WHEN Admiral Evans's fleet arrived in Magdalena two days ahead of schedule time there was undoubtedly a sense of relief in official circles in Washington over what was practically the termination of the long cruise to the Pacific, and also one of gratification because the ships, as Admiral Evans notified the Navy Department, were in better condition than when they left Hampton Roads and ready for any duty within an hour's notice.

On the fleet there was no sense of relief over the safe and prompt arrival. That was taken as a mere matter of course. It is true every one was a little proud over the performance of the fleet and glad that it had shaken itself into a homogeneous unit and was in first class fighting condition, not as separate battleships but as a fleet. In the matter of cruising the fleet at last was as one ship and lots of useful things had been learned.

On the ships the arrival was marked by just the opposite feeling from relief and gratification. The officers and men frankly were not in a placid state of mind. All were under an intense tension. They were what might be called wrought up. What, you say, American men-o'-wars men in a nervous condition—one that actually showed itself in their work and their play? No, not in their play, for there wasn't any. Well, but sea fighters nervous? Not a mother's son of them would admit such a thing. Preposterous! Men with nerves on warships? Well, perhaps not nerves as the ordinary person speaks of these anatomical cutups, but certainly something was the matter with all hands. Evidences of what the cub reporter would call suppressed excitement were plenty everywhere on every ship.

What was it all about? What was the matter? The answer is very simple and short:

The time to begin shooting had come—that was all.

But why get worked up over that, you ask? Shooting is what a navy is for. Of course; and in the old days real shooting was done only in time of war. The navy no longer waits for war to learn how to shoot. Twice a year it has exhaustive target practice—once for what is called record and once for battle practice.

Record practice is at a target at exactly a known distance. Every gun on every ship is fired individually at that target. Battle practice is at a target that simulates in size and distance the ship of an enemy. All the guns of the ship that reach that range are fired apparently helter-skelter for a given number of minutes. The range in that case has to be found out.

Record practice is held to qualify gun pointers, or, as the English call it, gun layers. Its purpose is to find out the best shooters in the ship and to give them practice. Battle practice is to give these gun pointers an opportunity of displaying their skill in what would seem to be slam-bang work, but what is really the result of months, and even years, of scientific training of the eye and hand and of the mind in knowing just when to pull a trigger or snap a lanyard at exactly the right fraction of a second.

You see, the secret of success in fighting on the sea, as it is practically in every kind of fighting, lies after all in what the Western man calls "getting the drop on the other fellow." The way to get that drop on warships is to find out the men who can shoot straightest and fastest and can keep their nerve, and then be prepared to turn 'em loose when war comes. The target practice here has been of that kind, to pick out and train gun pointers. It was record practice exclusively.

So far as this fleet is concerned this cruise was chiefly for this purpose. Aside from mere cruising and getting shaken down the officers and men had their minds and their energies centred on shooting guns. No matter what was the reason why the fleet was sent to the Pacific, the officers and men passed it by as something that concerned them only incidentally. They take their orders to go here or there with simply passing interest. They obey. Their one idea, their chief work, mentally and physically, during the entire cruise has been to prepare for this target shooting. To them it was the business end of the cruise.

Some people think that the purpose of the cruise was to go calling internationally, to say "How d'y do?" and fire salutes, the officers to be entertained with receptions and dances and dinner speeches and the men to have liberty on shore, with a chance to get a drink of real red "likker"; some might say that the purpose was to get data as to the cruising ability of the fleet; some might say it was to get the men used to what might be called the navy habit; some might say it was to gain experience in meeting problems of warship navigation; some might say it was for other than strictly naval reasons, to make a show of strength or to satisfy a public clamor or advance a political plan.

Whatever ideas others may have had about the cruise, the officers and men have had only one, as a matter of business and daily toil, and that was that the cruise would have its real naval culmination in target shooting in Magdalena Bay. That was what it was for to the men on these ships, and from the very hour the ships said good-by at Hampton Roads every effort was made to get them in fighting condition as a fleet entity. The target practice was to reveal whether they had done good work in strictly naval business. To the fleet the cruise was no spectacular parade around a continent; it was to prepare to shoot in the finest naval shooting place in the world, Magdalena Bay.

