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Updated: May 16, 2025
Then the foremost flying-machine was rushing between Bert and the American's deck, and then bang! came the thunder of its bomb flung neatly at the forward barbette, and a thin little crackling of rifle shots in reply. Whack, whack, whack, went the quick-firing guns of the Americans' battery, and smash came an answering shell from the Furst Bismarck.
Accordingly he telegraphed down to the engine-room for full steam, and passed the word "Prepare to ram". Then, sweeping round in a circle that caused the cruiser to heel at a considerable angle, he set her going at full speed in the direction of his intended victim, firing his fore barbette and machine guns as he went, so as to demoralise her crew and, if possible, prevent them from escaping the blow.
About six o'clock he breakfasts his garrison on pork and water, the only provisions left. An hour later the embrasures are opened, the black guns run out, and Sumter hurls back her answer to the voice of rebellion. The bombs making it unsafe to use the barbette cannons of the open rampart, Anderson was confined to his twenty-one casemate pieces, mostly of light calibre.
A worm-eaten gun or two, far more dangerous to those in rear than to those in front, rises en barbette. The affair would fall in half an hour before the mildest of gunboats. Yet by fortifying three points at an expense of some 6,000L to 8,000L Sa Leone might be decently defended.
Some of the regiment had discovered a field of late corn in the neighborhood, and used to boil a few ears every day, while it lasted, for the boys detailed on the night-picket. The corn-cobs were always scrupulously preserved and mounted on the parapets of the pits. Whenever a Rebel shot carried away one of these barbette guns, there was swearing in that particular trench.
Christy and the first lieutenant sprang from the shelter where they had been waiting the passage of the fort, and rushed up the steps to the bridge. The commander of the force on shore, with half a dozen men, was at work on one of the guns on the barbette; but it was impossible to make out what they were doing.
The soldier handles his piece with greater deliberation, sights it leisurely on its immovable platform, and, if mounted en barbette, retires behind a traverse before firing. Graduating in June, 1856, the now full-fledged Midshipman Perkins could look back upon his five years' probationary experience with many pleasant recollections, though doubtless thanking his stars that his pupilage was over.
Barbette hastened to make a blaze, and to light two oribus, the name given to candles made of pitch in the region between the villages of Amorique and the Upper Loire, and still used beyond Amboise in the Vendomois districts. Barbette did these things with the slowness of a person absorbed in one overpowering feeling. She listened to every sound.
I stooped under the overhang of the turret armour from the barbette and climbed up through an opening which allowed no spare room for the generously built, and out of the dim light appeared the glint of the massive steel breech block and gun, set in its heavy recoil mountings with roots of steel supports sunk into the very structure of the ship.
The forts in question, forming the principal defences of New Orleans, were heavy casemated works with traverses on top for barbette guns, some ninety miles below the city at a point where the river makes a sharp bend to the southeast. Fort St.
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