ed and captured by them. They had surprised Seattle at dawn much in
the same way as San Francisco had been surprised, and they at once
began to land troops and unload their war materials. On the other hand,
an attempt to surprise Port Townsend with an insufficient force had
failed. The Americans had had enough sense to prohibit the Japanese from
coming too near to the newly armed coast defenses, and the better watch
which the little town had been able to keep over the Asiatics had made
it difficult for them to assemble a sufficiently large fighting
contingent. The work here had to be attended to by the guns, and the
enemy had included this factor in their calculations from the beginning.

How thoroughly informed the Japanese were as to every detail of our
coast defenses and how well acquainted they were with each separate
battery, with its guns as well as with its ammunition, was clearly
demonstrated by the new weapon brought into the field in connection with
the real attack on the fortifications. Of course Japanese laborers had
been employed in erecting the works--they worked for such ridiculously
low wages, those Japanese engineers disguised as coolies. With the eight
million two hundred thousand dollars squeezed out of Congress in the
spring of 1908--in face of the unholy fear on the part of the nation's
representatives of a deficit, it had been impossible to get more--two
new mortar batteries had been built on the rocky heights of Port
Townsend. These batteries, themselves inaccessible to all ships' guns,
were in a position to pour down a perpendicular fire on hostile decks
and could thus make short work of every armored vessel.

Now the Japanese had already had a very unpleasant experience with the
strong coast fortifications of Port Arthur. In the first place,
bombarding of this nature was very injurious to the bores of the ships'
guns, and secondly, the results on land were for the most part nominal.
Not without reason had Togo tried to get at the shore batteries of Port
Arthur by indirect fire from Pigeon Bay. But even that, in spite of
careful observations taken from the water, had little effect. And even
the strongest man-of-war was helpless against the perpendicular fire of
the Port Townsend mortar batteries, because it was simply impossible for
its guns, with their slight angle of elevation, to reach the forts
situated so high above them. And if the road to Seattle, that important
base of operations in the N