Every one was glad to see Magdalena Bay because of this tension. It is a splendid sheet of water, in a general way about fifteen miles long and ten wide, with a narrow entrance and water just deep enough for safe manoeuvring and good anchorages everywhere. A line of sharp crested hills shuts it in from sight of the Pacific. There is only one village on it, consisting of about twenty dwellings, and no commerce in its waters. The shores on the inside are flat and there is a good horizon. The warships of the world might find an anchorage here without crowding one another. It is cut off from the rest of the world, in a desolate, barren region, and was designed apparently by nature for the very purpose of modern target shooting.

It seems a pity that American statesmanship years and years ago could not have had the foresight to secure it, when such a course would have been easy, for use of the navy, when a great naval station could have been built up and proper use of the place for strategical purposes could have been made certain. With a naval station on Puget Sound, one in San Francisco and this one on Magdalena Bay, the entire Pacific Coast within our immediate sphere of action would have been within our grasp. Oh, yes; it's a pity—too bad—that we do not own Magdalena Bay. Perhaps an effort to secure it would still be a most desirable field for the exercise of statesmanship. One feels like suggesting to Washington to get busy and keep busy.

As soon as the fleet came to anchor there were things doing. On every ship what is known as bore sighting had to be done. That means that a telescope sight had to be inserted in the exact axis of the bore of the gun and the sighting telescopes had to be so adjusted that they were exactly in line with the centre of the gun. It had to be proved scientifically that when the sights of the gun were exactly on a bullseye with their cross wires the centre of the gun was also exactly on the same spot. Every sight on every gun had to be tested and checked up, and it was tedious work. But you couldn't shoot straight without it, and it took hours and hours of most careful adjustment to make sure that all was in perfect condition. Then came the laying out of the ranges. This required careful surveying. An equilateral triangle had to be laid out for each range. Along one side, the base, spar buoys with flags on them had to be fixed, and buoys fixed further along at each end, so as to give a ship an opportunity of getting on the exact range in its turnings. At the apex of each triangle a great raft of thick timbers and poles on it for the targets had to be put in position. All this took time, but it was surprising how quickly the work was done.

And then the targets had to be brought out. Now the ship's crew had been working on those targets in spare moments for several weeks. Each ship had less than fifty and more than twenty-five of them to make. The biggest targets are for the smaller guns and the smallest ones for the larger guns. The size is proportional, as the experts put it, to "the angle of fall," and the size also represents, they tell you, "the mean error of fire" of a gun. Well, the angle of fall and mean error of fire may not convey a satisfactory idea to you, but you must remember that the shot of a little gun goes to its target in a high curve, while the shot of a big one goes almost horizontally. So you can see why a little gun ought to have the bigger target. It curves more, has a greater angle of fall, than a big gun has. And the mean error of fire has to do with what experience has shown that guns perfectly pointed and fired ought to do. They vary a little in their performances and the target is just large enough for every shot to hit it, if everything works absolutely perfectly.

The making of the targets is a long job. Great rolls of canvas were broken out of storerooms and cut into a certain number of strips of a certain length. These strips had to be sewed together, and at times certain compartments resembled the inside of a tailor shop with sewing machines buzzing and trimming and cutting going on. Then the rough target had to be spread out and the edges cut off until there was just margin enough to sew it all around to a rope about an inch thick. It required hard work with stout needles and thick leather palms to put the ropes on all four sides.

Then came careful measurements for the black lines about two inches wide that marked the targets into squares and a great square in the centre for the bullseye. Out came the paint pots. Some of the targets were made black with white lines and white centres and others were left white with black lines and centres. Then came the battens to which the targets were nailed so as to be stretched on the poles of the raft. Ropes had to be attached in certain places for fastening the target in the exact place and at the exact height. All this work had to be exact, for the umpires measured every target to see that no ship got the slightest advantage.

