The upper figure is a broadside view, the lower one a transverse section amidships. The upper portion of the hull was very like a raft, and was heavily armoured all over, as was the turret and the little pilot-box forward.
This first duel between ironclad vessels attracted an enormous amount of attention, as is only to be supposed. The net result in this country was that Captain Cowper Coles, R.N., was allowed to have a cupola- or turret-ship built which he had designed some years before. The Royal Sovereign, a wooden three-decker, was cut down to within a few feet of the water-line, plated with 5½-inch iron, and fitted with four turrets. The foremost one carried two guns, the remainder one apiece. She had very light pole masts and light, hinged iron bulwarks, which gave her 3-1/3 feet more freeboard at sea but had to be lowered before she could fight her guns. Captain Coles, however, had the usual hankering after "masts and yards", and, the Royal Sovereign having proved moderately successful, induced the Admiralty to build a fully rigged turret-ship. This was the unfortunate Captain, whose low freeboard, heavy turrets, superstructures, and fully-rigged tripod masts caused her to turn turtle in a squall off Cape Finisterre on the night of 6th September, 1870. Her inventor went down in her. Her gunner and seventeen men were the sole survivors. One other full-rigged turret-ship was built—the Monarch. As she had a very considerable freeboard she proved a seaworthy ship, but she was the last of her kind.[42]
In the meantime several small coast-defence turret-vessels had been built, such as the Scorpion and Wyvern in 1865, the Abyssinia, Magdala, and Cerberus in 1870, and the Glatton, Gorgon, Cyclops, and others a year or so later. They had one or two masts, but were not rigged ships. These little turret-ships developed into the battleships Devastation, Dreadnought, and Thunderer, launched between 1873 and 1877. Each had two turrets containing a couple of heavy guns apiece. Their hulls were heavily armoured, and they had but one mast fitted with a military top for machine-guns. It is from this branch of our earlier armour-clad construction that our modern "Dreadnoughts" derive their descent rather than from the broadside type.
To explain further developments it must be noted that while in this country the success of the Monitor induced us to experiment with placing guns in revolving armoured turrets, in France the tendency was to build a fixed armoured tower in the ship, and place the guns inside on a turntable en barbette—that is to say, so mounted that they could fire over the top of the armour in any direction. We tried to go one better in the Temeraire (1877). She was a broadside ship, with a "box-battery" amidships, but forward and aft two pear-shaped armoured barbettes were built into her, the tops of which rose about 1 foot or 18 inches above her upper deck. In each of these was placed a 25-ton gun—we classified guns by weight in those days, and not by inches of calibre as we do now—on a mounting, which enabled it to sink down on being fired, and to be raised up again into its firing-position when loaded. The Temeraire, it may be said, was an experimental ship in many ways. Though heavily rigged, she had only two masts, so was like an enormous brig. I believe I am right in saying that her mainyard was the longest and heaviest in the Service. At one time, too, she was painted grey, instead of the black which was then universal, except when ships were in hot climates, when it was generally changed to white. Yellow funnels were regulation, as was "mast-colour"—a sort of deep-yellow ochre with a reddish tinge—for all masts and spars. Ships were, and had been for very many years, painted white withinboard instead of the old eighteenth-century red. Outboard the black sides were finished off generally with a white water-line, and a broad white band along the upper part of the bulwarks, known as a "boot-top". Sometimes another white line was painted on the black side a few inches below it.
There was a good deal of controversy about this time as to the relative merits of "broadside" fire and "end-on" fire. Space forbids us from entering further into this question, but, generally speaking, if a British ship carried four guns heavier than the rest, they were so arranged that two could be fired ahead or astern, and all four on either broadside. But in a French ship the four corresponding guns would be each mounted singly in barbettes arranged diamond-fashion, so that three could be fired either ahead, astern, or on either broadside. A couple of armoured cruisers, the Imperieuse and Warspite, were built, probably as an experiment, on these lines, on the latter of which I had the honour of serving for something like twelve months. They were originally brig-rigged, like the Temeraire, but this was done away with later and replaced by a single military mast. Personally I do not think they were a success. The Warspite, at any rate, was a very wet ship. When steaming against quite a moderate sea the water ran all over her, into the barbettes and down below, and she was much cramped in many ways by the arrangement of her guns. The Devastation and her sisters proved very formidable and successful ships, but with the idea of getting a heavier fire ahead or astern a new departure was made in the Inflexible—the biggest ironclad we had yet constructed—by placing her turrets, not one forward and the other aft on the centre line of the ship, but en echelon—that is to say, diagonally amidships. Theoretically this arrangement, which had been copied from the big Italian ships Duilio and Dandolo, had a good deal to recommend it, but practically there is more to be said against it than for it. Nevertheless, four other smaller ships were built on these lines, the Ajax and Agamemnon—which gained notoriety as being almost impossible to steer—and the Edinburgh and Colossus. The last two were armed with breech-loading guns, which were now superseding the old muzzle-loaders to which the ordnance authorities had clung with such obstinacy long after every other nation had consigned them to the scrap heap.
Meanwhile a smaller single-turret ship, the Conqueror, had been built, an unwieldy-looking craft which went by the name of the "half-boot" from the resemblance her general outline had to that useful article of military equipment. But she seems to have met with the approval of the Admiralty, since an improved sister-ship, the Hero, was launched about five years later. These ships probably suggested the very much larger ones, Victoria and Sans Pareil, each of which, on a displacement of 10,470 tons only, carried a couple of 111-ton guns of 16·25-inch bore in a single turret—that is to say, as their main armament. They had also a 10-inch gun aft, and a dozen 6-inch breech-loading guns. These formed what is called her "secondary battery". The provision of such batteries marks a step in the evolution of war-ship construction which is very noteworthy. The bigger and bigger guns carried by battleships necessitated stronger and stronger armour. In spite of improvements in quality and manufacture the weight of armour tended constantly to increase. The area covered had therefore to be more and more restricted. To carry all this weight of guns and armour comparatively large ships were necessary, and a great part of their sides had to go without any protection at all. Their flotation might be preserved—against attack by gun-fire—by the combination of armoured belt and sloping armoured decks which had by now become almost universal. But it was obvious that the unarmoured portions of the ship above water could be torn to pieces by the fire of comparatively light weapons. This led to the installation of "secondary batteries" of 4-, 5-, and 6-inch guns, for the purpose of attacking an enemy's ship in this way and of neutralizing his attack by keeping down the fire of his secondary batteries.
Photo. West & Son, Southsea
The 111-ton gun on the old Benbow, which was very slow of fire and whose life was estimated at little more than 70 rounds.
The development of torpedo-attack brought about the Whitehead automobile torpedo, and the improvements in the speed and construction of destroyers and torpedo-boats caused also the introduction of "auxiliary batteries" of rapid-firing 3- and 6-pounder-shell guns. The machine-guns firing rifle bullets, and, later on, small steel shot, were found to have no "stopping-power" against torpedo-craft, and more powerful weapons became imperative.