The situation was awful, and the loss of life everywhere enormous. Dense, blinding smoke, and the choking fumes of mélinite, obscured the sun, and in the darkness thus caused the flames from the guns shed a lurid light upon decks strewn with dead and dying. The cruisers and scouts by which our battleships were surrounded cut off many of the French torpedo boats, but a large number got right in among the fleet, and some terrible disasters were thus caused. Once inside the circle of British cruisers, all fire directed at the boats was as dangerous to our own ships as to the enemy's boats.
The superiority of the French torpedo boats was, alas! keenly felt by the British, for in the course of the first hour five of our cruisers--the _Terpsichore_, _Galatea_, _Melampus_, _Tribune_, _Mersey_, the turret-ship _Conqueror_, and the battleships _Hannibal_ and _Rodney_, had been blown up. As compared with these losses, those of the enemy were at this stage by no means small. The French had lost two cruisers and four torpedo boats, and the Russians one battleship, three cruisers, and six torpedo boats.
The British, with all these fearful odds against them, still continued a galling fire. The _Camperdown_, _Anson_, and _Benbow_, steaming together in line, belched a storm of shell from their barbettes, which caused wholesale destruction among the crowd of ships engaging them. Yet the withering fire of the enemy was telling terribly upon the comparatively small force of the defenders. Upon all three battleships the casualties were frightful, and on board each one or more of the heavy guns had been disabled. Suddenly a shot, penetrating a weak point in the armour of the _Anson_, entered her engine-room, disabling a portion of her machinery, while a moment later a shell from the _Amiral Duperré_ fell close to her broadside torpedo discharge, and a fragment of the shell coming into contact with the striker of a torpedo, just as it was about to leave its tube, caused a terrific and disastrous explosion between the decks. The effect was horrifying. The torpedo contained over 70 lb. of gun-cotton, therefore the devastating nature of the explosion may be readily imagined. Over a hundred men were blown to atoms, and the whole six of the broadside guns were more or less disabled.