Elswick.

The following lists give some details of the Japanese and Chinese fleets,
only the ships engaged at the Yalu battle being included. But these ships
represented almost the entire strength of the two rival navies, and no
really effective ship was absent on either side, while to make up the two
squadrons ships were sent to sea that in a European navy would have been
considered obsolete and left in harbour (see pages 256-7).

A comparison of these two lists brings out some interesting points. The
advantage in gun power was clearly on the side of the Japanese. Of the
heavier class of guns they had seventy to fifty-five, and there were no
weapons in the Chinese squadron equal to the long 12 1/2-inch rifled
breech-loaders of French make, carried by four of the Japanese cruisers.
But there was a further gain in gun power for the Japanese in the
possession of 128 quick-firers, some of them of fairly heavy calibre. The
quick-firing gun was then a new weapon. It is really a quick loader, a gun
fitted with a breech action that can be opened and closed by a rapid
movement, and so mounted that the recoil is taken up by mechanism in the
carriage which at once automatically runs the gun back into firing
position, while the process of loading is further accelerated (for the
smaller calibre guns) by making up the ammunition like that of a rifle,
with projectile and charge in a big brass-cased cartridge, so that the gun
can be loaded up by one movement, and the cartridge contains its own means
of ignition, and is fired by pulling off a trigger. The lighter
quick-firers are further mounted on pivots, so that they can be easily
moved through an arc of a circle by one man, who keeps his eyes on a moving
target and his finger on the trigger ready to fire. The storm of shells
that poured from the Japanese quick-firers was even more terrible for the
Chinese than the slower fire of the heavy guns, and of these new
quick-firing guns the Chinese only had three on the little "Kwang-ping."

JAPANESE FLEET
-----------------+------+----+-----+-----+----------------------------------
|Tonnage.
| |Heavy Guns.
| | |Quick-firers.
| | | |Machine Guns.
Ships. | | | | | Notes.
-----------------+------+----+-----+-----+----------------------------------
N {_Yoshino_ | 4