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On the other hand, the huge shot and shell of the ironclads committed terrible devastation on the batteries. These were for the most part constructed of stone, which crumbled and fell in great masses under the tremendous blows of the English shot and shell. After an hour's continued firing the return from the forts began to slacken.
It is enormous, long jetties and breakwaters stretching far out, almost closing it in. There was every description of craft big Atlantic liners, yachts, fishing boats, ironclads, torpedoes, and once we very nearly ran over a curious dark object floating on the surface of the water, which they told us was a submarine.
And all this he has to do with the sense that behind the smooth language of diplomacy, the unbroken and even voices of diplomatic representatives, there stand ironclads and mighty armies bloodshed, wholesale, and hideous death the tiger spirit and powers of war.
If one torpedo could but reach her hull, the Vice-Admiral, in spite of seven disabled ironclads and a captured gun-boat, might yet gaze proudly at his floating flag, even if his own ship should be drifting broadside to the sea. The line of torpedo-boats, slightly curving inward, had advanced about a mile, when Repeller No. 11 awoke from her seeming sleep, and began to act.
As Ericsson said, "A single shot will sink a ship, while 100 rounds cannot silence a fort." Attacks of this kind against Fort McAllister and Charleston failed. At Charleston, April 7, 1863, the ironclads faced a cross-fire from several forts, 47 smoothbores and 17 rifles against 29 smoothbores and 4 rifles in the ships, and in waters full of obstructions and mines.
It often happens that a delusion takes its cue from something read, or thought, or experienced in a rational state. In the case of the man Blaisdell, for example you remember him, with his marble ship? He was formerly an enterprising ship-builder; during the Southern war he filled a contract with government for a couple of ironclads, and made his fortune.
Wooden vessels can do nothing with the ironclads, unless by getting within one or two hundred yards, so as to ram them or pour in a broadside." He repeats the information given by a refugee, that the ironclad Nashville would not be ready before March, and that the Confederate admiral announced that when she was he would raise the blockade.
We have, besides, twenty-four ironclads of an older type, all of which are of excellent value in battle." "Among these older ironclads are there not many which are equipped with muzzle-loaders?" "Yes, but a naval battle has yet to determine whether the general view that breechloaders are more serviceable in action is correct or not.
On April 2d, he wrote from Petersburg Heights telling of the movements of Sheridan's cavalry and the Ninth, Second, and Twenty-fourth Corps. On the 3d, he was in Richmond, writing, "There is no longer a Confederacy." He had been awakened by the roar of the Confederate blowing up of ironclads in the James River. A few minutes later he was in the Petersburg entrenchments.
My first natural impulse was to apply this principle to guns and ironclads, and all the material and methods of war, and from that to shipping, locomotion, building, every conceivable form of human industry. The chance that had brought me into the very birth-chamber of this new time it was an epoch, no less was one of those chances that come once in a thousand years.
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