ve feet, breadth of beam
seventy-five feet, draught of water twenty feet and six inches, height
of gun deck from the water line twelve feet; armament: ten twelve-inch
caliber guns mounted in turrets on the center line of the ship. The
turrets were bolted to the deck, five of them forward and five aft, and
were eighteen feet in diameter, eight feet high, with a slope from deck
to parapet of thirty degrees and made of armor steel twelve inches
thick. One gun in each turret and the guns could swing around on
four-fifths of the circle, so that every gun could be brought to bear
on an enemy either to port or starboard. No other guns were carried in
time of war and no cruisers, torpedo boats, or torpedoes were used, for
experience in war had shown that they were useless waste of men and
money. The battleship was propelled by rotary engines developing fifty
thousand horsepower, driving the ship at a sustained speed of thirty
knots an hour. The ship had four propellers, two on each side at the
stern, and the boilers were heated by petroleum with automatic feed.
The engineer informed me that they had tried gasoline and other
explosives (for the rotary engines worked well with them) but they
endangered the safety of the ship and the lives of the crew. There were
only two decks in the ship, the lower deck just above the waterline and
the gun deck; the lower deck floor was two-inch steel and was not
divided into compartments, having no partitions, so that if solid shot
or shell entered the side of the ship it could not scatter a shower of
steel splinters to kill or wound the men, and for further protection
against fragments of shell heavy woolen blankets were hung on the
inside from the ceiling. A double partition of two-inch steel ran bow
to stern through the center of the ship, reaching from the floor of the
hold to the lower deck, with a space between the partitions of four
inches filled in with concrete, and the gun deck was supported by heavy
steel pillars, as the space between the lower deck and the gun deck was
twelve feet. A fireproof platform four feet wide with a railing four
feet high of netting, encircled the smokestack about twenty feet above
the gun and connected with it by a rope ladder. It was the lookout
station and the Captain's post in battle from where he directed the
action.

There was only one smokestack on any battleship and no bridge or
superstructure or any inflammable material above the waterline, and the