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Updated: June 5, 2025
Into these little-known water-courses Porter boldly led his ponderous iron-clads; while Sherman, with a detachment of troops, advanced along the shore, keeping as near the flotilla as possible. Seldom have naval vessels been detailed upon so strange a service.
The batteries of the enemy on either hand were pounding away at the ascending ships, hurling huge bolts of iron against their mailed sides, with a thunder that was deafening, and a shock that made the stricken ships reel. The admiral stood in the gunroom of one of the iron-clads, watching the men working the guns, in an atmosphere reeking with the smoke of the powder.
And on deck he went, and stayed there while the fleet passed through the hail of shot and shell. The scarcity of iron in the Southern States prevented the naval authorities of the newly organized Confederacy from equipping a very large fleet of iron-clads.
Dare I tell it in the nineteenth century, this age of railroads and telegraphs and iron-clads, when space and time are in a fair way to be annihilated, and nothing is so sacred that it may not be questioned, no problem so hard that men may not try to solve it?
The immediate effect of this was to curtail our privileges of riding about the country of Yokohama. Perhaps the most notable incident, historically, of our stay in Yokohama was the arrival of the first iron-clad of the Japanese navy, to which it has fallen a generation later to give the most forcible lesson yet seen of iron-clads in battle.
These produced no less than 340,000 tons of steel during the year 1881, and two years later the total output had risen to half a million tons. In 1876 the British Admiralty built two iron-clads, the Mercury and Iris, of Siemens-Martin steel, and the experiment proved so satisfactory, that this material only is now used in the Royal dockyards for the construction of hulls and boilers.
The investment on the land side was made as complete as the number of troops engaged would admit of. During the night of the 13th Flag-officer Foote arrived with the iron-clads St. Louis, Louisville and Pittsburg and the wooden gunboats Tyler and Conestoga, convoying Thayer's brigade. On the morning of the 14th Thayer was landed.
The gunboats formed in line of battle, and advanced up the river. The four iron-clads led, steaming abreast. About a mile in the rear, came the three wooden vessels. The fort was soon in range; but both parties seemed anxious for a determined conflict, and no shot was fired on either side as the gunboats came sullenly on. How different must have been the feelings of the two combatants!
Time proved that the lighter class of boats, called "tin-clads," were helpless against field guns, while heavy iron-clads could be driven off by riflemen protected by the timber and levees along streams.
Miss Stansby wielded the double-bladed paddle in a way a Red Indian might have envied. Once she uttered a little feminine shriek as a cannon ball plunged into the water behind them; but as they got further away from the buoy those on the iron-clads appeared to notice that a boat was within range, and the firing ceased.
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