The targets being prepared, the next thing done on every ship was to clear for action. All stanchions, boats, ridge ropes, chests, gangways, everything movable, were taken down and the decks stripped. Hatches were closed and the ship was stripped for fighting. Theoretically everything wooden and not absolutely necessary to the fighting of the ship was thrown overboard. Pictures were removed from bulkheads and crockery packed away so as to save breakage. So carefully was all this packing done on the Louisiana that all the breakage that occurred when the big guns were fired was one water pitcher in a stateroom under the forward bridge and one pane of glass in the bridge storm shield.

The articles that were removed were not really thrown overboard, but were moved to out of the way places and marked with a tag which read:

"Overboard."

These tags furnished about the only element of fun in the entire practice. A mischievous boy, who may have been too familiar with the ship's Angora goat—you know goats have a way of doing things to persons when the persons are leaning over sometimes, and do not expect anything unusual to happen—or who didn't like the way the goat refused to eat tin cans occasionally and also spurned a pot of nice fresh paint, tied one of the labels to Billy's horns. Billy thought it was a decoration and if he had been a jackass instead of a goat would have heehawed with the rest of the crowd.

Then there was a little rascal of a youngster who is always getting into trouble because of his pranks and all too often has to be summoned to the mast for his offences, where he gets regularly penalties of from five to ten hours extra duty and grins as soon as the Captain's back is turned. Something had to be done about him. A shipmate stole up behind him and fixed an overboard tag on his back. For hours he carried it about and was surprised to see that suddenly he had become popular, while the rest of the crew grinned and laughed and slapped their sides just as ordinary folks do on April fool day when a sedate man goes down the street with a rag pinned to his coat tail.

But why should they be nervous about the shooting?

Well, if for three months you had been working almost day and night in the practice of loading and firing guns, had been lifting, pushing, pulling things about to represent great and small projectiles and bags of powder, and if you had been drilling so as not to make a false step or move and had been getting up team work so as to do your work in the shortest possible time, where fractions of seconds count; if you had a gun crew or were a member of one where probably one-half of the men had never heard a big gun go off before and there was danger that you would go gun shy; if for weeks and weeks you had been told to do exactly this and that and never to do that and this, and a lot of other tremendously important things had been dinned into your ears, especially matters relating to safety, and you realized that some blunder of yours might endanger not only yourself and your mates, but the ship itself; if you recalled that the navy gives a prize to the best crew on the fleet for each kind of gun fired and there is also a ship's prize for the best work of these guns, and that if you did your work well and won out there would be from $20 to $60, or possibly more, for yourself and each of your mates; if you knew how one gun's crew bets it will beat its rival; if you knew how every man on every ship is intensely eager to get the naval trophy in shooting for his own ship, so that all hands can put on proper airs and say in a deprecating way: "Of course we were glad to get the trophy, but it was nothing, mere nothing; why, we could beat it all to pieces in a fight, but of course we don't want to brag;" if you could see these men working overtime of their own volition in the Morris tube training, the miniature target shooting that is practised daily on the ships—you'd begin to realize how a ship gets all wrought up over this target practice.

The Captain naturally wants his ship to come out first when you get down to the real business of a warship; the division officers want the ship to win and their own division to be first; the gun crews, with money at stake for them and with the great pride that Uncle Sam's sailormen have, down to the last man, to excel in any contest, are more eager, if that were possible, than the officers to get the shooting record. The result is that when the great day approaches every one is as much under a severe strain as a trained university football team approaching the great game of the season. Team work has been the aim of the drills. To pretend to be cool and utterly unconcerned is the little game of byplay that is going on.

As the day comes on you don't hear much levity about the ship. The time of the grouch is at hand. Why, even the officers can hardly be civil to one another, and as for the men they get saying things to one another in their disputes and heat and anxiety that would make a stranger think they were dangerously near an uprising. The ordnance officer loses all his friends and the division officers glare at him and one another as if each felt sorry that the earth in general and the ship in particular was encumbered with such pitiful specimens of humanity.

