Frederick Leslie Robertson

“ In England, on the other hand, no great impression was created either by shells or by iron protection. A comfortable faith in our fleets of timber-built ships persisted; and, with regard to policy, as it had been with shell guns, and with steam propulsion, so it appeared to be with armour; the national desire was to avoid for as long a time as possible all change which would have the effect of depreciating the value of our well-tried material. At the same time it is remarkable how small an effect was conveyed to expert opinion, both here and in America, by the events of the Crimean War. ”

“ THE TRUCK CARRIAGE From the small truck, trochos, or wheel on which it ran, the four-wheeled carriage which served for centuries as a mounting for the long guns of fighting ships has come to be known as a truck carriage: the gun, with trunnions cast upon it, as a truck gun.
Artillery being from the first an affair common, in almost all respects, to land and to sea service, and being applied to ships as the result of its prior development on land, it would be expected that naval practice should in its evolution follow in the wake of that on land. ”

“ Great ships, in the opinion of Sir Walter Raleigh, were “of marvellous charge and fearful cumber.” The cost of so large a ship must needs be great, for not only the whole cost, but the cost per ton, increased with the size of the vessel; so wasteful a process was the building of a great ship, indeed, that it was not unusual to build a small ship simultaneously, out of the timber discarded: a practice known as “building a small ship out of a great one’s chips.” Ships of the greatest size, again, were “of little service, less nimble, less mainable, and very seldom employed.” ”

“ Science was still in its veriest infancy. The progress of ship design was still by the tentative and costly method of full-scale experience; not till the beginning of the nineteenth century, when new forces and materials had been discovered which in the end spelt the decline and supersession of the sailing ship, did science sufficiently direct the lines on which large sailing ships should be built.
By his bold deviation from established usage, says Fincham, Mr. Pett established his fame and advanced the interest and power of the British navy. ”

“ Later, although convinced that in any war involving this country and its colonies the chief combats must be fought in European waters, naval opinion saw the necessity for a type of ship designed primarily for the defence and attack of commerce: a speedy, lightly armed and protected type capable of overhauling and injuring a weaker, or of escaping from a more powerful enemy. The American War of ’62, in which no general sea action was fought, gave the impulse to the construction of the type which eventually became known as the cruiser. ”

“ La Gloire, the iron-belted frigate, was the direct result of the lessons gained from the floating batteries in the Russian war. After Kinburn the French naval authorities took up the study of how to apply armour to sea-going ships. Was it possible to embody in a fighting unit sea-going capacity, high speed, great offensive power, in addition to the defensive qualities possessed by the slow, unwieldy batteries? Could such a weight as iron armour would entail be embodied in a ship design without loss of other important qualities? ”

“ Bentham became a courageous Commissioner, and did much to stamp out abuses and to encourage efficiency; he was instrumental in checking the sale of stores, in abolishing “chips,” in introducing steam pumps, block machinery, and dry dock caissons, in improving the methods of building ships and of mounting carronades.
But still naval architecture, considered either as an art or as a science, was stagnant. As a class the Surveyors were men of very restricted education—“there is scarcely a name on the list of any eminence as a designer or a writer.” ”

“ Off-fighting was now feasible: a mode of action which largely neutralized the effects of an enemy’s superiority in size of ship or number of men, and which gave full scope and advantage to superior seamanship. Though no high standard of gunnery efficiency was then possible, yet it was the great superiority of the English gunfire, principally from the demi-culverins, the sakers, and the minions, over that of Spain, which conduced more than any other factor to the dispersal and subsequent flight of the Invincible Armada. The gun was the weapon on which the English seaman had learnt to rely. ”

“ To most Englishmen of that time any attempt to apply science to shipbuilding must have appeared as far-fetched and grotesque as these practices of the Laputans. Ship design was still an art, veiled in mystery, its votaries guided only by blind lore and groping along an increasingly difficult path by processes of trial and error. ”

“ The official designs were hampered, not only by the hereditary prejudices and dogmas and by the cautious timidity of the builders themselves, but by the restrictions still imposed by the Navy Board, who insisted on a certain specified armament in combination with a totally inadequate specified tonnage: who laid down incompatible conditions, in short, under which genius itself must fail of producing a satisfactory result. ”

“ Iron guns came more and more into favour as the century progressed, especially for naval use. The cost of iron was only one-eighth that of brass. The art of casting iron in homogeneous masses had by this time made progress, and though hitherto it had been the custom to make iron ordnance of great thickness and weight, repeated trial proved that they could be made lighter, if required, without undue loss of strength, and that in action they outlasted brass ordnance, which cracked, bent at the muzzle, and wore out at the vent. A well-made iron gun was almost indestructible. ”

“ The quantity of powder and shot allowed for exercise only amounted to one shot for each captain of a gun in seven months. No instruction was given in sighting or fixing sights, no system of instruction in principles was followed. And once again, as in the seventeenth century, the disadvantage under which naval gunnery laboured by reason of the dual control in all matters pertaining to the ordnance was strongly felt. “It is singular,” wrote Captain Pechell, “that the arming of a ship is the only part of her equipment which has not the superintendence of a Naval Officer. ”

