BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF THE TRANSITION
A few dates will illustrate the swiftness of our recent transformations. In 1838, when the French navy reduced San Juan de Ulloa, the principal defence of Vera Cruz, and in 1840, in the British attack upon Acre, the fighting power was wholly in sailing ships such as had fought at Trafalgar thirty-five years before. Two small paddle steamers towed the French frigate into position, while the four British vessels of the same type contributed only a desultory addition to the broadsides of seven sailing ships of the line, which compelled the surrender of the fortress. The first screw ship of the line in the British navy was launched in 1852; the last sailing ship of that class went out of commission in 1860. All alike, the ships of Vera Cruz and of Acre, and their short-reigning successors, the steam frigates and ships of the line, are now as much things of the past, in sails, in engines, and in guns, as are the galleys of Lepanto and the ships of the Armada. By 1870 it had been recognized everywhere that a type of vessel corresponding in essential features with the present armored battle-ships had displaced all competitors. The span of a single generation had seen the transition of the ships of Drake and Nelson to those of our own day. The career of Farragut was run in the intermediate period. His success for the most part was achieved and his renown won with vessels substantially of the older type, but with auxiliary steam-power.
It is almost needless to remark that this seemingly abrupt transition is but one incident in the startling progress made during the century in all the arts of peace as of war. Like the others, it is due to an intellectual activity, greater probably than that of our predecessors, and directed since the peace of 1815 less upon external political interests than upon scientific investigation, and upon the application of the results to the improvement of processes of every kind. The changes in conception and in development of the instruments of naval warfare result from the increased power of dealing with refractory material which has been acquired by scientific and practical men in the laboratory and the workshop. Thus viewed, though so rapid in realization as to amount to a revolution, not only is the change seen to be the outcome of a long, though silent preparation, but it is brought also into its due relation to the general movement of the age, and found to share its special characteristics. Our ancestors of the eighteenth century had their own problems, noble and absorbing, but chiefly political in character. While new worlds were being gathered into the embrace of European civilization, the leading powers struggling among themselves for pre-eminence in the work, and while the harvest was ripening for the French Revolution, science crept forward, but slowly and silently, the pre-occupation of the few, not the interest of the many.
The object of the present article is to describe the type of war vessel prevalent universally among civilized nations when the nineteenth century opened, and to trace historically the sequence of ideas and of facts which have resulted in the type whose general acceptance is seen now in the practice of the chief naval states.