may have tried to pass too closely to Naniwa and Tōgō, fearing a torpedo attack, fired the first shots of the war. The Chinese cruiser was badly damaged, with her forward gun disabled, but managed to reach Weihaiwei (modern Weihai) despite being pursued by Yoshino. Naniwa and Akitsushima crippled the gunboat with heavy loss of life, which had to be beached to prevent her sinking. At about 08:30 Jiyuan passed Kowshing, but the Chinese cruiser did not inform Kowshing of the battle and Kowshings crew misidentified the cruiser as a Japanese vesel. Tōgō ordered the British ship to heave to at 09:15 and Captain Galsworthy complied. He also consented to a search of his ship. Tōgō declared the ship seized as it was ferrying Chinese troops and ordered the crew and passengers to abandon ship. The Chinese troops took control of the ship and refused to comply with his orders. An attempt to negotiate a peaceful settlement by a German officer in Chinese service failed and Tōgō opened fire at 13:10 for fear of Chinese reinforcements. A torpedo launched at a range of went underneath the steamer's keel, but Naniwas guns did not, disabling the British ship's boiler room, possibly causing one boiler to explode, and hitting her below the waterline. This caused a panic aboard the Kowshing as the crew and passengers attempted to abandon ship. Naniwas heavy guns continued to fire at the sinking ship, while her light guns targeted the swimmers in the water. After the steamer sank at 13:47, the Japanese launched boats in an attempt to rescue the ship's European crew, ignoring the Chinese in the water, but only found Galsworthy and two other Europeans. Naniwa was hit once early in the battle, but the shell failed to detonate and it inflicted neither damage nor casualties. The cruiser only fired 36 shells from its heavy guns during the battle and 1,331 rounds from its light guns. Two days after the battle, Naniwa and the gunboat returned to the wreck of the Kwang-yi to prevent any attempt to salvage the ship. The ship exploded when fired upon, probably as a result of the torpedo warheads detonating, which destroyed the gunboat. The IJN spent the next several weeks escorting troop convoys to Kunsan. On 9 August, Vice Admiral Itō, now commanding the Combined Fleet, took his ships to Weihaiwei, China, in search of the Beiyang Fleet and