Now and then they get to telling one another what they think of things, not meaning a word of it, and sometimes a dispute goes clear up to the Captain for him to decide. He does decide it gravely, and perhaps when the disputants leave he turns away and smiles as he recalls that men are but children of larger growth, and after all he's glad to see these things come up because it shows how hard and earnestly every one is working and bending all his energies to be first. Be first! Be first! That's the thought of every one, and all these bickerings, sharp-tongued retorts, objections, suggestions, sullen looks—yes, even drawn faces—mean that every ounce of energy, of intensity that the men on the ship have is being expended in the task at hand.

When you see all this you can understand why the men of a 7-inch gun's crew, for example, who think they have what they call a look-in for the navy prize elect to sleep beside their pet gun all night, just as a stable boy sleeps in the stall of his great racer who is to be out the next day for the supreme contest of the year; you can understand why some of the officers refuse to shave themselves until target practice is all over and they begin to look as if they were training to be pirates, bad and bold; every naval hoodoo is avoided; you can see why the men go over every part of the mechanism of the guns oiling, rubbing, shining, testing parts until you wonder whether the gun itself is not in a state of agitation and the molecules, which the experts gravely assert are always in a state of motion, are not racing back and forth and saying contemptuous things to one another.

Why some of these men never allow themselves out of sight of their gun lest something may happen to it. They pat the guns with their hands and whisper pet names to them, and tell them to do their best, and if they win why they'll put ribbons on them and point them out to every one. And, indeed, more than one gun—it would be telling to say which ones—did wear ribbon decorations and did receive embraces from a victorious crew after the shooting was over.

Just before the shooting begins a calm, a stillness, comes over the ship. Men steady themselves with a supreme effort to keep cool, and the spirit of do or die takes possession of the ship, and as the guns go bang, bang and boom, boom you'd think these officers and men had done nothing else all their lives but shoot off projectiles and it was as much a matter of course with them as getting their breakfasts. All hands are now smiling and good cheer pervades every compartment, and it's "That's fine, Bill!" "Hit 'em again!" "Sock it to 'em!" "Soak 'er!" "You're doin' great!" "Never mind, that's only one miss!" "Bully boy!"

And when the target is brought on board between the runs to be repaired for use again you can understand why the men crowd around it while the umpires examine the rents to see if they made any mistake in their decisions and you can also enter into the feelings of some young fellow who has done the shooting at it and has to repair it, as he looks at it and sees only three hits, for example, out of five shots, while he fairly moans: "I'll never get over this as long as I live. I thought I was on the target and don't see how I missed it." And you can also enter into the feelings of pride and exultation of another youngster as he mends his target with every shot a hit and done in the fastest time ever known, while his mates slap him on the back and say: "Great work, Bob! Great work!" And when he finishes his mending and catches the eye of the newspaper correspondent on board you know how he feels when he comes up and touches his hat and says:

"You know my home, sir, is in a little town in the centre of Ohio. I don't suppose our country papers print your articles, but I know my people and friends, and I guess all the town, would be glad to know how well I did and would like to see my picture in the paper, sir." Well, you feel sorry that you have to tell him that you are not allowed to give results of the target shooting or to mention names or to say whether any ship or any gun did well or badly. But when you tell him that in good time all his people and friends and neighbors are sure to find out about it he smiles with great pride and says:

"Thank you, sir. I guess we've got 'em all skinned good and proper."

But how is it all done? Why don't you give details? perhaps you, gentle reader, as the old-time books used to say, are asking. Well, this article if it interests you at all will interest you because of what it will not say rather than because of what it will say. Listen to the pledge, which every correspondent bound himself to keep when he came on this cruise:

"To refrain from giving out for publication, either while with the fleet or later, any military information that might be of value to a possible enemy, such as detailed descriptions of mechanism or of methods of drills, of handling fire control (that means the way of controlling the fire of the guns), tactical manoeuvres, scores at target practice, etc."

And this pledge was supplemented on arrival in Magdalena Bay by further instructions from the Commander-in-Chief, which said:

"No statement of scores shall be forwarded or whether ships do well or badly.

