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The Shah and Amethyst were unarmoured cruisers, but in point of number of guns they were superior to the ironclad. The fight lasted for three hours. The Huascar's smoke-stack was pierced, and damage done to her deck beams, but the metal of the British guns were not heavy enough to pierce the armour.
Some ships of this description can spurt up to 25 knots not so long ago considered a high speed even for a torpedo boat destroyer. The unarmoured cruisers are intended chiefly for scouting purposes, or for capturing or protecting commerce.
But that shell was the saving of her for, having pierced the unarmoured sides of the Miraflores as though they had been paper, the explosion took effect right among the tightly packed ammunition-cases which constituted her cargo, and the next second she went into the air, as the Huemul had done, with an appalling roar, followed by a tremendous shower of all kinds of debris.
As a child sometimes carries a tender-winged butterfly in the globe of its two hands that the bloom on the wings may not be ruffled by fluttering, so He carries our feeble, unarmoured souls enclosed in the covert of His Almighty hand.
The guns were worked under hoods, which protected the gunners from the rush of the wind, and just forward of the mast was an oval conning-tower, not unlike that of the Ithuriel, only, of course, unarmoured, from which everything connected with the working of the ship could be controlled by a single man.
The Huascar, however, paid no attention, and at last the British ships opened fire on her. The Shah was a fast cruiser armed with heavy guns, but was wholly unarmoured, while the Amethyst was only a small sloop, also unarmoured.
The more I feel myself weak, the more I am meant not to fold my hands and say, 'I never can do that thing; it is of no use my trying to attempt it, I may as well give it up'; but to say, 'Lord I there is none beside Thee that can set the balance right between the mighty and him that hath no strength. 'Help me, O Lord my God! Just as those little hermit-crabs that you see upon the seashore, with soft bodies unprotected, make for the first empty shell they can find, and house in that and make it their fortress, our exposed natures, our unarmoured characters, our sense of weakness, ought to drive us to Him.
A similar state of affairs is visible in front of the neck, and probably under the entire surface of the yielding carapace. The fineness of the membrane at the articulations enables us to perceive it at these unarmoured points, but the cuirass of the corselet conceals it in the central portion. At these points the circulatory reserves of the insect are pulsing in tidal onsets.
As nearly as is known the Russian fleet consisted of twelve battleships, twenty-five armoured and unarmoured cruisers, and about forty torpedo-boats. These came charging ahead at full speed into the entrance to the Sound in spite of the overwhelming force of the Allied fleets, supported by the fortresses of Copenhagen and Elsinore.
The seeming helplessness of the British unarmoured ships before Cronstadt during the Crimean War, their failure before the forts of Sevastopol, and the uselessness of the French navy during the war of 1870, had spread the notion that warships could not overpower modern fortifications. Probably this impression lay at the root of Arabi's defiance. He had some grounds for confidence.
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