Warships and their story

by R. A. Fletcher

The engagement began about half-past nine in the morning; by two o’clock in the afternoon the last ship, the Cristobal Colon, was run ashore sixty miles down the coast, and Admiral Cervera himself was a prisoner. In the interval the Infanta Maria Teresa, the Oquendo, and the Vizcaya were forced ashore and burnt, blown up, or surrendered, within twenty miles of Santiago. The Furor and Pluton were destroyed within four miles of the port. Cervera’s ship was about two knots faster than the American ships which first assailed it, but it could not hope to escape the other American vessels lying off the coast, nor did it. In respect to fighting power, weight of metal, armour protection, and condition for fighting, the Spanish ships were hopelessly overmatched; and the Spanish guns, whatever may have been their value on paper, were as inferior as the Spanish gunnery. One knows not whether to wonder more at the state of mind of an administration which could send so ill-equipped and neglected a fleet to the seat of war, or at the extraordinary bravery of the crews who went in a patriotic cause to what was little else than certain death. The indifferent shooting which the Spaniards displayed in the Santiago affair, from first to last, prompted Captain (afterwards Admiral) Robley D. Evans, otherwise “Fighting Bob,” to declare that they “couldn’t hit a d——d thing but the ocean” when they missed his ship with unfailing regularity.

U.S. BATTLESHIP “TEXAS.”

U.S. BATTLESHIP “IOWA.”

When the Cristobal Colon appeared, the Indiana headed close in shore to get within short range. The Spaniard fired her 11-inch Hontoria gun and missed. The American ship replied with her 13-inch guns, and then discharged every weapon she could bring to bear upon her ill-fated antagonist, one shell exploding on the Spanish cruiser’s deck. The Iowa and Texas took up the attack upon the Cristobal Colon; the Indiana joined with the Brooklyn and Texas in smashing the Oquendo, which stranded on fire. The Vizcaya next appeared to run the gauntlet, with two destroyers close behind her. The destroyers tried to torpedo the Indiana, but the American ship’s secondary battery soon accounted for them, one drifting ashore and blowing up. The Vizcaya was set on fire by the American shells, but was fought until she was no longer tenable before she was surrendered. The Eulate was also surrendered. The Cristobal Colon raced with the Brooklyn and Oregon for 3,000 yards, until she struck the rocks bow-on and remained fast.

The destruction in such short spaces of time of the Spanish fleets in the Pacific and then in the Atlantic, with such little injury to the American side, demonstrated most unmistakably the importance and power of the new American navy. A few years later the famous cruise round the world was undertaken by an American fleet, and enabled the powers of the Old World to inspect some of the ships, and others of later date, which wrought such havoc. Yet such has been the progress of naval construction that not one of the ships which made the cruise is now included in the first rank of the American fighting line.

After the Japanese had decided to adopt war vessels of the Western types, they ordered a number of vessels of various kinds from builders in the United Kingdom. Their first ironclad frigate was the Foo-So, launched from the slip in Messrs. Samuda’s yard at Poplar, from which the Thunderbolt, the first ironclad ever built for the British Navy, took the water. Another coincidence was that both the Thunderbolt and the Foo-So were launched with every armour-plate upon them. The Foo-So had as her main deck battery, which was protected by armour 8 inches thick, four Krupp’s long 23-cm. breech-loading guns, each weighing 15¼ tons. On the upper deck were placed two long 17-cm. Krupp guns of 5½ tons each, but these were unprotected. The main deck battery projecting beyond the sides, permitted of a greater training to the guns. She carried a powerful ram, and her bowsprit, as was the custom with all vessels at that time fitted with a ram and bowsprit, was made so that it could be hauled inboard when a ramming attack was to be made. The ship was belted on the water-line with 9-inch armour and the vital parts were equally well protected. She was of 3,700 tons displacement, and fitted with trunk engines of 3,500 h.p. which, with a steam pressure of 60 lb., were calculated to give her a speed of fourteen knots; her coal capacity was expected to enable her to cover 4,500 miles at moderate speed. The first warship on Western lines which the Japanese built was a little barque-rigged vessel, the Seika, launched in 1875, a model of which is now (1911) in the Museum at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich.

The naval engagements in the Chino-Japanese war were not remarkable for much in the way of fighting, but chiefly for a pronounced objection by the Chinese officers as a whole to anything of the sort. A few of them, Admiral Ting among the number, did their best, but they were so hindered by their colleagues’ incompetence and cowardice that they never had a chance of success. Guns that had been neglected, and shells from which the powder had been extracted and its place filled with charcoal, are not the best weapons for warfare, and when to these are added coal that was not much use and ships that were not in fighting condition, it will be seen that the victory of the well-organised Japanese was a foregone conclusion. One or two of the Chinese ships offered the best resistance they could, but it was a hopeless resistance from the start. The Battle of the Yalu was won by the Japanese before a shot was fired. The few survivors of the Yalu fell victims at Wei-Hai-Wei. The training which a cavalry officer received in the Chinese army was not such as to fit him to command a fleet at sea, even of Chinese ships, but the former cavalryman who became commander of the Chinese fleet tried his utmost; his personal bravery was unquestioned, and he had preferred death to dishonour when he was found lifeless in the cabin of his beaten ship with a revolver by his side and a bullet through his brain.

Disciplinarian he was not. It is recorded that like most Chinamen he was an inveterate gambler, and that on one occasion when the fleet, as usual, was doing nothing, he found the time heavy on his hands, and when a visitor went on board the sentries were engaged in fan-tan in a secluded corner of the deck, the officers who should have been on duty were similarly engaged elsewhere, and the admiral himself was acting banker in that charming game with one or two other officers, and the sentry, who should have been on duty at the door of the admiral’s cabin, joining whole-heartedly in the gamble.