"No comments on the workings of the battery or its appurtenances, including the fire control, shall be forwarded."

Now, what can a conscientious correspondent do when, for the good of the service and the welfare of the country, he's all tied up like that? Well, there are lots of things that can be told about target shooting, things that every naval man knows about and are no secret and that the ordinary person doesn't know about. There's no inhibition on writing about noise, and the flare of guns and the puffs of smoke, and the geysers that shoot up out of the water as the shots ricochet far out to the horizon. Oh, yes, the old adage is still true that there are a good many ways to skin a cat.

As has been said, the preparations for this target practice began as soon as the fleet was out of Hampton Roads. There was the daily drill of hours and hours at Morris tube practice, where the men shoot at little targets from little rifles attached to the big guns. The targets are kept in motion and every man has to shoot his string of so many shots. The division officer soon comes to know which men have the sharpest eye, the steadiest hand, the coolest temperament, and in time the pointers and trainers are selected and each man has his post assigned to him. And when the miniature target shooting is over for the day there is the team work drill with dummy projectiles and powder bags and day by day the men become expert in making this exact step and avoiding that false move, and show increasing deftness and zeal. They get to dreaming of what they will do. They learn just how far to lean back and move their heads when the gun darts past their faces in its lightning recoil, and those who have never heard a big gun go off try to imagine what the roar will be like and to nerve themselves not to mind it any more than a firecracker's report. Then as the final test comes and they hear the officers scold or praise them they get into the state of anxiety described in the first part of this article.

But it is time to shoot. Every one now is calm and eager to begin. The bos'n and three launches and two boats' crews go out and put up the first targets. The ship gets under way and steams about slowly until she gets the proper headway of a predetermined speed. The men at the targets set them up and steam away to a buoy a quarter of a mile from the target. Slowly the ship swings out and comes on the range, just grazing the buoys that mark the path. The men are at the guns. The outward buoy is passed and then the ship approaches the first buoy, where the firing is to begin. The exact range of that point is known. The elevation of the gun is known, as is also the deflection. You know the sights have to be right on the target, but the gun itself has to be aimed a little to one side, so as to account for the side movement of the projectile, due to the ship's motion, as it flies through the air. What is called fire control determines just how much the gun must be elevated and how much it must be deflected at a certain instant. There is a man at the gun who turns little wheels and adjusts gauges, and he gets word from some one else just what to do and when to do it. Never mind how this is communicated to him.

Meantime one man has been training the gun sideways and another has been raising or lowering it, independently of the man who has been setting the deflection and fixing the range. When the cross-wires in the gun pointer's telescope are right on the bullseye and it is time to fire he pulls a trigger and the electrical apparatus sends a lightning impulse into the powder, there is a roar, a thin cloud of smoke from the primer, a flash and you look for the splash to see if it is a hit.

As the ship proceeds along the base of the triangle the deflection and range have to be changed constantly. The change is greatest at the ends of the run. Along about the centre, when you are just opposite the target, the changes are slight, but it is just as hard to hit the target. All these changes are matters of fractions of seconds. It is not deliberate work, but it is done carefully, and there is where the element of training comes in.

The first roar of a gun sends a thrill through the ship. The man who has fired it is nervous. If it's a miss, he steadies himself at once. Rare is it that the second shot is a miss. The gun-shy part of that man's career is over. He is now as cool as if he were whistling Yankee Doodle. Bang and crack go his shots. Perhaps the gases obscure his vision to some extent. He waits an instant from time to time before he fires. Pump, pump, goes the trigger. He's got the range, he's got his nerve, he knows when he hits and when he misses. It's a big contest, and his tools of trade are the confined elements of destruction with the accumulated scientific skill of decades behind him, and the result depends upon his clear vision and steady hand. The task inspires him, his face is drawn tense, he forgets everything else. He becomes part of that machine of destruction, an automaton.

