicated horsepower was 18,238, developing a speed of 18.9 knots. She carried four 12-inch, twelve 6-inch, ten 12-pounder, and two 3-pounder guns, as well as four torpedo tubes.
These guns were eagerly purchased by the owners of privateers fitted out to cruise against the Americans, and the Lords of the Admiralty approving of them, directed some 18 and 12-pounder carronades to be placed on board a few frigates and smaller vessels of the Royal Navy.
With this request they complied; not because they feared the 12-pounder, or the still more powerful guns of the Michigan, which lay close by, but because they respected the authority of the United States, in defence of which many of them had fought and bled during the late war.
You see that 12-pounder yonder to the right? Very well, dismount it. Then we'll send in a flag of truce, and parley with this Mattingley, for his jests are worth attention and politeness. There's a fellow at the gun no, he has gone. Dismount the right-hand gun at one shot. Ready now. Get a good range." The whole matter went through Ranulph's mind as the captain spoke.
Then, as soon as his broadside guns bore on the enemy, Villavicencio fired, and a storm of shot and shell came flying round the Angamos and her consort, hulling the latter badly, and dismounting two of the recently replaced 12-pounder breech-loaders.
Her small bridge, with its 12-pounder gun, steering wheel, compass, and engine-room telegraphs, was placed on the top of the turtle-back and about 25 feet from the bows. It acted as a most excellent breakwater and took the brunt of the heavier seas, and how often the Rapier came back into harbour with her bridge rails flattened down and her deck fittings washed overboard, I really do not know.
There were four men on the deck, namely Lieutenant Strang, his second in command, Sub-Lieutenant Hotham, and two who stood by the gun, a 12-pounder which had been raised from its snug niche in the deck, and was pointed full on the steamer. The latter was nearer than Ken had thought, and by this time it seemed that her whole crew were in the boats, and the ship herself entirely deserted.
They had two batteries of steel mountain guns, a battery of four Armstrong 12-pounder guns, and two mortars, besides which many of the troops were armed with the deadly Snider rifle, against which the weapons of the Abyssinians were almost useless. The Naval Brigade of 80 men were armed also with deadly rockets, especially calculated to create a panic among such troops as the Abyssinians.
But it very soon became apparent that our fellows were much the better and cooler gunners of the two; for whereas the Russians seemed to ram in their charges and let fly on the instant that their guns were loaded, our men waited, watching the roll both of their own ship and that of the enemy, and firing at her waterline as she rolled away from us, with the result that within the first five minutes of the fight a lucky shot from our 12-pounder sent a shell through her upturned bilge a foot or so below her normal waterline, blowing a hole through her thin plating that admitted a tremendous inrush of water every time that she rolled toward us.
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