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Updated: June 7, 2025
Adopting the spirit of Secretary Herbert's recommendations in his report of 1894, Congress, in 1895, authorized the construction of two coast-line battle-ships of most formidable equipment and power, their cost not to exceed $4,000,000 each. Further provision was made for the building of twelve torpedo-boats.
Torpedo-boats do their twenty-two knots an hour; railway trains do their sixty miles an hour; the ice-boats on the frozen Hudson do their sixty-five miles an hour; a machine built by the Patterson company, with a cogged wheel, has done its eighty miles; and another locomotive between Trenton and Jersey City has done its eighty-four.
The torpedo-boats' crews made much of us and, I believe, would have given us everything they had, if we would have taken it; but I contented myself with a pannikin of saki, to counteract the cold of my drenched clothing, and then asked them to run me off alongside my own ship, the Kasanumi, which was hove-to about a mile further out.
“As we were going past the torpedo-boats, I ought to have mentioned two men in the water, stripped, to whom we threw life-buoys, with which they expressed themselves satisfied. It is impossible in such a case, with two of the enemy’s ships going ahead of us, to stop.
The most astonishing part of the report was that the total losses of the Japanese were three torpedo-boats, no other ships being seriously damaged, while the loss in killed and wounded was not over eight hundred men. It was a fight that paralleled, in all respects except that of dimensions of the battling fleets, the naval fights at Manila and Santiago in the Spanish-American war.
Gunboats are simply light-draught cruisers, and are intended for use in shallow waters and rivers. Torpedo-boats, as their name implies, depend entirely upon the torpedo as the weapon of attack, and they carry no guns except a very few light-calibre rapid-fires to keep off small boats.
Rapidity of fire also was increased nearly fourfold. It was the custom to send the fleet each winter to the Caribbean Sea for manoeuvres, which lasted about four months. In December, 1907, the Atlantic fleet, comprising sixteen battle-ships and a flotilla of torpedo-boats, began a cruise around the world.
Unless he is a lunatic, he will prove to be much stronger in reality than he is on paper in the matter of submarines, torpedo-boats, waterplanes and aeroplanes. These are things cheap to make and easy to conceal. He will be richly stocked with ingenious devices for getting explosives up to these two million pound triumphs of our naval engineering.
At the outset the little Gloucester, commanded by Lieutenant-Commander Richard Wainwright, who had been navigating officer of the Maine at the time of her destruction, made a dash for her legitimate opponents, the two torpedo-boats. They in turn sought shelter behind the Oquendo, and for a minute it looked as though the yacht were about to attack the big cruiser.
Soldiers' lives are sacrificed in tens of thousands on battlefields. The flotilla would be demoralized during transit by the assault of a few torpedo-boats? Granted; but the same would apply to a fleet of transports, with the added certainty that one lucky shot would send to the bottom ten times the number of soldiers, with less hope of rescue.
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