United States or Sint Maarten ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It consisted of a revolving turret with 8-inch armor and two 11-inch smoothbore guns, set on a raft-like structure 142 feet in length by 41-1/2 feet in beam, projecting at bow, stern, and sides beyond a flat-bottomed lower hull. Though unseaworthy, the Monitor maneuvered quickly and drew only 10-1/2 feet.
There are temples, yes; but where else is there a bouquet of gracious buildings such as these gathered in such a holder as this tiny, raft-like isle? And where else are just such delicate and, as I have said, light and almost feminine elegance and charm set in the midst of such severe sterility?
The last puff of wind must have thinned the fog in the ship's track; for, standing up, face forward to pull stroke, I saw her come out, stern-on to us, from truck to water-line, mistily tall and motionless, but resounding with the most fierce and desperate noises. A cluster of empty boats clung low to her port side, raft-like and vague on the water.
Had he been a rash, impatient man, he would have been speedily drowned in some earlier desperate attempt to reach the shore; had he been an ordinary bold man, he would have succeeded in transferring himself to the branches of some obstructing tree; but he was neither, and he clung to his broken raft-like berth with an endurance that was half the paralysis of terror and half the patience of habitual misfortune.
A low, black, mastless, raft-like, cruel-looking machine, without the faintest pretension to form or comeliness, a turret-ship is simply a fighting-engine, a floating battery an ingenious and formidable instrument of death and destruction, no doubt, but nothing more.
The fishermen who went to the river were not content with the raft-like devices of the aquatic Shell People and learned, in time, that hollowed logs would float and that, with the aid of fire and flint axes, a great log could be hollowed.
I think it was the following Friday afternoon that a curious diversion occurred at the schoolhouse, just as the school was dismissed. Coming slowly along the white highway two small boys were espied, each carrying on his head a raft-like platform laden with plaster-of-Paris images.
On the crests of the swelling waves they swam round the dark bulk of the vessel, and heard plainly the clamor of the men as they embarked in the small boats. Two of them seemed to be fastened together, raft-like, on the starboard side of the yacht, and were quickly filled with men.
The journey was a long and weary one, the only variety being caused by a strong spice of danger at each river. At some streams we were transferred bodily to a large raft-like ferry boat, and so taken across.
The Confederate characterization of it as a "cheese-box on a raft" is still the best description of its appearance. Its lower hull, 122 feet long and 34 wide, was protected by a raft-like overhanging upper hull, 172 feet long and 41 wide. Midway upon her low deck, which rose only a foot above the water, stood a revolving turret 21 feet in diameter and nine in height.
Word Of The Day