ics worked almost naked,
in heat like that of a furnace. Some died, all were in the doctor's hands
after the fight, but they kept the engines going, obeyed orders, and
brought the half-burnt ship out of action.

More than half of the Chinese fleet had now been destroyed or beaten off,
without any loss to the main fighting force of the Japanese. Disregarding
the Chinese cruisers, which were now badly cut up and firing harmlessly at
long range, Ito concentrated his attack on the two armour-clads. Though
each ship was hit more than four hundred times, their armour was never
pierced. Yet the Japanese had some guns that theoretically should have
penetrated it. Battle results are, however, often very different from
experimental work on the testing range.

Early in the fight a Japanese shell had cut down the foremast of the
Chinese flagship, sending overboard and drowning seven men who manned the
top--carrying away also the signal yards, so that no orders could for some
time be conveyed to the fleet. But for more than an hour Admiral Ting was
in no condition to give orders. Almost at the outset he had carelessly
taken a position that brought him within the danger arc of the blast from
his own big barbette guns. He was stunned, and for a while it was thought
that he was dead. The ship was fought by two European officers, Herr
Albrecht, a German, and Mr. Nicholls, who had formerly been a petty officer
in the British navy. Albrecht distinguished himself by more than once going
to terribly exposed positions, and personally handling the hose with which
he extinguished the fires lighted by the Japanese shells. Nicholls directed
the barbette guns with a cool courage worthy of the service in which he had
been trained, until he was killed by a bursting shell.

Two other white men, the German soldier, Captain von Hanneken, and the
American commander, McGiffen, took a prominent part in the fighting on
board the other armour-clad, the "Chen-yuen." Both had more than one narrow
escape. Von Hanneken was stunned for a while by an explosion, and slightly
wounded while at the barbette guns. When the lacquered woodwork of the bow
burst into flame and smoke, and none of the Chinese would go forward to
extinguish it, McGiffen, who was in command of the ship, dragged the
fire-hose to the danger point. Just as he had drowned the fire he was
wounded in two places and stunned by a bursting shell. He had told the men
in the barbette not to reopen fir