Jasper County Democrat, Volume 18, Number 58, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 October 1915 — Good Old Time at Sea. [ARTICLE]

Good Old Time at Sea.

People think of the 15-inch guns j on the Lizzie and ships of her class . as the largest naval guns ever made, • but British warboats carried bigger, guns in the early days of the hard- ! ware navy. The old Inflexible had four eighty-ton guns of sixteen-inch caliber. Nearly 30 years ago the British navy had 110-ton guns of 16.25 inches in caliber, and these guns were the most ponderous ship’s guns ever made; But the seven teeninch naval gun is coining. That reminds us that the world went very well in the good old days when ships of war thumped away at each other’s wooden topsides with Long Tom, who was only a roundbutted son-of-a-gun of a thirty-two-pounder, and Toni’s numerous family long and short, the smallest member of which heaved a little thing smaller than a tennis, ball, Alen

fought just as merrily-in the old days when the whole broadside of a i, three-decker was only so per cent of the weight of one shell thrown by the Lizzie at a Turkish fort on manyhilled Gallipoli. The old ,wooden ships hauled alongside each other at ’close quarters,” and the decks were. a foot deep in blood when the scuppers choked with the fragments of shattered humanity. The plunging round shot was as capable al projectile, muzzle to muzzle, as the modern shell at 10 miles’ range. A twopound shot could cut a man in two, and what shell could accomplish more? The butchery was just as satisfactory proportionately to the number of men on the ships. The records of the old sea battles show that vessels often lost 50* per cent in killed and wounded, and sometimes as high as 70 per cent. In some fights off shore ships were sunk or burned without as much as a rat escaping. In view of this, modern guns and gunnery have hardly made sea fights any njore bloody than in the day's of “sticks and strings.”—Vancouver Sun. i