when
occasion demanded; while long chains were secured to the missiles, by
which they were attached to the enemy's vessel, as well as to the wire
of a galvanic battery fastened round the waist of the commander of the
launch. This battery was the means by which the torpedo was exploded.

The flotilla left the Roumanian side of the Danube on the 25th of June
1877 at about midnight, and in something less than an hour the _Hifse
Rahman_ loomed in sight, a shadowy mass on the dark waters. The
approach of the torpedo-boats was almost noiseless, and the croaking of
the frogs was said to have further favoured the Russians by drowning the
sound of the engines, so that those on board the monitor were not aware
of their enemy's propinquity until the launches were almost alongside.

The sentry at once challenged, when Lieutenant Doubarsoff, the commander
of the _Czarevich_, answered "Friends." But his speech betrayed him;
the alarm was spread; and the _Hifse Rahman_ opened a sharp fire upon
the launches. But Lieutenant Doubarsoff succeeded in attaching his
torpedo-chain to a rope hanging at the monitor's bows, and then rapidly
backed his little vessel and fired the torpedo. A tremendous explosion;
a column of water shot up into the air, and the launch was nearly
swamped! A breach had, however, been made in the _Hifse Rahman's_
bulwarks.

The other monitors were now thoroughly alive to their danger, and the
Russian launches had to sustain a deadly cannonade, upon which
Lieutenant Doubarsoff ordered Lieutenant Schestakoff to bring up his
launch, the _Xenia_, and apply a second torpedo, which the latter was
able to do, attaching the missile amidships of the Turkish vessel. The
fate of the _Hifse Rahman_ was now sealed, and in a few minutes she
sank.

The Russian launches succeeded in getting clear of their enemy again
without losing a single man, and thus ended the first torpedo expedition
ever made against an enemy's ironclads, but which may, as a writer
describing the event says, "end in completely revolutionising our
present system of monster iron walls." The Grand Cross of Saint George
was awarded to Lieutenants Doubarsoff and Schestakoff for this intrepid
and successful exploit.

Space is not left us to do more than revert for a moment to what is
perhaps the deadliest weapon of offensive naval warfare yet devised,--
rams. Some experts maintain that nothing can match the power of the ram
of a modern ironclad skilfu