While Rob thus was puzzling, a young man, wearing the uniform of an American naval officer, walked briskly up to where he was standing, and signalled a sampan.
"Can you tell me, sir," asked our lad, addressing this officer, "what American ship that is out there, and how she got wrecked?"
"Wrecked!" repeated the other. "What do you mean by wrecked? She looks all right to me. Is anything the matter with the old packet?"
"Of course, I don't know much about wrecks," replied Rob, a little nettled by the officer's tone, "but if a ship sunk to the bottom of a Chinese river, nearly ten thousand miles from home, isn't wrecked, then the word must mean something different from what I think it does."
"But she isn't sunk. She's floating all right, and showing fully as much freeboard as she did when we brought her across the Pacific, nearly two years ago. Monitors always look that way, you know."
"Monitor! Is she a monitor?" cried Rob, who never before had seen one of this peculiarly American type of war-ship.
"To be sure. She is the United States monitor Monterey, one of the finest of her class, and, with the exception of her sister-ship, the Monadnock, now at Shanghai, the most powerful fighting-machine now afloat in Asiatic waters. Wouldn't you like to go aboard and take a look at her?"
Of course, Rob gladly accepted this invitation, and, entering the sampan with Lieutenant Hibbard, was sculled out to the floating fortress, which always lies off Canton, providing a safe-refuge for foreigners against a storm of wrath such as sometimes sweeps over that turbulent city. She is at the same time a most effective peace-keeper, since the Chinese know as well as any one that her powerful guns could within a few hours lay their metropolis in ruins.
The Monterey is famous as having been the first ship of her class to cross the Pacific to Manila, where she added such strength to Dewey's handful of war-ships as to render his position there impregnable.
On gaining her side Rob found the rail to be quite two feet above water, instead of only a few inches, as he had supposed. He also found her to be of great breadth of beam, with wide sweeps of unencumbered deck, both forward and aft. Safely below the water-line he found roomy, well-ventilated quarters for officers and crew, as well as ample engine, coal, and ammunition spaces. He marvelled at her huge guns, polished until they shone, mounted fore and aft in steel turrets of a strength and construction to defy the most powerful of modern missiles. At the same time, these could be revolved at will, by a mechanism so delicate as to be controlled by a finger. Rob took tiffin with the officers of the ward-room mess, whom he entertained with news from the States and from Manila, and when, late in the afternoon, he again was set on shore, he felt that his first day in Canton, in spite of its clouded beginning, had been one of the very happiest and most interesting of his life.