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Updated: May 31, 2025
Both countries concerned had fleets on the Adriatic. Italy was the strongest in navel vessels, possessing ten ironclads and a considerable number of wooden ships. Austria's ironclad fleet was seven in number, plated with thin iron and with no very heavy guns. In addition there was a number of wooden vessels and gunboats.
The complete repairs of our five heavy ironclads are only delayed on account of the inadequacy of the appropriations made last year for the working bureaus of the Department, which were actually less in amount than those made before the war, notwithstanding the greatly enhanced price of labor and materials and the increase in the cost of the naval service growing out of the universal use and great expense of steam machinery.
And halfway down the slope came a tumult in the air, clang-clank, clang-clank, and we stopped, and presently over the hill-crest those war things came flying one behind the other." The man seemed hesitating on the verge of a description. "What were they like?" I asked. "They had never fought," he said. "They were just like our ironclads are nowadays; they had never fought.
For the first time I experienced a sensation I was destined many times to repeat-that of the sheer size of the animals. Menagerie rhinoceroses had been of the smaller Indian variety; and in any case most menagerie beasts are more or less stunted. These two, facing us, their little eyes blinking, looked like full-grown ironclads on dry land.
The fleet under his orders comprised thirty-three vessels, of which twelve were ironclads. The Austrian fleet numbered twenty-seven ships, including seven ironclads.
When the sharp outlines of the red cliffs of Heligoland appeared, the German cruiser Seeadler came from the island to meet the squadron and reported that the coast ironclads Aegir and Odin, the cruisers Hansa, Vineta, Freya, and Hertha, together with the torpedo-boats, had set out from Wilhelmshaven during the night and had seen nothing of the enemy. The sea appeared free.
His purpose was entirely frustrated by the speedy and clever manoeuvre of the German ships, the plan of destruction failed, and his own ironclads, while proceeding athwart, had to stand a terrible fire right and left, which was especially disastrous to the two ships on the wings.
The American gunfire ceased, except for a few heroic shots, but they still steamed on, obstinately unsubdued, bloody, battered, and wrathfully resistant, spitting bullets at the airships and unmercifully pounded by the German ironclads. But now Bert had but intermittent glimpses of them between the nearer bulks of the airships that assailed them....
Yet still the South, in spite of her ironclads, raiders, and rams, in spite of her river craft, of the home ships or foreigners that ran the blockade, and of all her other efforts, was a landsman's country that could make no real headway against the native seapower of the North.
The advance of the science of warfare in recent times has left these little fortifications but sorry defences against modern ironclads; but they have since been replaced by some of those improvements in defence which have accompanied the invention of new methods of attack.
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