The most spectacular part of the shooting is with the smallest and biggest guns. The small guns are shot at night. Great black targets with white centres are put up, and then your own ship, or possibly another anchored near, illuminates the targets with four or five great searchlights. The guns boom, and soon a little curlicue of light is seen curving through the air. It is what is called a tracer, a chemical set on fire by the redhot projectile as it flies. You see it hit the target, and then under the lights you see a splash.

Then the light goes curving up into the air and you know the projectile is ricocheting. Down it comes. There is another leap and flight and then another and another, and far off, two or three miles away, it disappears. The projectile has made its last jump. So fast are the small guns fired that frequently from five to ten of these rockets are leaping and jumping toward the sky and curving back into the black water. It is beautiful fireworks.

Although the small guns are fired at night, some of them are fired in the daytime. The string of these guns is run off first. No noise of a gun is quite so disturbing as that of the 3-inch weapons. You may stuff your ears full of cotton—and nearly every one on ship does that—but the terrible crack smites through it and gives you a jolt. The deck feels an earthquake tremor, and you are glad when the ship goes off the range. But this is getting ahead of the story. Suppose the ship has just passed the outer buoy. Steadily she approaches the first firing mark. Soon word is passed:

"Buoy on the bow!"

The umpires have their watches in hand, the crew prepares to load. Now the buoy is abeam. A red flag goes up to the forward yardarm, the whistle blows and then the command is heard:

"Commence firing!"

That is all the command that is given. For the small guns a given number of shots must be fired as quickly as possible. For the big guns as many shots may be fired as possible within a certain number of minutes. The shots are counted carefully for the small guns, and when the given quota is fired the order is given:

"Cease firing!"

When the time limit has expired for the big guns a whistle is blown by the umpire who has the watch and the same command is given, but the crew has the right to fire one more shot within a given number of seconds so as to discharge any projectile that may have been in the gun when the cease firing command was given.

As soon as the command to fire is given intense activity starts. Crack goes the 3-pounder or 3-inch. Then comes the splash. A geyser jumps up out of the bay, then another and another, as the projectile hits the water. These geysers look as if Old Faithful of the Yellowstone had been brought down to give a special performance. The spurts are not in a straight line, for the curvature of a small wave deflects the course of the projectile and sends it careening this way or that. You can tell from the position of the spurt whether it was hit or not and you count the hits and misses carefully. You forget the ear-smiting cracks of the guns and the jolt of the decks. Did he make a hit? is what you want to know. And is the pointer doing his work well? Cheers come from various parts of the ship as hit after hit is made, and if it's a clean string there is general jubilation.

But the ship is moving steadily along the course. There is always a slight gap in the shooting when the pointers change positions and telescopes, but bang, bang, crack, crack, come the reports, and before you know it the whistle blows and the red flag is lowered and that string is over. Then the ship slowly circles around to the targets, and the repairing crew in the small boats dash over to mark the hits of the small guns with red paint and to make repairs, change targets and fix things up generally. Then comes another start for the range, and so hour after hour the ship goes back and forth until every small gun has had its say and every pointer has had his few minutes.

When the time comes for the target practice of the great guns no red paint is needed to mark the hits. You can see the projectiles as they near the target, needlelike things that seem to flee with the speed of light. You can see the holes they make if you take a glass. Their roar is dull and the shake of the ship is a powerful tremor. Your ears are not smitten, as with the smaller guns, but the shock is tremendous. You are close to the manifestation of a terrific force. But if you wish to see the best part of the work you must go into the casemate, where the firing is done. Ah, there's where team work is going on!

Take a 7-inch gun. The word to commence firing is passed. Powder and projectiles are all ready. The gun captain throws open the breech block. The men lift the projectile and place it in the breech. Scarcely have they removed their tray before a long wooden rammer is thrust in and the projectile, which has been carefully smoothed off and oiled, is run home and seated. Get out of the way quick, rammer, for the powder bags are being thrust in! Don't make a false step, for you may hinder some one who has just one thing to do in the shortest possible time!

The charge is now home, the gun captain whisks the breech block into place, the primer is attached and then the captain slaps the pointer on the back or cries ready. All this time the gun is being trained, the range and deflection have been changed, and instantly there is a roar, a blinding flash. The members of the crew close to the gun move just far enough back to escape the recoil, like a prizefighter when he throws his head back and escapes a blow by the fraction of an inch.

