Warships and their story

by R. A. Fletcher

STEAM AND WARSHIPS

The use of the steam engine as a propellant had been established in the mercantile marine long before the British Admiralty led the way in the adoption of the steamship as an engine of war. There were several reasons why the decision to take the important step was not reached earlier. In the first place there was a repugnance, amounting with many persons to an unconquerable aversion, against the use of the steamship for any purposes whatever. Steamships were regarded as unsightly with their splashing paddle-wheels and their high funnels belching forth smoke, and as the steam mercantile marine had been by no means free from boiler explosions and had lost many vessels through fires caused by sparks or cinders from the furnaces, or the overheating of wood work near the flues, it was argued that the introduction of so many fresh dangers into the country’s fighting ships would only add to the perils of the sea, which were already serious and numerous enough.

The navy possessed many fine wooden ships which could be handled extremely smartly under sail and presented a magnificent contrast and beautiful picture compared with the smoky steamer. The latter, it was graciously admitted, might have its uses in towing the sailing warships, but that anything further should be advocated was too subversive of all that had gone before; too revolutionary, indeed, to merit a moment’s consideration.

It was in vain that the advocates of the adoption of steam propulsion urged that the steamship could carry guns, that she would be independent of wind and tide, and that she could choose her own position. These strategical advantages were simply derided. What, it was asked in reply, could a small steamship armed with such guns as she could carry, do against a battleship; or, for that matter, what could any number of armed steamships do? When it was pointed out that an armed steamship could engage with every advantage an enemy’s ship of the same size, the retort was that a battleship would never be far off. Strange though these objections seem to us in the light of subsequent events, it must be recollected that marine steam engines in those days were bulky for their power and weak for their weight, and consumed an enormous amount of coal for the energy developed, and that there was no room to spare in the fighting ships of the period; also, that the steam engine was not far removed from the experimental stage. For the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth century the Admiralty had every excuse for the maintenance of its conservative attitude.

In America, also, the objections to steam war vessels were as acute as in this country. One United States secretary of the navy declared that he would never consent to see the beautiful sailing warships displaced by hideous and smoky steamers, but the advocates of the new method of ship propulsion were not of his opinion, and so worried the worthy man that in despair he wrote to a sympathetic friend, “I am steamed to death.” Another and earlier American administrator was so opposed to warships of any kind, or at least to spending much money on their construction, that he conceived the brilliant idea of having some small gunboats built which could be taken overland from port to port and launched afresh, when necessary, to oppose the British warships. It is a pity he could not have derived some inspiration from the invention of Oliver Evans, an American, who in 1804-5 designed a dredger which bore the terrible name of Orakier Amphibolos; it had a steam engine of some sort, and propelled itself on wheels from the shed where it was built, to the Schuylkill, a distance of a mile and a half, and being fitted with a paddle wheel in the stern, navigated the river to its junction with the Delaware.[27]

France, like England, was disposed at first to look upon the steam engine as useless for naval purposes, and until well towards the middle of the nineteenth century she was a long way behind England in the application of steam power to the navy. Many of the smaller nations, however, having but a few insignificant sailing ships for war, were not trammelled, as were England and France, by the possession of a large fleet of wooden sailing vessels of types which had helped to build up the national renown, nor had they to contend against the energy of a powerful section of the community which, conscious of what had been accomplished with the sailing warships, despised anything else and hated innovations. The smaller nations were the better able, therefore, to experiment with warships of the new type than were the great maritime powers, and one or two of them ordered small steamers carrying a few small guns. These were mostly converted merchant steamers, it not being until after England and France had definitely adopted steamers that the other nations ventured to possess steamships specially built for purposes of war.

But when steam navigation had become an accomplished fact and steam-propelled vessels were able to undertake ocean voyages, there was the less excuse for the absolute rejection of steam-driven ships for war purposes. The objections raised, and they were certainly serious, were that the paddle-boxes were large and increased the size of the target at which the enemy could aim, that one or other of the paddle-wheels could easily be disabled by a hostile shot, in which case the steamer would be almost helpless, and would be entirely so if both wheels were disabled; that the engines and boilers, being partly above the water-line, were peculiarly vulnerable, and that the only vessels of a size capable of being propelled by paddle engines were too small to be of much fighting value.

Long before steam engines were adopted in any form in the navy, numerous experiments had been made in the mechanical propulsion of warships, and some extraordinary methods were brought forward. The remarkable feature of nearly all these experiments is that they would propel a vessel; but the inventors could not be taught, except by the bitter lesson of experimental failure, that an appliance which might attain a certain measure of success with a small boat or a model might be incapable of developing sufficient power to propel a larger vessel. Several inventors, both in this country and America, tried what they could do with oscillating paddles at the stern. Manual power was tried on the frigate Doncaster at Gibraltar, in 1802, to drive a “perpetual sculling machine,” invented by a man named Shorter, and a speed of something under two miles an hour in still water was obtained.

Certain of the early experiments in America had an important influence upon the development of the steam warship, though the proof of that influence did not become evident for many years.

Colonel John Stevens, who had a small, screw-propelled steamboat on the Hudson, in 1804, and a twin-screw steamer in the following year, designed, in 1813, an iron-clad ship which fully embodied the Monitor type, and was the first ironclad ever worked out for construction. It was Stevens who sent the first steamer on a sea voyage; his vessel, the Phœnix, being shut out of the waters of New York by the monopoly which Fulton and his friends had secured, went round to the Delaware by sea in June, 1809, experiencing a gale on the way, which compelled her to seek shelter in Barnegat Inlet.