NAVAL ATTACK OK FORTIFICATIONS. 
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As I said before, I think it is absolutely necessary to get close to, 
because we cannot hit if we are a long way off. At Alexandria cer¬ 
tainly we were a long way off, but then, as a matter of fact, we never 
really hit them. In the report which was made upon the condition of 
the defences afterwards, it was stated that if the garrison had been 
Europeans, or at any rate if they had had pluck, on the following 
morning all the guns except three would have been ready for action. 
So that the batteries were not really disabled, although the men were 
demoralised. 
Now comes the question : How close should we get ? The limit 
appears to me to depend very much upon hydrographical considera¬ 
tions—the exigencies of navigation. Of course you can only stow 
a certain number of ships in a limited piece of water, and the closer 
you get probably the less room there is for your ships. Therefore 
supposing that in attacking a certain battery or group of batteries 
you could but put, we will say, four ships at 800 yards, eight or 
ten ships at 1200 yards, it might be worth while to go off to 1200 
yards so as to get more guns to bear. I do not myself attach any 
weight to your going a long way off in order that your armour 
may not be pierced. If a ship gets hit all about the place you will 
probably disconcert her so much, even without piercing her armour, 
that she will be glad enough to draw off. In the abortive Northern 
attack upon Charlestown they had seven very invulnerable ships, moni¬ 
tors. They went into attack the batteries in what appeared to me rather 
a heedless way, without any particular plan ; they did not anchor. The 
batteries, on the other hand, appeared to have been very well fought, and 
to have knocked the ships about very much. The ships were quite in¬ 
vulnerable to most of the shells from the batteries ; but notwithstanding 
this, and the fact that they only lost something like three or four men 
in all in the well armoured ships—there was one badly armoured ship 
that was sunk, notwithstanding that fact they were driven out of 
action by their guns being disabled because the turrets would not 
turn, and so on. And you will remember that the American ships 
were simply, as they were called, “ Cheese boxes on a plank they 
presented a very small target, they were quite unseaworthy, through 
lack of upper works which were omitted in order that they might be 
able to stand a heavy fire—and how well they stood fire may be 
judged by the fact that one of them received 250 hits during the 
fighting that went on at Charlestown, but was very little damaged. 
That could never be the case now-a-days. Our ships will not stand 
so much knocking about as that without feeling it very seriously. 
The next question is, are we to anchor or not ? Yes, decidedly. 
Anchoring is a necessity if we are to get close to, and another advan¬ 
tage of anchoring is, that the bearing of the object remains constant. 
We had a lot of trouble at Alexandria from not seeing what to fire at. 
You picked out a gun that was annoying you, and just as you were 
laying for that a cloud of smoke came across and you lost sight of it. 
When the ship was under way, she went on, and when the smoke 
cleared there was a different view, and you did not know where to look 
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