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Updated: May 3, 2025
The Almirante Cochrane did not reply for several minutes, but silent and grim as death itself, she held steadily on her course toward the monitor. Then, when she had approached to within a distance of a little over a mile, she in turn opened fire with both her forward turret-guns on the Huascar, and the battle of Angamos had begun in real earnest.
The next day, about eighty miles south of the latitude of Mount Hekla, I sighted a big ship, which turned out to be the French cruiser Lazare Tréport. I boarded and overhauled her during three hours, her upper, main, and armoured deck, deck by deck, to her lowest black depths, even childishly spying up the tubes of her two big, rusted turret-guns.
The Warsaw yawed, slackened speed, and came to a stop, her turret-guns still speaking, but the secondary guns silent. The Argyll circled around her, sending her thirteen-, eight-, and six-inch shells into her victim with almost muzzle energy. The two military masts of the Warsaw sank, and dead men in the fighting-tops were flung overboard.
The groans of the stricken, the crash of steel against steel, the roar of the turret-guns, the rattling chorus of quick-fire rifles, and the drumming of heavy shells against the armor and turrets made an uproarious riot of sound over which no man above the water-line could lift his voice.
At that moment the officer in the fire-top shouted the news that the range had now lessened to 3000 yards, and the word was immediately given to fire both forward turret-guns.
It was therefore deemed best to stop the firing here, and to have the gunners relieve the men at the turret-guns, who had suffered greatly from the enemy's fire. The men in charge of the completely demolished small guns on the upper deck had already been assigned to similar duty.
The Peruvian ironclads steamed slowly along toward their prey, the Huascar firing her two 10-inch turret-guns as she came, but she was somewhat handicapped by the circumstance that there was great risk of her shot striking the town, which was, of course, still in Peruvian hands.
There were eight-hour intervals in this work, during which Nosey slept or ate his meals or played a mouth-organ in the lee of one of the turret-guns on deck, according to the hour of the day. He slept in a hammock slung in an electric-lit passage far below the water-line; the passage was ten feet wide, and there were six hammocks slung abreast along the entire length of it.
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