Famous Sea Fights, from Salamis to Tsu-Shima

by A. Hilliard Atteridge

h.m.s. warrior, the first british ironclad

Towards the close of the Crimean War a Swedish engineer settled in the United States, John Ericsson, had sent to the Emperor Napoleon a design for a small armoured turret-ship of what was afterwards known as the Monitor type. He wrote to the Emperor that he asked for no reward or profit, for he was only anxious to help France in her warfare with Russia, the hereditary foe of Sweden. The war was drawing to a close, and for his future projects the Emperor wanted large sea-going ships, not light-draught vessels for work in the shallows of the Baltic. So Ericsson received a complimentary letter of thanks and a medal, and kept his design for later use. His opportunity came in the first months of the Civil War.

In the fifty years between the war of 1812 and the outbreak of the struggle between North and South, the American navy had been greatly neglected. It was a favourite theory in the United States that a navy could be improvised, and that the great thing would be, in case of war, to send out swarms of privateers to prey upon the enemy's commerce. Very little money was spent on the navy or the dockyards. On the navy list there were a number of old ships, some of which had fought against England in 1812. There were a number of small craft for revenue purposes, a lot of sailing-ships, and a few fairly modern steam frigates and smaller steam vessels depending largely on sail-power, and known as "sloops-of-war"—really small frigates.

While the dockyards of Europe had long been busy with the construction of the new armoured navies, the United States had not a single ironclad. Both parties to the quarrel had to improvise up-to-date ships.

Sea power was destined to play a great part in the conflict. As soon as the Washington Government realized that it was going to be a serious and prolonged war, not an affair of a few weeks, a general plan of operations was devised, of which the essential feature was the isolation of the Southern Confederacy. When the crisis came in 1861 the United States had done little to open up and occupy the vast territories between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi Valley. The population of the States was chiefly to be found between the Mississippi and the Atlantic, and in that region lay the states of the Confederacy. They were mainly agricultural communities, with hardly any factories. For arms, munitions of war, and supplies of many kinds they would have to depend on importation from beyond their frontiers. It was therefore decided that while the United States armies operated on the northern or land frontier of the Confederacy, its sea frontiers on the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico should be closely blockaded, and its river frontier, the line of the Mississippi, should be seized and held by a mixed naval and military force. For these last operations troops on the banks and gunboats on the river had to combine. It was said at the time, that on the Mississippi army and navy were like the two blades of a pair of shears, useless apart, but very effective when working together.

Strange to say, it was not the industrial North, but the agricultural South, that put the first ironclad into commission as a weapon against the coast blockade. When the Secessionist forces seized the Navy Yard at Norfolk, in Virginia, a fine steam frigate, the "Merrimac" (built in 1855), was under repair there. The guard of the dockyard set her on fire before surrendering, but the flames were extinguished, and the "Merrimac," with her upper works badly damaged, was in possession of the Southerners. A Northern squadron of frigates and gunboats, steam and sailing ships, anchored in Hampton Roads, the landlocked sheet of water into which runs not only the Elizabeth River, which gives access to Norfolk, but also the James River, the waterway to Richmond, then the Confederate capital. The northern shores of Hampton Roads were held by Federal troops, the southern by the Confederates. Presently spies brought to Washington the news that the "Rebels" were preparing a terrible new kind of warship at Norfolk to destroy the squadron in Hampton Roads and raise the blockade.

The news was true. The Confederates had cut down the "Merrimac" nearly to the water's edge and built a solid deck over her at this level. Then on the deck they erected a huge deck-house, with sloping sides pierced with port-holes for ten heavy smooth-bore guns. The funnel passed up through the roof of the deck-house. There were no masts, only a flagstaff. The flat deck space, fore and aft, and the sloping sides of the deck-house were to be armoured with four inches of iron, but there were no armour plates available. Railway iron was collected and rolled into long narrow strips, and these were bolted on the structure in two layers, laid crosswise in different directions. An armoured conning-tower, low and three-sided, was built on the front of the deck-house roof. The bow was armed with a mass of iron, in order to revive the ancient method of attack by ramming. Thus equipped the "Merrimac" was commissioned, under the command of Commodore Buchanan, and renamed the "Confederate States' ironclad steam-ram 'Virginia,'" but the ship was always generally known by her former name.

At noon on Saturday, 8 March, 1862, the "Merrimac" started on her voyage down the Elizabeth River. It was to be at once her trial trip and her first fighting expedition. She was to attack and destroy the Federal blockading fleet in Hampton Roads. Up to the last moment the ship was crowded with working men. They were cleared out of her as she cast off from the quay. As the "Merrimac" went down the river the officers were telling off the men to their stations. Not one of her guns had ever been fired. There had been a few hurried drills. Everything was improvised.

The first disappointment was to find that with the engines doing their best she could only make five knots. She steered badly, answering her helm slowly and turning on a wide circle. As one of her officers put it, "she was as unmanageable as a water-logged vessel." She drew 22 feet of water, so that she had to keep to the narrow channel in the middle of the river, and the risk of getting hopelessly aground was serious.