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Updated: May 16, 2025
Ranged along the coast from Folkestone to Deal was an armament consisting of forty-five battleships of the first, second, and third classes, supported by fifteen coast-defence ironclads, seventy armoured and thirty-two unarmoured cruisers, forty gunboats, and a hundred and fifty torpedo-boats.
One of the important events was the adding to the commissioned fleet of the coast-defence monitor "Amphitrite," whose keel was laid in 1874. The work of remodelling her was begun in 1889, under the appropriation made by Congress in 1887. The "Amphitrite" is in some respects an old-fashioned type of vessel, but is nevertheless capable of important service. Her displacement is 3,990 tons.
Theodore Roosevelt came out with a signed statement: "Four years ago I warned this country that the United States must have two great fleets one for the Atlantic, one for the Pacific." Senator Smoot, in a sensational speech, referred to his vain efforts to secure for the country a fleet of fifty sea-going submarines and twenty-five coast-defence submarines.
Petrox, with its armorial gallery and ruins of an ancient manor house, and the castle, consisting of a square and a round tower, coming down from Henry VII.'s reign, when it was built for coast-defence. On the opposite point of the harbor-entrance are the foundations of another castle, evidently built about the same time.
They are sometimes known as "coast-defence ships," from the circumstance that they were constructed mainly for home service. Of these "English monitors," four the Cyclops, Gorgon, Hecate, and Hydra are built on identically similar principles. In appearance they may be best compared to a raft with a battery on top of it, from which fortress or battery rise various funnels and a flag-staff.
He had favored the payment of the national debt; he had dared to anticipate the future, to impose taxes and provide ships; he had aided the formation of a military academy and advocated a system of coast-defence, and had boldly asserted our national rights against the French Republic; and yet he loved peace so well, that, against the advice and wishes of his party and his cabinet, he sent a minister to France, who made an honorable treaty.
Therefore, no sooner did their lordships hear what had happened at Springhaven than they sent down a rider express, to say that the ship must be saved at any price. And as nothing could be spared from the blockading force, or the fleet in the Downs, or the cruising squadron, the Commander of the coast-defence was instructed to enrol, impress, or adapt somehow all the men and the matter available.
He refused point blank, although one of the coast-defence ships, the Thunderer, has been disabled by shells from the air-ship, and all his other vessels have been terribly knocked about by the incessant cannonade from the fleet, which has now advanced to within two miles of the shore, having nothing more to fear from the land batteries.
Of course these bodies do not agree; different policies are pursued by each, and the coast suffers. Large sums are sometimes spent in coast-defence works. At Spurn no less than £37,433 has been spent out of Parliamentary grants, besides £14,227 out of the Mercantile Marine Fund. Corporations or county authorities, finding their coasts being worn away, resolve to protect it.
The Chinese theory still showed itself, not in measures for defence, but in impotent measures for restriction or prohibition, and finally in a declaration of war against England on the very eve of her triumph by the power of her navy and commerce over the greatest captain of the age: a war declared by our rulers without an army, navy, officers, coast-defence, or national credit, for the avowed purpose of securing free trade and sailors' rights by measures which the mercantile community rejected.
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