“The indications that the English would join the Sultan at any time still prevailed at the time the vessels were ready to go to sea. When the ‘Europe,’ ‘Asia,’ and ‘Africa’ were ready to depart, they had to go without any guns, because all the loose guns that the Russians could spare from the navy were mounted on forts, and none could be appropriated for these ships, so they had to depart without guns. They expected when they came here to be able to purchase guns in this country from some of the gun manufacturers, and they were very much amazed to find that our government had not permitted any gun factories to exist here. So they had to go without. “The captains all showed great determination and pluck, but their going away was not under the conditions usually attending the departure of war vessels. They expected when they left that England would openly espouse the cause of Turkey before they arrived at the other side, and they were all prepared to sink their ships rather than surrender. They felt that their case was particularly hard and that their hands were tied, and having no guns they were at the mercy of the enemy. They could not find much satisfaction of sinking with their own ships unless they had done some damage to the enemy, so under the circumstances their sailing was a very sad occasion. “The ‘Zabiaca’ being a new vessel, it took longer to finish her, and by the time she was finished the war with Turkey was over, and they managed to get guns to put aboard her. “The fitting out of this small fleet of commerce destroyers had the effect that the Russians originally intended it to have. It deterred the English from going in with the Sultan. The merchant fleet of England is too great and too vulnerable to permit their country to go to war for a trifle. England would suffer more in a war than any other nation on account of the large number of merchant-men under her flag; and it was because of the great number of her ships and the danger and loss from their destruction that made the British government and its people labor so hard to have our navigation laws repealed, so that a fictitious sale could be made and the vessels of their merchant marine could be put under the protection of the American flag. As two of our statesmen said (Henry C. Carey and Judge Kelley), ‘As long as our navigation laws remain as they are, England will be under perpetual bonds of indemnity to keep the peace with all the small nations in the world, because their merchant-ships cannot fly to the protection of the American flag.’ In this case the English saw the scheme of the ‘Alabama’ applied to themselves. “These vessels went abroad, and most of them became flag-ships on foreign stations.