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Updated: June 5, 2025
But where now is the one-masted Hercules, which but a moment since went trembling at the bale of her own bellowing barbettes? The Hercules is in a Nessus-shirt of flame.
The most recent armoured cruisers are ships of 13,000 to 14,000 tons displacement, and are protected by a belt of 6-inch armour, in addition to protective decks. They are armed with two or four 9.2-inch 380-pounder guns, mounted in barbettes of thick armour, and with a number of 6-inch 100-pounders; a number of 12-pounders and 3-pounders are also carried.
Long before this time the lessons of the Civil War had hastened the adoption of armor, the new ships ranging from high-sided vessels with guns in broadside, as in the past, to low freeboard craft influenced by the Monitor design, with a few large guns protected by revolving turrets or fixed barbettes, and with better provision for all-around fire.
Beside the man, Billy Keyse dwindled to a stunted boy, a steam-pinnace bobbing under the quarter of an armoured battle-ship, its huge mailed bulk pregnant with possibilities of destruction, its barbettes full of unseen, watchful eyes, and hands powerful to manipulate the levers of Titanic death-machines. Let it be understood that the intervener did not present the aspect of a hero.
She was watching the frowning Rock; Louis was pointing out the little threatening barbettes as they drew inshore slowly. Out in the stream very much out lay a Norddeutscher Lloyd ship at anchor. "Every inch of this water is mined," he told her. "A touch from switches up on the Rock would blow the whole lot of us to Kingdom Come. The bally old German out there knows that."
Of the squadron that came to Cuba under Admiral Cervera, the Colon lacked two 10-inch guns for her barbettes, and the Vizcaya was so foul under water that with a trial speed of 18-1/2 knots she never made above 13 Cervera called her a "buoy."
From admiral and commodore and captain in the conning-towers to officers and men in barbettes and casemates, and the sweating stokers and engineers in their steel prisons which might well become their tombs every man risked and gave his life as cheerfully as the most reckless commander or seaman on the torpedo flotillas.
The barbettes, that is, the parapets supporting the gun turrets, are one forward and one aft. They rest upon the protective deck at the bottom and extend up about four feet above the upper deck. At the top of the barbettes, revolving on rollers, are the turrets, sometimes called the hoods, containing the guns and the leading mechanism and all of the machinery in connection with the same.
Forward and aft are the two barbettes, each carrying a pair of long 12-inch 50-ton guns, firing 850-pound shot, capable of penetrating 28 inches of wrought iron at a range of two miles. The secondary armament of 6-inch or 7.5-inch guns is mounted in "casemates," or armoured chambers, so disposed that two of them can also fire straight ahead, and the other two straight astern.
The armor is to be 11 inch on belt and barbettes and on sides 8 inches, and each ship is to carry a complement of 1,115 officers and men. Two of the turrets will be set forward on the forecastle deck, which will have 28 feet, freeboard, the guns in the first turret being 34 feet above the water and those of the second about 40 feet.
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