THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR 242 armour protection for their heavier guns. The newer monitors were formidable ships so far as gun power was concerned, mounting pairs of 12-inch guns in their massive armoured turrets. They had an arrangement by which on going intoaction watercouldbeadmitted so as tolower the deck till it is awash, the turret, conning tower, and deckhouses showing above water. Their great drawback was that they wereat all times slow, had little cruising power and coal capacity, and could not fight their guns in bad weather. They were, in fact, floating batteries, and were primarily intended for service i.. the lagoons, river mouths, and harbours of the American coast, their light draught fitting them for workin shallow water.

The Columbia and Minneapolis were cruisers built chiefly for speed, very heavily engined, with large coal capacity. They were intended for the special work of attacking an enemy's commerce. Together withrthe auxiliary fleet of armed liners they formed a splendid body of swift scouts. TheKatahdin was a peculiar ship, of which there was only one specimen afloat. She was a long, narrow vessel with a pointed bow, with no armament except a few light quick-firing guns. When in fighting trim she wassubmerged byadmittingwater till only her central portion was visible,the object being to make her as small a mark as might be for an enemy's fire. Her bow, most of which wasthus below the surface, was strongly built,and constituted herchief weapon. The ship, as it were, was the shaft of a colossal spear,of which the pointed bow was the head, and she was illtended to ram and sink the enemy, a method of attack that has goneout of favour with naval mengenerally since torpedoes came into vogue, it being considered that a ship attempting to ram is likely to be torpedoed by her adversary before she can strike home with her own bow. The Katahdin was completed in 1894, aud was actually rejected after trial by the UnitedStates Navy Department ; but then came the dispute with GreatBritain over theVenezuelan question and the short-lived war scare, during which the Katahdin was taken into the navy, notwithstandingthe previous adversereport.

The Iowamay be taken as a typical American battleship. She was the most powerful vessel under the United States flag at the beginning of the war. She had unarmoured ends, but a steel armour-belt, fourteen inches thick and seven feet six inches wide,ran alongthe waterline on the central part of the ship. An underwater armoured deck covered the engines and vitals of the ship, and the armour was carriedup her sides to the bases of two massive armoured turrets placed fore and aft. There were also armoured bulkheads below the main deck to prevent raking fire. In eachof thelarge turrets there were two 12-inch guns, each weighing a little over forty-five tons, and throwingan 850-pound shell. Between the main turrets there were four smaller turrets, two on each side,and each carrying a pair of 8-inch guns. Thesmaller turrets were armoured,but there wasno armour on the ship's side between their bases and the water-linebelt, so that a well-placed shell w 1add destroy the ammunition hoists and stop the fire of the turret. Mounted in ports on thebroadside, and behind shields on the central superstructure, therewere thirty-two quick-firing guns of various calibres, and the fighting tops of the militarymast were armedwithGatlings. Some experts held thatthe ship wasoverweightedwith this armament, which is far beyond anything that British constructors ventured to place upon a ship of the same size. The threeother large battleships— the Indiana, Massachusetts, and Oregon— werea littlesmaller andless powerful than the Iowa, and had the further defect that their low freeboards made it difficult to fight all their guns in heavy weather. The cruisers New York and Brooklyn had a partial armoured belt on the water-line, and some Other peculiar vessels were the dynamite gunboat Vesuvius and the cruiser Buffalo. Their chief weapons were huge air-guns, destined to launch through the air a dynamite shell, or " aerial torpedo," in the hope of blowing up an enemy, or exploding the mines he had laid down in the entrance of one of his ports, and Late Niitheroy, Brazilian navy(builtin U.S.A.).

Old Harbour Defence Monitors— Dhplticewent (/<«.). Launched. I Twelve Ships f 1,800 to ( 2.IOO 1863 to 1865 5 to 6 Dynamite Cruisers— Vesuvius Buffalo* 930 7,080 1888 1893 22J 19 Ram— Katahdin 2,l33 1893 16 Torpedo Boats— Cushing Ericsson Rodgers Foote Porter Dupont Winslow 105 120 j M2 j 185 1800 1892 1896 j IS961 22* 23 25 24J 28i Y I42 1897