Of minor navies little need be said. Austria had, in 1898, a fleet of 115 vessels of all types, including 13 battleships and 79 torpedo craft. Holland’s force was 185 vessels, 3 being battleships and 93 torpedo craft. The fleets of Turkey, Greece, Spain, and Portugal are “paper-navies” mainly. Norway and Sweden have a combined strength of 171 vessels of all types. Denmark, which began the century with overwhelming naval disaster at Copenhagen, has now a force of 3000 men borne on 50 vessels, half of which are torpedo craft. Argentina, Brazil, and Chili have afloat 102 torpedo vessels and 49 of other types. The vast growth in naval armaments during the century may be measured from the fact that the personnel of the leading navies of Europe, with those of Japan and the United States, comprised, in the year 1898, 368,028 officers and men, with a total force of 2749 vessels of all types, including torpedo craft.
III. THE BATTLESHIP,—PAST AND PRESENT.
In tracing the evolution of the modern man-of-war, it will be instructive to compare with her the type of the sailing age. There are two ships of the old time which hold chief places in the memory of the Anglo-Saxon race,—the Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, and the Constitution, whose achievements under Hull, Bainbridge, and Stewart, rang around the world. There were, even before the days of steam, war-vessels twice as large and powerful as “Old Ironsides,” but over no sea, in any age, has there sailed a ship with a more gallant record. [Plate I] shows her as she was in her prime—before the wind, with all sail set. On [Plate II] there is given a side view of her hull, which is of historic interest, in that it is reproduced from the original drawing made in October, 1796.
NELSON’S FLAGSHIP VICTORY.
When her power and dimensions are compared with those of the Oregon, our sea-fighter of to-day, one sees what time has wrought. The frigate carried 456 men, the armor-clad, 500; and yet, with this approximately equal force, the Oregon has a displacement 6½ times that of her famed predecessor; and although the number of the guns—44—is the same in each, she discharges a broadside 8.3 times heavier and in energy overwhelmingly superior. The speed of the battleship is one half greater than that of the Constitution, and she carries armor varying from 18 inches to 4 inches thick, which the frigate wholly lacked. The longitudinal section of the Oregon indicates the immense advance in other directions. Her hull is, for safety, minutely subdivided, and is provided with engines for propulsion, steering, lighting, drainage, and ventilation, numbering in all 84, with miles of piping and hundreds of valves. The time-honored frigate was but a sail-propelled gun-platform, whose wants were as few as her construction was simple; the steel-clad battleship is a mass of mechanism, a floating machine-plant, which for full efficiency must be manned by a personnel not only brave and daring as of old, but expert in many arts and sciences, which in the age of sail were but rudimentary or unknown.
PLATE I. CONSTITUTION (1812) UNDER SAIL.