With hull covered with plates of copper and iron, two rudders, one at the bow and one at the stern; and a paddle-wheel as her propelling machinery, fitted inside.] The Dutch patriots struggling for freedom from Spanish tyranny had tried their hands at a somewhat similar contrivance about ten years earlier, which was known as _The Ark of Delft_. This seems to have been a double-hulled arrangement, with three hand-turned paddle-wheels placed between the two hulls. The _Ark_ only rose 5 feet above the water-line, was 110 feet long and 46 feet broad. She mounted twenty guns, and "a large gallery was suspended from her three military masts"--whatever that may mean. It is a curious but generally accepted fact that a great many more or less modern "inventions" have been forestalled in the Far East. Gunpowder was first made in China; water-tight compartments were commonly used in the ships of that country hundreds of years before they found a place in our men-of-war. It is not altogether strange, therefore, that the Japanese should have been in possession of what may well have been a pretty formidable armour-clad so far back as the year 1600--a remarkable-looking craft, more like a big turtle than anything else. She was cased with hexagonal plates of iron and copper, fitted closely together. She had a rudder at both bow and stern, and was propelled by a paddle-wheel amidships, something like the _Ark of Delft_. A Captain Saris, who made a voyage to Japan in 1613, mentions that he there saw a junk of from 800 to 1000 tons, sheathed all over with iron. This was probably the one just described, which, by the way, is stated to have carried a battery of cannon. It is hardly necessary to point out that impenetrability does not necessarily imply armoured protection. An earthen rampart may well be impenetrable, as may a thick-sided wooden ship, as was the _Great Michael_ to the artillery of her day; yet, while affording protection to those behind it, neither the one nor the other is armoured. Between 1600 and 1800 there were many attempts at special forms of protection, from the floating batteries employed by the English in the mismanaged expedition to La Rochelle to the famous Spanish floating batteries destroyed at the Siege of Gibraltar in 1781; but iron ship-armour does not appear again till the year of Trafalgar.