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Updated: June 8, 2025
Disposed in form of a crescent, the horns of which were seven miles asunder, those gilded, towered, floating castles, with their gaudy standards and their martial music, moved slowly along the channel, with an air of indolent pomp. Their captain-general, the golden duke, stood in his private shot-proof fortress, on the deck of his great galleon the St.
Meanwhile, the others had razeed a frigate, the Merrimac, and upon an angular roof laid railroad-iron to make her shot-proof. Stories of her likelihood to be a terror, especially as she was stated by spies to be seaworthy, inspired the Americanized Swedish naval engineer, Ericsson, to build a turret-ship. The Naval Construction Board unanimously rebuffed the innovator.
The "Ark of Delft," an enormous vessel, with shot-proof bulwarks, and moved by paddle-wheels turned by a crank, now arrived at Zoetermeer, and was soon followed by the whole fleet. After a brief delay, sufficient to allow the few remaining villagers to escape, both Zoetermeer and Benthuyzen, with the fortifications, were set on fire, and abandoned to their fate.
Boisot's force, with those already an the scene, numbered about 2500, equipped with some 200 shallow-draft boats and row-barges mounting an average of ten guns each. Among them was the curious Ark of Delft, with shot-proof bulwarks and paddle-wheels turned by a crank.
They consisted of four concentric rows of palisades, formed of trunks of trees, thirty feet high, set aslant in the earth, and intersecting each other near the top, where they supported a kind of gallery, well defended by shot-proof timber, and furnished with wooden gutters for quenching fire.
The plan of elevating a gun above a shot-proof deck at the moment of aiming and firing, and dropping it for loading or protection by means of hydraulic cylinders, and the plan of placing a gun upon the top of the armor-clad portion of the ship, covering it with a shot-proof hood, and loading it from below, and the plan of a rotating battery, in which one gun is in a position to fire while the others attached to the same revolving frame are loading, all these obviously feasible plans have the advantages of avoiding port-holes in the inhabited and vital parts of the vessel, of rendering the possible bursting of a gun comparatively harmless to the crew and ship, and of rapid manoeuvring, as compared with the turret system, besides all the advantages of the turret as compared with the casemate or old-fashioned broadside system.
He should not be there, I am cooped up here, behind timbers that are almost shot-proof." "It will be time for you to go to the front, as you soldiers call it, when there is an enemy to face. You cannot think there is any danger of an attack upon the Hut this morning." "Certainty not. It is now too late. If intended at all, it would have been made before that streak of light appeared in the east."
The "Ark of Delft," an enormous vessel, with shot-proof bulwarks, and moved by paddle-wheels turned by a crank, now arrived at Zoetermeer, and was soon followed by the whole fleet. After a brief delay, sufficient to allow the few remaining villagers to escape, both Zoetermeer and Benthuyzen, with the fortifications, were set on fire, and abandoned to their fate.
And when Fort Sumter was about to fall, and when a single shot-proof gun-boat could have defied the rebel batteries, and without the loss of a man have conveyed to the fortress stores for six months and a whole battalion of troops, that single gun-boat, a mere gun-boat, which need not have passed within one thousand yards of any batteries on her way, could not be commanded by the Government, and the gallant Anderson was compelled to lower to treason that flag whose fall has aroused the nation to arms.
Their captain-general, the golden Duke, stood in his private shot-proof fortress, on the deck of his great galleon the Saint Martin, surrounded by generals of infantry, and colonels of cavalry, who knew as little as he did himself of naval matters.
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