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Updated: May 6, 2025
Outside, her cuirass shows no deep scars, for the shattered plates have been replaced; but my guide points proudly to the numerous patchings of the decks, the steel masting supporting the fighting-tops, the smoke-stack, and to certain terrible dents, with small cracks radiating from them, in the foot-thick steel of the barbette.
Men in the turrets bade mental good-by to their mates in the superstructure; and these, secure in their five-inch protection, pitied those in the fighting-tops, where, cold logic says, no man may live through a sea-fight. Yet all would have volunteered to fill vacancies aloft. The healthy human mind can postulate suffering, but not its own extinction.
I heard the humming drone of shells coming from afar, a hum that grew to a wail a shriek and the sickening crash as they smote her or threw up great waterspouts high as her lofty fighting-tops; I seemed to hear through it all the ring of electric bells from the various fire-controls, and voices calm and all unshaken by the hellish din uttering commands down the many speaking-tubes.
Besides her thirteen-, eight-, and six-inch guns, she carried a secondary quick-fire battery of twenty six-pounders, four one-pounders, and four Gatling guns distributed about the superstructure and in the fighting-tops. The peculiar efficacy of this battery lay in its menace to threatening torpedo-boats, and its hostility to range-finders, big-gun sights, and opposing gunners.
Looks like an armored cruiser o' the first class." "Armored cruiser o' the first class?" muttered the captain, as he carried his binoculars to the weather rail and looked ahead. "More 'n I can make out with the glasses." If three funnels, two masts, two bridges, and two sets of fighting-tops indicate an armored cruiser of the first class, Johnson was right.
Above each superstructure, their fighting-tops, giant davits, funnels, and gibbet-like yards twisted into the air, fantastic and incomprehensible, but the bulk below seemed to rest solidly on the bottom of the ocean, like an island of lead. The muzzles of their guns peered from the turrets as from ramparts of rock. Channing gave a sigh of admiration. "Don't tell me they move," he said.
"A man-o'-war, by the Lord Harry!" he exclaimed. "Yes; there are her upper signal-yards, and her fighting-tops below them, clear enough. By the piper, this is growing interesting indeed. Now, who and what is she? and why is she chasing a British liner? for she is chasing her, beyond a doubt!"
Signal-flags were whipping the air aloft classes in signalling; while from engine-room and fighting-tops each battleship hummed with the activities of masters and pupils teaching and learning every phase of the complicated calling of the modern navy man.
Outside them showed the masts and fighting-tops of those which had sunk before reaching shore, and outside these again lay a score or so of battleships and a few armoured cruisers, some down by the head, some by the stern, and some listing badly to starboard or port still afloat, and still with a little fight left in them, in spite of their gashed sides, torn decks, riddled topworks and smashed barbettes.
Every other individual aboard the Kennebunk had his station, from the firemen shoveling tons of coal into the fiery maws of the furnaces to keep the indicator needles of the steam-gages at a certain figure, to the range-finders high up in the fighting-tops, bending over their apparatus. In the turrets the officers fitted telephone receivers to their heads.
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