ere ready to take the sea.

In addition to these there was a fleet of warships as yet unscathed
by shot or shell, consisting of thirty battleships, a hundred and ten
cruisers, and the flotilla of dynamite cruisers which had been
constructed by the late Government at the expense of the capitalist
Ring. There were no less than two hundred of these strange but
terribly destructive craft, the lineal descendants of the _Vesuvius_,
which, as the naval reader will remember, was commissioned in 1890.

They were double-hulled vessels built on the whale-back plan, and the
compartments between the inner and outer hull could be wholly or
partially filled with water. When they were entirely filled the hull
sank below the surface, leaving nothing as a mark to an enemy save a
platform standing ten feet above the water. This platform,
constructed throughout of 6-inch nickel-steel, was of oval shape, a
hundred feet long and thirty broad in its greatest diameter, and
carried the heavily armoured wheel-house and conning-tower, two
funnels, six ventilators, and two huge pneumatic guns, each
seventy-five feet long, working on pivots nearly amidships. These
weapons, with an air-charge of three hundred atmospheres, would throw
four hundred pounds of dynamite to a distance of three miles with
such accuracy that the projectile would invariably fall within a
space of twenty feet square. The guns could be discharged once a
minute, and could thus hurl 48,000 lbs. of dynamite an hour upon a
hostile fleet or fortifications.

Each cruiser also carried two under-water torpedo tubes ahead and two
astern. The funnels emitted no smoke, but merely supplied draught to
the petroleum furnaces, which burned with practically no waste, and
developed a head of steam which drove the long submerged hulls
through the water at a rate of thirty-two knots, or more than
thirty-six miles an hour.

Such was the enormous naval armament, manned by nearly a hundred
thousand men, which hoisted the Federation flag at one o'clock on the
afternoon of the 30th of November, when orders were telegraphed north
and south from Washington to get ready for sea. Two hours later the
vast flotilla of warships and transports had cleared American waters,
and was converging towards a point indicated by the intersection of
the 41st parallel of latitude with the 40th meridian of longitude.

At this ocean rendezvous the divisions of the fleet and its convoys
met and shaped their course fo