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Updated: June 7, 2025
My business was to starve the enemy any way I could. Within an hour the three ships were under the waves and the Iota was streaming down the Picardy coast, looking for fresh victims. The Channel was covered with English torpedo-boats buzzing and whirling like a cloud of midges. How they thought they could hurt me I cannot imagine, unless by accident I were to come up underneath one of them.
Once only did the crabs give the torpedo-boats a chance. A mile or two north of the scene of action, a large cruiser was making her way rapidly toward the repeller, which was still lying almost motionless, four miles to the westward. As it was highly probable that this vessel carried dynamite guns, Crab Q, which was the fastest of her class, was signalled to go after her.
Vessels of the cruiser type, fast, and with a heavy quick-firing armament, are best suited to cope with torpedo-boats, which would find it difficult to get to close quarters with such craft. Warships have lately been built with a considerable increase of length, which of course increases a torpedo's chance of striking by giving it a larger target.
Led by a black, high-sided monster, the left column of the enemy was made up of four battle-ships of uncouth, foreign design and murderous appearance, while the right column contained the flag-ship and three others, all heavily armored cruisers. Flanking each fleet, far to the rear, were torpedo-boats and destroyers. "We're outclassed, Dalrymple," said Captain Blake.
The torpedo-boats Dupont and Hornet shelled the blockhouse near the lighthouse at Point Maya, at the mouth of the harbour of Matanzas, and Fort Garcia, which is an old hacienda used as a blockhouse, lying three and one-half miles to the east.
Chamberlain could get from the admiral; but the officer of the deck, whose name I did not learn, had no hesitation in explaining fully to us the nature of the "trouble" that would ensue if, through design or inadvertence, a newspaper despatch-boat should get within five miles of the fleet at night. "We can't afford to take any chances," he said, "of torpedo-boats.
"If that be so," said Lancey, after a pause and deep sigh, "it seems to me no manner of use to build ironclads at all, and that it would be better, as well as cheaper, in time to come, to fight all our battles with torpedo-boats."
From the south came a three-decked vessel, a great island of floating steel, with a flag as red as the angry sky behind it, snapping in the wind. To the south of it plunged two long low-lying torpedo-boats, flying the French tri-color, and still farther to the north towered three magnificent hulls of the White Squadron.
During the late war between Russia and Turkey one of the most daring exploits of the campaign was an attack by a Russian squadron of torpedo-boats on the Turkish monitor Hifse Rahman. The flotilla comprised four ships, the Czarevich, the Xenia, the Czarevna, and the Djirid.
The danger of attack by torpedo-boats having been recognised, both ironclads had let down their crinolines. But the captain of the Thunderer had resolved on a a what shall I call it? a "dodge," which would probably deceive the enemy. He had an electric light on board.
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