Warships and their story

by R. A. Fletcher

They were the only vessels of their class in the British navy. The former was employed in the operations in the Sea of Azoff, and both were held to combine the three essential features of light draught, ability to carry heavy armament, and to possess the highest known rate of speed, so as to give them the power of choosing their own time and place of attack. The Recruit mounted four 68-pounders on her stanchions and bombarded the Russian positions at Taganrog at 1,400 yards, in company with a French steamer, the Mouette.

Among the numerous types of boats, recognised as belonging to the navy or improvised for some special circumstance, few acquired during the campaign in the Baltic greater renown than the mortar-boats, the gunboats, and the ships’ boats with their rocket apparatus. In the Baltic, as in the Black Sea, the need was felt of small, shallow, powerful ships which could engage the enemy’s batteries at short range, and similar batteries to those sent to the Crimea were forwarded to the Baltic also. The same difficulty of shallow water was experienced by the forces in the Sea of Azoff. So there was improvised by the officers and crew of the Stromboli a remarkable raft of twenty-nine casks placed in six rows and cradled in a framework of heavy spars, a portion of the upper part being planked over. The gun tackles were fastened to a spar lashed over the front of the planking, and the train tackle was similarly fixed aft. She was named the Lady Nancy. Her construction took twelve hours, and she carried a long 32-pounder, weighing over 2 tons, 100 rounds of ammunition, a heavy hawser, and a crew of eighteen. She gave a good account of herself at the Battle of Taganrog.

A fleet of screw gunboats, numbering nearly a hundred, and having engines of 60 h.p. each, was added to Britain’s naval strength during the war. These vessels were armed with 68- and 32-pounder pivot guns and 24-pounder brass howitzers. “The possession of this force,” according to a contemporary writer, “cannot be too highly estimated. No line-of-battle ship could be safe at 1,000 yards range, and, owing to their light draught of water (four and six feet), they could force their passage through the most shallow of the enemy’s creeks; besides which their 68-pound shells would tell at 4,000 yards upon a ship or arsenal.” Another hundred of these were all but completed, and the whole force was to take part in the great review at Spithead in 1856. “There will also,” said the chronicler, “be a new description of screw-gun despatch vessels, equally elegant and powerful. These beautiful specimens of British naval architecture have been built in the Government and private yards; they will average a speed of 16 knots an hour, and will mount five of the heaviest pivot guns. In addition to these there will be one hundred iron and wood mortar-vessels of the most powerful build, each armed with a 18-inch mortar, weighing five tons, besides half a dozen mortar-frigates (old 42’s converted). To sum up, then, England is prepared with:—Line-of-battle ships, 42; heavy frigates, 56; corvettes, 123; gunboats, 220; mortar-vessels, 100; troop frigates, 10; transports, 340. And nearly the whole of this gigantic force is composed of screw or paddle-box ships, besides an immense reserve. Well may Russia be desirous of coming to terms.”

After the feverish activity of the war came a period of comparative inaction. The whole political atmosphere of the world, however, was too heavily charged—too electric, as it were, to permit of hopes of lasting peace. In the United States of America the tension between the northern and southern states was already becoming acute, while in Europe the prevailing attitude of the powers towards one another was that of frigid politeness, which at any moment might thaw into hostilities. So there was no lack of incentive to continue the development of the fighting marine. The principal reasons why more was not done at this time were that naval architects and administrators were at the parting of the ways. Some urged that the types with which they were familiar should be adhered to, and that though armoured vessels were useful in the war against Russia, where peculiar conditions had to be met, it did not follow that such vessels would be of use in another war; and it was pointed out that they would be of no value whatever in a naval engagement on account of their unseaworthiness, or rather clumsiness, and the difficulty of handling them. Others, more far-seeing, urged that iron-clad vessels were bound to come sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, since it had been demonstrated that such were not only possible but, so far as they had been used in the war, effective, and that they showed that vessels of less size, armour-plated and carrying a few heavy guns, would be more than a match for any wooden line-of-battle ship afloat. It was contended that the gunboats which silenced the Kinburn forts would be able to give a good account of themselves against the best three-deckers in the allied fleets. But the Admiralty, still convinced of the excellence of the type which had done so well in the past, retained that type and went on building wooden ships, as for that matter did all the admiralties of the world.

