Warships and their story

by R. A. Fletcher

THE “PRINCE ALBERT” (SISTER SHIP TO THE “ROYAL SOVEREIGN”) AS
CONVERTED TO A TURRET SHIP.

From the Model in the Royal Naval College, Greenwich.

H.M.S. “MINOTAUR.”

Photograph by Symonds & Co., Portsmouth.

The dimensions of the first British turret ship compare curiously with those turret ships which followed her in rapid succession, both in the British and other navies. She was 240 feet 7 inches in length, with an extreme beam of 62 feet and a draught aft of 24 feet 11 inches.

Even after the launch of the Warrior the Admiralty ordered a few wooden ships, but in 1866 decided upon the adoption of iron warships. One of the last and certainly one of the best to look at of the wooden armour-plated ships was the steam frigate Lord Clyde, but as a sailer she had many defects, of which slowness was not the least. In her case the armour extended to the ends of the ship, and nowhere was it less than 4½ inches in thickness, while at the water-line the armour plates were 5½ inches thick. The sides of the entire battery deck from stem to stern, and from 3 feet below to 3 feet above the ports, were plated with 6-inch armour, of which one thickness of 1½ inches was bolted to the ship’s frame, and the other, of 4½ inches, was placed upon the outside of the planking. The armour went 6 feet below the water-line amidships, and for the sake of lightness was only 4½ feet deep at the ends. The gun ports were 8 feet 9 inches above the water-line, or 2 feet 6 inches higher than those of La Gloire. She was the first vessel in the British Navy to carry an armour-plated bow battery on the main deck. This armour plating also was carried upwards to protect an upper-deck bow battery mounted under the ship’s forecastle. This arrangement enabled her to fire four guns ahead, while exposing to the enemy’s fire only the curved surface of her bow armour. She also had a distance of 15 feet between each gun port on her main deck. Her engines of 1,000 h.p. nominal, and 6,000 indicated, drove a two-bladed Griffith’s adjustable propeller 28 feet in diameter.

From 1860 to 1866 ten broadside ironclads were added to the navy, the last and the largest being the Northumberland of 10,780 tons. All these vessels, except the Hector and Minotaur, carried muzzle-loaders, but these two had breechloaders of the early Armstrong screw type, which were soon superseded by more powerful weapons. The Minotaur carried fifty guns, the Northumberland twenty-six.

Then followed the abandonment of the broadside and the confinement of the heavy armament of an ironclad to a central battery protected by thick iron side armour and armoured bulkheads, the only other portion of the ship to be thus protected being that near the water-line. The first of these in the British Navy was the Bellerophon, launched in 1865; she was of 7,550 tons displacement, and her engines, of 6,520 h.p. indicated, drove one screw and gave her a speed of fourteen knots. Her thickest armour was 6 inches, and her heaviest gun a 12-ton muzzle-loader. Altogether she carried fourteen guns, including one in a small armoured citadel in the bows.

Great though the advantages were of the screw propeller, it was admitted that it was not without many drawbacks. The single screw took up a lot of room, weakened to some extent the structure of the stern, and if anything happened to the engines or propeller the ship was helpless and had to depend entirely upon whatever sail power she might possess. To overcome this difficulty Messrs. J. and W. Dudgeon were the first to build, from the designs of Mr. John Dudgeon, a twin-screw ocean-going steamship. Twin and triple screws had been used before, but were driven by the one engine.