m realities of war
can give the lie to paper estimates.

Wilhelm von Tegethoff, who commanded the Austrian fleet with the rank of
rear-admiral, was one of the world's great sailors, and the man for the
emergency. He had as a young officer taken part in the blockade of Venice
during the revolution of 1848 and 1849; he had seen something of the naval
operations in the Black Sea during the Crimean War, as the commander of a
small Austrian steamer, and during the war of 1864 he had commanded the
wooden steam frigate "Schwarzenberg" in the fight with the Danes off
Heligoland. Besides these war services he had taken part in an exploring
expedition in the Red Sea and Somaliland, and he had made more than one
voyage as staff-captain to the Archduke Maximilian, whose favourite officer
and close friend he had been for years. When the Archduke, an enthusiastic
sailor, resigned his command of the Austrian fleet to embark for Mexico,
where a short-lived reign as Emperor and a tragic death awaited him, he
told his brother, the Emperor Francis Joseph, that Tegethoff was the hope
of the Austrian navy.

The young admiral (he was not yet forty years of age) had concentrated his
fleet at Pola, the Austrian naval port near Trieste. He had got together
every available ship, not only the seven ironclads, but the old
line-of-battle ship and the wooden frigates and gunboats. The Admiralty at
Vienna had suggested that he should take only the ironclads to sea, but he
had replied: "Give me every ship you have. You may depend on my finding
some good use for them." He believed in his officers and men, and relied on
them to make a good fight on board anything that would float, whether the
naval experts considered it was out of date or not. Among his officers he
had plenty of men who were worthy of their chief and inspired with his own
dauntless spirit, and the crews were largely composed of excellent
material, men from the wilderness of creek and island that extends along
the Illyrian and Dalmatian shores, fishermen and coasting sailors, many of
them so lately joined that instead of uniform they still wore their
picturesque native costume. The crew looked a motley lot, but, to use
Farragut's phrase, "there was iron in the men."

Twenty-seven ships in all, small and large, were moored in four lines in
the roadstead of Fasana, near Pola. But they did not remain idly at their
anchors. Every day some of them ran out to sea, to fire at moving targets
o