Open comes the breech in a flash, then another charge on it by the various men, another slap on the back, another roar and it's a hit or a miss. Then a third charge, and another and another. The men sweat and breathe hard, their faces become strained and some of them white. The fight is on, and the work, second by second, every one of them as valuable as hours would be ordinarily, saps the strength and energy of the men in their supreme effort.

"Every shot a hit!" cries one of the crew exultingly.

"What was the time?" asks another.

"So many seconds," says the umpire.

"That beats all records!" shouts another, and then there are cheers and great rejoicing. After the first fire scarcely a man hears the noise of the gun. It is a mere pop to them. Sometimes they overreach themselves in the desire to be quick and they make a miss. They don't hear the last of that for some time, but it's all in the work and part of the general eagerness to do well.

Then come the 8-inch guns. The rumble and roar is only a little worse than the 7-inch guns. The geysers shoot a little higher and the echoes from the report come back to the ship like so many sharp thunderclaps, where the lightning is close. Indeed, if you want to have a better reproduction of thunder than any theatre can produce just manage to be on a battleship while it fires off its 8-inch guns in rapid succession. It's the kind of thunder that comes when lightning hits and you look out to see if the tree in your front yard has been split. Crash after crash comes back to make you duck and dodge until the projectile has finished its thunderbolt career and darts into the water with perhaps the ignominious mission of killing a fish instead of shattering a battleship.

But the 12-inch guns! Pack the cotton well into your ears! Keep your mouth open! Stand as far away from the muzzle as you can on the ship! Secure all the things in your stateroom, for if you don't you may find your shaving mug on the floor and your hairbrush mixed up with the fragments of your soap dish! Close your port or else your trinkets may be whisked into a heap and some of them broken into pieces! The whistle has blown. The seconds go by, oh how slowly! Will they never get that gun loaded? Then comes a blast. The white flame seems brighter than sunlight, the roar runs through you like an electric shock, the decks seem to sink and you wonder if the eruption of Mont PelÉe had more force than that. You look toward the target. There goes the projectile, straight through the bullseye. Then an enormous geyser leaps into the air more than a hundred feet high. Surely that is Old Faithful! Then comes another half a mile away. Then another and another and you wonder if the projectile is going clear over to Europe.

And with this comes that peculiar roar that no other agent of power produces. It is more like the rush of a limited express into and out of the mouth of a tunnel. You can hear the chug, chug of the locomotive. You hear the rumble of a fast train on a still night through a valley. You can almost see the hills and the little river as the train dashes over bridges and noisy trestles. There it goes into the tunnel again, and before you can speak of it out it comes with another roar! More bridges and trestles, more tunnels, more chugs, and then there comes a steady roar. The train is going over the hill and out of the last tunnel, and you take a long breath. Before you expel it from your lungs there is another smiting flash and you are dancing on your toes again. The ship seems to settle and you get the geysers, the roar of the fastest train that ever ran. And so it goes until the whistle blows and you swing around to look at the target and then repeat the performance. You now begin to realize what a battleship means, and you are speculating about it when an officer comes around and says:

"Pretty fine, eh? Well, that's nothing to battle practice! when for a certain number of minutes we let all the guns go together. That's real noise! This is just pop-gun work."

Well, if it is not noise you begin to think that if there is ever another war you know one place where you don't want to be, and that is on a battleship. Every one of the ships had to go through this work, and when it was all over then it was that the men on these ships felt the sense of relief that none of them experienced over their safe arrival and the performance of the fleet on the way to this bay. They were ready to drop in their tracks. They were worn out, as the expression goes.

There is one moment of great suspense at every gun in such practice as this. It is when some adjustment has gone wrong, when some accident has occurred, and when there is real danger. Then the officer in charge cries sharply:

"Silence!"

