The five starred white flag, called the five of clubs, was run up at the fore truck of the Connecticut to indicate that that ship was the guard ship. The lines were run at intervals of 1,600 yards, and the ships of each division, still in wing and wing fashion, were at distances of 400 yards. To be strictly naval you must call the space between two lines of ships interval and the space between two individual ships in line distance. Well, after the ships were spread out they covered an area of more than two square miles, and then one began to realize what all these ships meant. The circle of twelve or fourteen miles that hemmed them in and that expanded in front and contracted in the rear seemed practically filled with them. Distances were kept fairly well and the ships plodded along in the smooth sea nodding their approval of what was going on. It was this problem of distance that kept the officers of the decks busy. When you think that each of these ships represented a weight of from 15,000 to 18,000 tons more or less, and that you had to move that ship at the rate of 10 knots an hour and keep it within 400 yards of a ship in front of you; when you consider how some ships move a trifle of an inch faster than another ship at the same number of propeller revolutions; when you think that one of the propellers of your own ship will do more work than the other at the same number of revolutions, and that this will throw you out of your course and make you steer badly if you don't correct it; when you think that your leader may vary in his speed; when you think of all this, you can begin to understand the problem of those officers on the bridge to keep the ships in line and at proper distances. It took some time for each ship to determine how many revolutions were necessary to produce ten knots speed, according to the standard of the flagship. For example, the Louisiana's experts figured on sixty-seven revolutions. It was too much, for after an hour or two it was found that sixty-five would do the work. Some of the ships were between two numbers. All the time each ship was gaining or losing a trifle and this had to be corrected every minute or two. On each ship a young midshipman stood on the bridge beside the officer on watch looking through a little instrument of bars and glasses and wheels graduated to a scale of figures and called a stadimeter. He reduced the truckline and the waterline of the flagship to some mathematical basis involving triangulation--what's the use of trying to explain it? No one but a mathematician could understand it--and then he would say, "370 yards, sir," or perhaps the figures would be 325 or 460, or what not, and the officer of the deck would have to signal to the engine room to slow down or go faster. It was to be watchful every minute of the hour. The midshipman often had to report distances every fifteen or twenty seconds and the corrections of speed were going on every two or three minutes.