RODNEY'S SHIP ON RODNEY'S DAY
THE FORMIDABLE THAT BROKE THE LINE
Brave Rodney made the French to rue
The Twelfth of April 'Eighty two.
Old Song.
The West Indies is the Station for honour.
Nelson.
'Who can feel any pride in a mere blustering adjective? We do seriously believe that the Admiralty would add something to the popularisation of the navy by a reform of the naming system. It is proper enough to christen new ships after famous old vessels of the past, and the 'Admirals' also are very proper and pleasant, but why this mania for adjectives and such futilities?'
So a London newspaper commented on the selection of the name Formidable for the great first-class battleship that to-day bears that name proudly lettered at her stern. Well, we shall see what we shall see. When all is said and done, it may appear, perhaps, that some of us are not so unreasonable after all in taking pride in seeing this 'blustering adjective' inscribed as a man-of-war name on the roll of our modern British fleet. Handsome is, every nursery knows, that handsome does. It is more than highly probable that should the day for 'the real thing,' as Mr. Kipling calls it, come in our present Formidable's time, those to whose lot it may fall to face the Formidable from the enemy's side will think that, in regard to this particular ship at least, there is something in a name.
This is the sort of vessel that our twentieth-century battleship the Formidable is, glancing at some of her points—the details on which she relies to make good the intention of her name. Hard hitting is the Formidable's business in life, so to speak, her raison d'être; her forte, the dealing of knock-down blows. To that end she carries the most powerful guns in existence: 50-ton breech-loaders, a foot in diameter in the bore; capable of hurling gigantic shells each between three and four feet long and weighing 850 lbs., or 7½ cwts., with a bursting charge of three-quarters of a hundredweight of powder or lyddite, through three feet of iron at a mile and a half off, or all the way across from Shakespeare's Cliff at Dover on to the sand dunes round Calais. Each firing charge of cordite weighs by itself nearly 2 cwts.—the weight of a sack of coal as delivered at a house-holder's door from a tradesman's cart,—and each gun by itself takes a year to construct. The Formidable's guns could silence the old 'Woolwich Infants' and the mighty 80-ton guns that the famous Inflexible carried, from a range miles beyond the farthest that the older guns could reach. Yet these less than twenty years ago were reckoned a wonder of the world.
A finger's pressure, nothing more,
The ponderous cannon's thund'ring roar,
A passing cloud of smoke, and lo!
The waves engulf the haughty foe!
wrote a versifier once about what the guns of the Inflexible could do. With less than half the weight, they are considerably more powerful weapons than the 110-ton monsters of the Benbow and Sans Pareil and the ill-fated Victoria, one of which was tested at Shoeburyness against a specially-built-up target of enormous proportions, and sent its shot, as easily as one can push one's finger into a lump of putty, clean through 20 inches of steel-faced compound armour, 8 inches of cast iron, 20 feet of oak, 5 feet of granite, 11 feet of concrete, and lastly 6 feet of brick—to a depth of 44 feet 4 inches altogether. As to the actual size of the guns, of the ship's heavier pieces: each is 41 feet long—13 yards and 2 feet from muzzle to breech. Pace this out on a gravel garden-walk, and imagine the length covered by a gigantic steel tube, three-quarters of a yard across at one end and swelling gradually to over 5 feet thick at the other—that may give some idea of the bulk of a Formidable gun. Such a piece of ordnance would have suited the mood of old Marshal Soult when he refused to fight a duel on the score of his dignity. 'A marshal of France,' growled the old gentleman at his challenger's seconds on their calling to offer him the choice of weapons, 'a marshal of France only fights with cannon!'