Then another detail, and the most important of all. Speed, for a cruiser, is, of course, the prime essential. It means the power of picking out a foe, of running down a foe, the command of the weather-gage, the choice of the range, the power of bringing on or refusing battle. Twenty-three knots an hour, or 26½ statute miles, is the Monmouth's best pace. Twenty-three knots an hour means the covering of a land mile in 2 minutes 36 seconds; or 100 yards in 7-4/5 seconds. In modern athletics 9-3/5 seconds is the record for 100 yards. The record for the Oxford and Cambridge boat race works out at under 11 knots an hour—considerably less than the Monmouth's everyday cruising speed in time of peace.
How it is done is, of course, an engine-room affair. Two main engines drive the ship: one engine to each of the immense 16-feet-wide twin-screws. At full speed they work up to an aggregate power of twenty-two thousand horses: eleven thousand horses each engine. Thirty-one boilers, of the much-maligned Belleville type, supply the steam. What that means the staff below have good reason to know. The thirty-one boilers, with their 'economisers,' provide seven thousand tubes to be looked after and kept clean. Collectively, the boiler-tubes offer to the fires in the stoke-hold a total heating-surface of 50,300 square feet: an area, that is, of an acre and a sixth, a space about equal to Trafalgar Square within the roadway, or the floor-space of the Albert Hall. Each boiler has two furnaces to heat it, making sixty-two in all. When all are alight they burn 40 tons of coal at once, on a grate-area of 1610 square feet; practically giving off a square space of flame 170 yards each way.
The main engines, however, are by no means all. There are on board sixty-five separate 'auxiliary engines' besides. The weight of the machinery alone on board the Monmouth, amounts to 1750 tons—a fourth of the total weight of the ship.
Six hundred and eighty officers and men form the complement of the Monmouth, and their pay costs the nation £32,000 a year. To feed them, 'bare navy,' costs two-thirds of that sum a year. The ship herself, as she floats, represents to the country a value not very far short of three-quarters of a million sterling, or, put in concrete form, 8 tons of sovereigns—a railway truck packed tight. Our first ironclad, the Warrior, cost less than half the amount expended on the Monmouth. The Collingwood, a first-class battleship of eighteen years ago, cost to complete £20,000 less than the price paid for the Monmouth cruiser of to-day. Ten Victorys or Royal Georges could have been built and fitted for sea at the cost of this one cruiser of ours.
Such, in brief, are some of the 'points' of our modern Monmouth. The reputation that she has to live up to, the ancestry of her famous name, in particular the magnificent feat of arms that one of our Monmouths, the most famous of all, once achieved—these have now to be told.
The Monmouth, as a fact, bears a name that ranks second to none for brilliant associations and memories of heroism. Hardly another man-of-war has so many 'battle honours' to its credit. No ship of the Old Navy perhaps ever won such distinction in battle for sheer hard fighting as did the six Monmouths, one after the other, from which our cruiser Monmouth of to-day takes her name. Were it possible for His Majesty's ships-of-war to have ship flags for display at reviews or on other ceremonial occasions, just as the regiments of the army use regimental colours, the Monmouth's flag would show a record of upwards of thirty fights, and even then the list would not be complete. No flag, probably, could display the detailed record of the occasions on which Monmouths of old did their duty before the enemy at sea.
The navy owes the name to Charles the Second, who introduced it on the roll of the fleet as a mark of special favour and a paternal compliment to Lucy Walters' ill-starred son, the vanquished of Sedgemoor, whose headless body now lies beneath the altar of the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula in the Tower.
That was in the year of the Dutch attack on Chatham, and the same year saw our first Monmouth's first fight. Mr. Pepys's 'complaints' notwithstanding, the Monmouth made a good show on the occasion.[1] Her allotted duty was to bar the approach to the iron chain stretched across the Medway below Upnor Castle, and Captain Clarke, the Monmouth's captain, kept his ship at her post until the position was no longer tenable. The Monmouth later on was in the thick of the fight in the tremendous battle off Solebay, where James, Duke of York, defeated the Dutch fleet under Admiral Ruyter after nearly sixteen hours at close quarters; in Prince Rupert's three battles with the Dutch in 1673; and at La Hogue.
Our second Monmouth was with Rooke when he made his swoop on the Vigo galleons—which dashing affair is commemorated to this day in the name of Vigo Street, off Regent Street;—took a distinguished part in the capture of Gibraltar; fought the French off Malaga; and helped Byng—Sir George Byng, Viscount Torrington, the father of the other Byng known to English history, the Byng who beat the enemy and was not shot—to settle the Spanish fleet off Cape Passaro in the year 1718.