Had the wind blown a little harder during the "Monitor's" first voyage from New York, or had the tow-rope to which she hung parted, there is no doubt she would have gone down in the same way. In that case the course of history would have been different, for the "Merrimac" would have been undisputed master of the Atlantic coast, and have driven off or destroyed every ship of the blockading squadrons. The fates of nations sometimes depend on trifles. That of the American Union depended for some hours on the soundness of the hawser by which the "Monitor" hung on to the tug-boat "Seth Low" of New York. CHAPTER XI LISSA 1866 In the American Civil War there had been no battle between ironclad fleets. "Monitors" had engaged batteries. The "Merrimac" had had her duel with the first of the little turret-ships. But experts were still wondering what would happen when fleets of armoured ships, built in first-class dockyards, met in battle on the sea. The war between Austria and Italy in 1866 gave the first answer. The experiment was not a completely satisfactory one, and some of its lessons were misread. Others were soon made obsolete by new developments in naval armaments. Still, Lissa will always count among the famous sea-fights of the world, for it was the first conflict in which the armoured sea-going ship took a leading part. But there is another reason: it proved in the most startling way--though neither for the first time nor the last--that men count for more than machines, that courage and enterprise can reverse in the actual fight the conditions that beforehand would seem to make defeat inevitable. "Give me plenty of iron in the men, and I don't mind so much about iron in the ships," was a pithy saying of the American Admiral Farragut. There was iron enough in the Austrian sailors, Tegethoff and Petz, to outweigh all the iron in the guns and armour of the Italian admirals, Persano and Albini, and the "iron in the men" gave victory to the fleet that on paper was doomed to destruction. At the present time, when in our morning papers and in the monthly reviews we find such frequent comparisons between the fleets of the Powers, comparisons almost invariably based only on questions of ships, armour, guns, and horse-power, and leaving the all-important human factor out of account, it will be interesting to compare the relative strength--on paper--of the Austrian and Italian fleets in 1866, before telling the story of Lissa.