And then consider the ships that in 1860 graced the register of the American navy—ships that with the aid of steam could hold their own against wind and tide, and that carried guns of so large a calibre that any but the largest from Arnold’s fleet might have been shoved down their throats after the trunnions were knocked off. Arnold in his flagship, the galley Congress, had eight guns of which the bore was about three and a half inches in diameter, and the shot weighed six pounds. But when the Civil War came, the Minnesota was armed with forty-two guns of a nine-inch calibre and one of eleven inches, besides four rifles that threw elongated projectiles weighing 100 pounds and one rifle with a projectile weighing 150. Arnold’s Congress could throw at a broadside twenty-four pounds of metal over an effective range of perhaps 300 yards; the Minnesota could throw 1,861 pounds over an effective range of 1,600 yards.
And a still more wondrous advance was in the minds of men; it was at hand—an advance to a point where steel forts were to be sent afloat in place of the ships that were in 1859 the pride of naval seamen.
The Minnesota as a Receiving Ship.
From a photograph by Rau.
Remarkable as it seems to the present-day student of naval history, the changes in naval ships that produced the Minnesota before the year 1859—even the changes that gave us the steel fort afloat—were foreshadowed in 1813 when the immortal Fulton made plans for a ship of war that should not only be propelled by steam, but should be as impregnable to the guns of that day as were the ironclads of 1862 to the guns of their day.
A Loop-pattern Gun of 1836—a Type which Runs back over 100 Years.
Although this ship was designed in 1813, she was not sent afloat until October 29, 1814, and even then, although swifter and more convenient than Fulton had promised that she should be—although she was the very craft that on a smooth-water day could meet and destroy the insolent blockading squadron then off Sandy Hook—she was not put into commission immediately, and the war came to an end before there was opportunity to show what steam might do for the sea power of a nation.
