A MODERN SUPER-DREADNAUGHT
Which carries the heaviest type of guns, and is protected by heavy armour. Its speed is less than that of cruisers.
The Monitor was a strange-appearing ship. The fact that she was said by the Confederates to be a “cheese box on a raft” gives some idea of her appearance. She was 170 feet long, 41½ feet wide, and displaced about 1,200 tons, but her appearance was unique. Her deck was but two feet above the water and from bow to stern she was as smooth as a paved street except for a tiny pilot house near the bow and a huge round “cheese box” amidships. This cheese box was the turret and in it were mounted two 11-inch Dahlgren guns, the Monitor’s only battery. The turret was about twenty-two feet in diameter and the sides of it were of iron eight inches thick. This was built up of eight thicknesses of one-inch plates bolted together. The broad smooth deck was covered with three inches of iron and the low sides with five inches. This strange vessel was completed just in time to be sent to Hampton Roads in order to protect the wooden ships of the Union Navy from the ferocious and effective onslaughts of the Merrimac, a Confederate ironclad that had just sunk the Cumberland and set fire to the Congress. This ship had been the wooden frigate Merrimac which had been partly burned when the Union forces had abandoned the Norfolk Navy Yard. The Confederates had raised her, repaired her, cut her sides down almost to the water line, and had built a huge deck house amidships. This deck house, in which the cannon were mounted, had sloping walls which were covered with railroad rails. Harking back to the time of Greece, they affixed a huge ram to her bow, and then sent her forth against the Union ships in Hampton Roads. Their shells ricochetted from her armoured sides like hail from a tin roof. All the cannon the helpless Cumberland could bring to bear disturbed her not at all, and slowly bearing down upon her wooden adversary she buried her ram in the Cumberland’s hull. Slowly the old sailing ship filled and sank, her guns still firing and her shells still glancing harmlessly from the Merrimac’s armour of rails. The Confederate ship then turned her attention to the Congress, shelled her and set her on fire, and then calmly returned to her base none the worse, save for a few dents in her armour.
But during the night that followed the Monitor appeared, having slowly made her way down the coast from New York. The next day the Merrimac came out to finish her work of destruction, when the Monitor, a tiny ship beside her great opponent, steamed slowly toward the approaching ironclad. A duel memorable in naval annals followed—the first battle between ironclad ships.
As the two ships approached each other the Monitor’s turret slowly revolved. The black muzzles of the two guns came to bear on her great antagonist. A double blast from them, and the Merrimac reeled from the shock, but the turning turret had carried the gun muzzles on around, away from the fire of the Confederate ship. As the turret revolved the gun crew, with feverish haste, loaded again, and once more the muzzles faced the Merrimac. All this time the Confederate had been raining shells at her little opponent, but they glanced harmlessly from the deck or barely dented the iron walls of the turret. The Merrimac tried to ram, but the Monitor out-manœuvred her and the battle continued. A shell struck the Monitor’s pilot house and the commander was temporarily blinded, but the fight continued. At last, however, the Merrimac withdrew. The fight, perhaps, was a draw, but can more properly be called a victory for the Monitor—the first ship to mount a turret, for the Merrimac never again faced a Union ship, and later in the war was sunk by her own men to keep her from falling into the hands of their enemies.
A BATTLE CRUISER
A ship carrying the heaviest of guns but lacking the heavy armour of the dreadnaughts. Its speed is greatly superior to that of dreadnaughts.
Following this engagement many ships similar to both the Monitor and the Merrimac were built to take part in the Civil War. And others of other designs were constructed. The war ended, however, with no further important steps having been made in the design of warships.
Following the Civil War the Navy of the United States fell into decay for twenty years, but European nations continued the building of ironclad and, later, steelclad warships. In these, many experiments were made with turrets and side armour but little of permanent value resulted.