Since the advent of modern battle-ships of the new type, armed with high-powered rifled ordnance, naval officers of all nations had been eagerly looking for an occasion when the use of such ships and guns would be an object lesson to them, and various theories in regard to naval warfare would be put to the test of actual practice. While most people were looking to movements in other and widely distant parts of the world—some predicting a naval battle in the North Sea, while others looked for a battle of giants in the Mediterranean—the problem was in part solved for them by a pitched battle in the far Orient, between the Japanese and Chinese fleets, and which will be known in history as the battle of the Yalu.
The rival fleets may be said to have illustrated each a different principle. That represented by the Chinese was the principle of the school which puts material above personnel, for their fleet contained the heaviest ships and the largest guns, although these were not so numerous as those of the Japanese. They had also the most extensive torpedo equipment.
The Japanese represented the school which believes in lighter, more active ships, and in “the man behind the gun”—that is, the greater rapidity and accuracy of fire and ability in manœuvring—much the same as Farragut’s conviction that the best protection for a ship was a rapid and accurate fire from her battery.
BATTLE OF THE YALU—SINKING OF THE CHIH-YUEN.
Before proceeding to describe the battle it would be well to give some account of the strength of the contending fleets. By this we mean the available naval strength of each nation at the outbreak of the conflict.
The Chinese navy owes its existence principally to the fostering care of the Imperial Viceroy, Li Hung-Chang, now in disgrace. He employed Captain Lang, an Englishman, and other Europeans to drill the ships’ companies. But Captain Lang was forced to leave that service some time before the war began, and Captain Von Henneken, a German, who constructed the forts at and near the naval port of Wei-hai-wei, appears to have taken his place as adviser to Admiral Ting—as much as a military man can advise upon naval matters. The Chinese had five heavy ironclads—Ting-Yuen, Chen-Yuen, King-Yuen, Lai-Yuen, and Ping-Yuen—with armor from fourteen to eight inches thick, and armed with Krupp guns, from twelve-inch to eight-inch calibre, mounted in barbette. They had also some quick-fire and a number of machine guns. All of these vessels, except the Ping-Yuen, were built at Stettin, in Germany.
The Chinese protected and partly protected cruisers were nine in number, with armaments of Armstrong and other guns, and a number of quick-fire guns in two of them, the Tschi-Yuen and Ching-Yuen. Most of them were built in Germany and in England, but three of the smaller ones were constructed in the Chinese building yard at Foo-choo. Some of the vessels named were quite fast, but as the speed of a fleet is that of its slowest ship, we must put it down at ten or eleven knots—the speed of the ironclad Ping-Yuen.
The torpedo flotilla included twenty-eight boats of over one hundred feet in length and thirteen over eighty, all built in Stettin.
As regards the Japanese fleet, of the armor-clads (Riujo, Fuso, Kongo, Hi-Yei, and Tschiyoda), all are stated to be practically obsolete but the last, and she was much damaged in the battle by the Chinese Tschi-Yuen. They were all built in England at different dates, from 1864 to 1879. The Tschiyoda, armored cruiser, is a modern ship of about 2500 tons, built in Glasgow. She has a four-and-a-half-inch belt, one-inch deck plating, and mounts 24 quick-fire guns. Her best speed is about nineteen knots.