“It distresses me beyond measure to see our ships constructed so as to impose upon them the most terrible penalties whenever their commanders dare, as dare they ever have, and dare they ever will, to close with their foe and try conclusions with him. Why, sir, it has been my painful duty over and over again to hear foreign officers entreat me to use all my influence against the adoption in their navy of ships with so little armored surface as ours. On one occasion the _Collingwood_ herself was imposed upon them as a model to be imitated, and I was besought to give them a safer and better ship. ‘How could I ever steam up to my enemy with any confidence,’ said one of the officers concerned, ‘with such a ship as that under my feet?’ * * * * * “Mr. White coolly tells us that the _Collingwood_, with five hundred tons of water logging her ends to a depth of seven or eight feet, will not be much worse off than a ship whose armored deck stands two and a half or three feet above the water’s surface, and his reason is that even above this latter deck the water would flow in when the ship was driving ahead with an injured bow. Well, sir, I will only say that sailors of experience see a very great difference between the two cases, and I can but regard such theorizings as very unfortunate basis for the designs of her Majesty’s ships. “I have said that Mr. White’s assumptions as to the immunity of the above-water compartments and coffer-dams from wide-spread injury by shell-fire rest upon no experimental data; I go on to say that such data as we have to my mind point very much the other way. The _Huascar_ was not an unarmored vessel, and such shell as penetrated her had first to pass through some thin armor and wood backing; yet after the _Cochrane_ and _Blanco Encaloda_ had defeated her she presented internally abundant evidence of the general destruction which shell-fire produces. An officer of the _Cochrane_, who was the first person sent on board by the captors, in a letter to me written soon afterwards, said: ‘It requires seeing to believe the destruction done.... We had to climb over heaps, table-high, of _débris_ and dead and wounded.... We fired forty-five Palliser shell, and the engineers who were on board say that every shell, or nearly so, must have struck, and that every one that struck burst on board, doing awful destruction.’