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One's horse, if one is riding, does not very much like it, but I have seen horses far more frightened by a puddle on the road when coming home from hunting in the evening: one 12-inch howitzer more or less in France calls for no great attention from man or beast.
To lay out 324 pounds at once on globes alone, useful as I acknowledge those articles to be, seems exceedingly profuse, when we have only about 3,000 pounds a year for all purposes of English education. One 12-inch or 18-inch globe for each school is quite enough; and we ought not, I think, to order sixteen such globes when we are about to establish only seven schools.
Of shallow draught, and of size varying in accordance with the waters they are destined to patrol, I have seen them as large as twenty tons and as small as a skiff, having an old flint gingall mounted forrard with all the circumstance of a 12-inch gun.
But her speed was only 17 knots at the most. She had been built in England as had the Asahi and Shikishima, which were launched in 1900 and 1901. They also carried 12-inch guns and had a speed of 18.5 knots. Their tonnage was 15,000. Admiral Togo's former flagship, the Mikasa, was also of the predreadnought type, having been built in 1900, and carrying a main battery of 12-inch guns.
There was evidently something wrong with the machinery that brought shells and ammunition to her guns from out of her hold, the fire probably interfering with it. A 12-inch shell cut right through her third funnel and carried it completely off the ship. She turned so that she could bring her starboard guns into action, and they did so feebly.
In the "Princeton" the means of offence were two 12-inch wrought-iron guns, as already noted. In the "Monitor" and its type the means of offence were two 11-inch smooth-bore cast-iron guns, followed later by larger guns of 13 and 15 inches of similar type. In the double-turreted monitors four such guns were of course installed.
The latter, hit by the Russian 12-inch guns was at first unable to reply because the first shots set her afire in several places, but she finally let go with her own guns and after a fourteen-minute engagement she sailed off into a fog. Her sister ship the Breslau took no part in the exchange of shots, and also made off.
It was at this time that the commander himself, leading the party, was knocked over by a shell explosion and then barely escaped the blast of one of his own 12-inch guns by rolling through an open hatch and falling 8 feet to a pile of débris below.
While it would be truthful, therefore, to say that the energy of the 12-inch gun within 5,000 yards is greater than that of 47,000 muskets, it would also be truthful to say that outside of 5,000 yards, millions of muskets would not be equal to one 12-inch gun.
The weather had changed, and was now bright and comparatively warm, the atmosphere so clear that even comparatively small objects were clearly visible. The Mikasa opened the ball by firing a sighting shot from one of the 12-inch guns in her fore barbette, and at the same moment the Russian ships were seen to be getting under way.
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