United States or Bangladesh ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A telegram from Key West gave the following information: “Acting Rear-Admiral Sampson sailed this morning with all the big vessels of his blockading squadron on some mysterious mission. “In the fleet were the flag-ship New York, the battle-ships Iowa and Indiana, the cruisers Detroit, Marblehead, and Cincinnati, the monitor Puritan, and the torpedo-gunboat Mayflower.
England's great dogs of war, her battle-ships, fought an imaginary war with one another and the orders were flashed from the flagship to the fighters, and from the Admiral's cabin to the shore, in spite of fog and great stretches of open water heaving between.
To meet the susceptibilities of this large class of well-meaning people, we provided for the battle-ships under the name of "coast defense battle-ships"; meaning thereby that we did not make them quite as seaworthy as they ought to have been, or with quite as much coal capacity as they ought to have had. Then we decided to build real battle-ships.
At times a shovel reached out its five-yard steel jaw and gently cleared the rails of debris, or boosted some bowlder from the path with all the skill of a giant hand and fingers. Up and down the canon rolled spasmodic rumblings, like broadsides from a fleet of battle-ships.
Aside from these the Russian fleet was annihilated, its ships destroyed or captured; the total loss, according to Admiral Togo's report, being eight battle-ships, three armored cruisers, three coast-defense ships, and an unenumerated multitude of smaller vessels, while the loss in men was four thousand prisoners and probably twice that number slain or drowned.
And when I kept on at my shipmates and wanted to know what made the sphere of influence so very precious I received the staggering answer that it was nuts. We were building battle-ships and recruiting armies and building railways and bridges and harbours, for nuts. To me, walking to and fro on the after-deck in the glow of a tropical sunset, it seemed absurd.
Within the outer anchorage The ancient Argonauts lay to; Little they dreamt that dauntless crew That here to-day in the sheltered bay Where the seas are still and blue, Great battle-ships should froth and hum, And mighty transport-vessels come Serenely floating through.
The American ships lay some three miles off shore under low steam, and their crews were preparing for Sunday morning inspection. Two of the battle-ships were overhauling their forward turrets, and repairing damages received during a bombardment of the forts on the previous day.
In each fleet there were thirteen battle-ships, but the French ships were the larger and more heavily armed. They carried forty-six more guns, and the weight of their broadside was 14,029 pounds to 10,695 pounds, while they carried 2300 more men, and were 5000 tons heavier. They had, too, in addition, four frigates, besides the mortar vessels, gun-boats, and the battery on the island of Aboukir.
The House committee on naval affairs authorised the immediate construction of three battle-ships, one to be named the Maine, and provided for an increase of 473 men in the marine force. The despatch-boat Fern sailed for Matanzas with supplies for the relief of starving Cubans.
Word Of The Day