“ Through many years, indeed, the two types held ascendancy each in its own waters; in the smooth stretches of the Mediterranean the oar-driven galley, light, swift, and using its sharp ram or bow-cannon as chief means of offence or defence, was a deadly danger to the becalmed sailing ship; in the rougher north Atlantic the sailing ship, strong, heavy, capacious, and armed for attack and defence only along its sides, proved far too fast and powerful for the oar-driven rival. ”

“ The events of the Crimean War tended to emphasize the doubt and uncertainty. A few there were who saw in that war clear proofs of the superiority of iron over wood; who argued that, though iron had proved to be dangerous in the form of thin plates in certain circumstances, yet it had shown itself to be impervious both to shot and shell, and indeed an indispensable defence in certain circumstances when applied in sufficient thickness; that thicker plates than those condemned as dangerous might therefore prove to be a great protection against shell fire ”

“ Captain Pechell was a firm believer in the desirability of developing to its utmost British material. He had an enthusiastic belief, moreover, in the possibilities of his personnel; and stated his conviction that officers were only too anxious to be given the chance of instruction, prophesying an emulation among them and as great a desire to be distinguished “in gunnery as in Seamanship.” His advocacy of a system of gunnery training bore fruit later in the establishment of the Excellent at Portsmouth. ”

“ At one time every man between the ages of fifteen and sixty had to possess a bow equal in length to his own height. Every township had to maintain its butts, each saint’s day had its shooting competition. The churchyard yew gave its wood for staves, the geese on the green their best wing feathers; and a goose’s head was the orthodox and inconspicuous target. No man under the age of twenty-four was allowed to shoot at any standing mark, and none over that age at any mark of eleven score yards or under. ”

“ Iron was condemned altogether as unsuitable for ships of war. “The shot and shell,” reported Captain Chads, “on striking are shivered into innumerable pieces, passing on as a cloud of langrage with great velocity,” and working great destruction among the crew. Nor was a combination of wood and iron any better. In fact the report claimed that, as regards the suitability or the unsuitability of iron, these experiments might be deemed to set the question at rest. ”

“ Expensive, designed with several aims and essentially complex,—a compromise, like man himself,—it could not be replaced by a number of small, cheap, uni-functional vessels, each constructed for one sole and special purpose, without loss of efficiency and concentration of power. Nor could it be supplanted by a type which, like the sea-going torpedo-boat, could only count on an ascendancy over it in certain moments of its own choosing—for example, at night-time or in a fog. To every novel species of attack the ironclad proved superior, calling to its aid the appropriate defensive measures. ”

“ The struggle between guns and armour begun with the Gloire and Warrior had continued. In the presence of the new powers of mechanical science, artillerists and shipbuilders had sought to plumb the possibilities of offensive and defensive elements in warship design. Guns influenced armour, armour reacted on guns; both revolutionized contemporary naval architecture. It was in the effort to aggrandize the power of guns that Noble discovered that, with the existing powders and with the short muzzle-loading gun, a natural limit of power was soon reached. ”

“ We have fallen into consideration of the length of cables, and by it we resist the malice of the greatest winds that can blow, witness our small Milbrook men of Cornwall, that ride it out at anchor, half seas over between England and Ireland, all the winter quarter.... For true it is, that the length of the cable is the life of the ship in all extremities. We carry our ordnance better than we were wont, because our nether overloops are raised commonly from the water, to wit, between the lower part of the port and the sea. ”

“ The Clermont, a flat-bottomed wall-sided craft 166 feet in length and only 18 feet in beam, steamed at a speed of five knots from New York to Albany, in August, 1807; to the surprise of thousands of spectators who knew her as “Fulton’s folly,” and whose shouts of derision gave place to silence, and then to a chorus of applause and congratulation. Many of the224 inhabitants of the banks of the Hudson had never heard even of an engine, much less of a steamboat. “A monster moving on the waters, defying the winds and tide, and breathing flames and smoke! ”

“ For coast defence alone steam vessels would be invaluable. The colonies would be safer from piracy. Passages, at present difficult or dangerous, would be made with speed and safety. Incidentally, an entirely new system of tactics would be evolved by the coming of steam; each ship-of-the-line would be escorted by a steam vessel, to tow her into position, and concentration of force would be obtained by such means as, harnessing two steamers to one sailing ship, so as to tow one half of the fleet to a position of vantage over the enemy. ”

“ Imperfectly bored; discharging a ball of iron or lead whose diameter was so much less than its own bore that the projectile bounded along it and issued from the muzzle in a direction often wildly divergent from that in which the piece had been laid; on land it attained its effects by virtue of the size of the target attacked, or by use of the ricochet; at sea it seldom flung its shot at a distant ship, except for the purpose of dismasting, but, aided by tactics, dealt its powerful blows at close quarters, double-shotted and charged lavishly, with terrible effect. ”