That means that no more shots must be fired from that gun on that run. With it goes a penalty that works against the ship's record. More than once such command has been heard on these ships, but it is wise, for all too sad have been the records of accidents at target practice not only in our own ships but in those of every other navy. It would have pleased any one to observe all the precautions that were taken this time. The navy has learned some lessons. Safer and safer the turrets are becoming all the time. And this element of speed which enters into all contests with the firing of guns conduces to that end. You see, it is not only the hits that count but the time in which they are made.

But why this haste, you ask. Well, it trains the men to get the drop on the enemy and also, and perhaps of just as much importance, it reveals the defects in the system. In other words, it tends more to make turrets and ordnance what the experts call "foolproof." It may be said that nearly all of our ordnance on these ships has reached that stage, the stage where some man by some unforeseen fool action, one that no one could guess would happen, endangers and probably costs the lives of himself and several others. Every breakdown of a gun on this practice has had its value and it all goes toward speeding the day when these faults will be corrected and a ship may go into action with a reasonable assurance that all its mechanism will do the work it was intended to do. Yes, speed has its advantages, very great advantages.

What a change in twenty years! There are men on this ship who used to take part in the old practice on such ships as the Saratoga or the Quinnebaugh, the one that was on the European station so long that some one in the Navy Department forgot for a year or two to put it in the Naval Register. The Saratoga had one 8-inch muzzle loading rifle that had formerly been a smooth bore 11-inch Dahlgren gun, the kind of gun that resembled a soda water bottle and was called such. It was mounted amidships between the fireroom hatch and the break of the to'gallant fo'c's'le. The bulwarks at that place were pierced by pivot gun ports that could be secured as part of the bulwarks when the gun was not in action.

The gun swung on circles and pivot bolts by using hauling and training tackles, and could be used on either broadside and about ten points forward and abaft the beam. The ship had also four 9-inch smoothbore Dahlgrens to complete its main battery. It required about twenty-two men to handle such a gun. The charges of powder were in canvas bags and rammed home. The guns could be sighted up to 2,000 yards. The recoil was taken up by a heavy hempen hawser fastened to the bulwarks and passed through the cascabel of the gun. The range for target practice was 1,000 yards, and lucky was the gunner if he made 30 per cent. of hits.

In those days the men at the guns were not half stripped, as they are now. One-half of them were armed with cutlass and pistol and the other half with magazine rifles and bayonets. This was to repel boarders. That's all gone. No battleship ever expects to repel boarders in these days. Protection for the gunners was made by piling up hammocks and bags—about the last thing that would be thought of, with its danger from fire, in these days, even if all else failed. Nowadays the recoil is taken up hydraulically, and the gun is shot back into place with springs. Even fewer men are required to handle an 8-inch gun than twenty years ago. One of these guns will shoot five times further and do ten times—yes, one might say almost a hundredfold—more damage than the old ones. And there are eight of these on a ship like the Louisiana, to say nothing of twelve 7-inch guns, four 12-inch, twenty 3-inch and twelve 3-pounders.

In target practice on one of these ships ten shots are fired from each 7-inch gun, twenty from each 3-inch gun, twenty from each 3-pounder and as many from each 8-inch and 12-inch as can be got off in a given time. It may be stretching the proprieties to tell even that much, and to get back to generalities it may be said that about twenty-five tons of metal were fired from all the guns. The cost? Well, put it for convenience sake at $300,000 for the fleet. Expensive? Not a bit of it! That expenditure is the best money spent by the United States Navy. It is the premium of insurance paid annually for efficiency, and it will prove its value if these ships ever get into war. There'll be no hit or miss or reckless helter-skelter shooting then. To make the practice record here each ship has to steam about 100 miles in going over the course and in a general way it may be said that each ship made from thirty-five to forty runs on the range. There, that's about all to be said in print or elsewhere about target practice by this fleet.

Well now honest, you say, didn't the ships do well, pretty well, just a little better than ever before, perhaps a great deal better? Just that much is what you want to know? Well, you'll have to ask the Navy Department about that. In its own good time and in its own way it may decide to give out such information and it may not. You'll never get an answer from the Sun's correspondent on this trip.