And the signals to the engine room would quit jangling for a time while the Captain or officer of the deck looked around again and repeated:
"Mighty fine sight, this!"
It all depends on the way you look at it. You couldn't see much going down the Chesapeake Bay channel. There was a turn or two, but the smoke of the saluting obscured things and it was not until the ships headed out to sea and the Connecticut was past the whistling buoy, which also seemed to want to have a share in the sendoff, that it was possible to get a satisfactory look at the entire fleet that stretched away for more than three miles.
Then came a signal for open order. The Admiral's ship went right on. The next following bore out to port and the next to starboard. Then the ships paired off to port and starboard, making two lines, each a quarter of a point off the flagship, which had a lane to itself in the centre, giving the Admiral and his staff on the after bridge a view of all. Perhaps the formation may be understood better by the average reader by saying that it was a wing and wing formation.
Signals were passing along the line constantly and semaphores were throwing their arms about as if they were manikins performing for the amusement of the 14,000 men afloat. It was pretty to see a mass of flags fall to the deck simultaneously from time to time. It was impressive to see the flag of the country fluttering from the gaffs of mainmasts. It was fine to see the ships keeping in line.
The commanding officers might refer to the spectacle as a mighty fine sight, but the few civilians with the fleet shared the sentiment of a tar who sidled up to the Sun man and said:
"This makes you proud of your country. You know already that the country is big and great and all that, but when you see it reduced to this kind of business on the ocean you are sure your country is great. None but a great country could produce such a sight as this. I'm glad I've had the chance to see it."
In single file for two hours the ships kept on their course. They were like so many Indians on a jaunt. Each ship stood for sovereignty. Each stood for brute strength. Each stood for the development of science and skill. Each stood for an impressive expression of patriotism. In that fleet of sixteen ships there seemed to be concentrated, according to some of those who looked at them, the entire power of the United States for good or evil.
When it came to estimating the brute strength of the fleet it grew bewildering. The mathematicians got busy. They figured out that there were nearly 1,000 guns of various kinds on the entire fleet and they talked about the weight of projectiles and charges and then got down to muzzle velocity in foot seconds and muzzle energy in foot tons and a lot of other terms that would make a landlubber's head dizzy. They told how the average muzzle velocity of those guns was 2,700 feet a second and that a 13-inch gun's energy was equal to raising 31,372 tons a foot, while that of a 12-inch gun, with which these ships are all armed, could lift, by the power of one discharge, 44,025 tons a foot. Then they got to figuring out how much all the guns could lift and how swift the things they shoot could go. This ran the figures up into the millions of foot tons just for one discharge.
When some one tried to figure out how many millions upon millions of foot tons could be raised if all the projectiles in the fleet were fired—the exact number of the thousands upon thousands of these projectiles it would not be prudent even to indicate—why, an amateur at figures, the simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division man, got a headache.