In 1858, there was designed the last and the finest line-of-battle ship constructed of wood for the British navy. She was launched at Portsmouth in 1859, and commissioned in 1864, and under the name of the Victoria served as flagship in the Mediterranean, and was removed from active service three years later. She was a screw steamer, with horizontal return-connecting-rod engines by Maudslay, indicating 4,000 h.p., and with the boilers giving 22 lb. pressure she could steam at 12 miles an hour. She carried, on her upper deck, twenty-two 32-pounders and one 68-pounder; on her main deck thirty-four 32-pounders, on her middle deck thirty-two guns of the same size, and on her lower deck thirty-two 8-inch guns. A comparison of her armament and that of the next Victoria shows the remarkable change made in the course of a few years in naval artillery, no less than in the arrangement of the weapons on ship board.

But whatever may have been the conservative official view, the lessons of the armour-clads in the Crimean War were not thrown away, and many naval designers were attempting to solve the problem of the best means of applying those lessons to the altered conditions of modern naval warfare. Guns were invented, more powerful than any wooden ship could hope to withstand, and it was admitted to be impossible to place as many of them on a ship as of the ordinary weapons. The turret and the broadside systems had already been suggested, and both had their enthusiastic advocates.

The report presented by a Royal Commission appointed in 1858 to consider the relative strength of the British and French navies, first compared the state of the navies of the two powers before the Crimean War with that prevailing afterwards. In 1850 the line-of-battle ships of both countries were sailers, as were nearly all the frigates. The steam fleet of England at the time of the Crimean War was superior to that of France, which at one time had only one screw line-of-battle ship, the Austerlitz, available for the Baltic; but after the war the French lost little time in converting several of their sailing ships into steamships.

A return accompanying this report shows that although the British had five steam line-of-battle ships for every four possessed by France, including those completed or still under construction, the French had forty-six steam frigates to thirty-four possessed by this country. The report contained one significant item, viz., that four iron-plated ships were being built by France, and these, “appearing so ominously, had completely changed the situation.”[35]

The French naval architect, Dupuy de Lôme, was responsible for this innovation, and the four vessels were a testimony to his genius. The first of the quartette to be launched was the Gloire. Originally designed as a 90-gun battleship, she took the water as a 60-gun armoured frigate. She was of 5,650 tons displacement, and her three sisters were slightly smaller. Her armour was of iron, 4½ to 4¾ inches thick. She was not, as is sometimes asserted, armoured all over, but was plated her whole length along the water-line and for some little distance above it, and her central battery was also protected by a belt extending above the water-line belt. The engines worked up to about 4,200 h.p. indicated.

Iron armour over a wooden frame suggested a compromise in the matter of construction with which the Admiralty did not at all agree. It, therefore, decided on building an iron ship in reply to the Gloire, and the Warrior was the first seagoing ironclad. In her external appearance there was nothing to distinguish her from the average wooden steam frigate of the time, except her extraordinary length. She was a three-masted square-rigged ship, with a graceful overhanging cutwater, her dimensions being as follows: length, 380 feet, and 420 feet over all; draught, 25½ feet; depth from spar deck to keel, 41 feet 6 inches. Her engines of 1,250 h.p. nominal gave her a speed of nearly 14½ knots. She carried twenty-eight 7-inch muzzle-loading rifle guns, two other rifle guns, and two 20-pounder breech-loading rifle guns. She was built at what is now the Thames Ironworks, then the no less celebrated yard of Messrs. Ditchburn and Mare.