Warships and their story

by R. A. Fletcher

Broadly speaking, the cruiser of the present day is to the modern fleet what the frigate was to the line-of-battle ship in the days of the three-deckers. That is to say, she has to be the eyes of the fleet, able to show a good turn of speed, and capable of taking care of herself if need be. There the resemblance ends. The duties of the modern cruiser are multifarious. She has to be no less a commerce protector than a commerce destroyer, and while at one end of the scale she may be little more than a glorified gunboat, she may at the other end have to be able to take her place in the line of battle and help her more powerful sisters. Whatever her duties, speed is regarded as of great importance.

The Iris, in 1878, attained a speed of eighteen and a half knots, but more than seventeen years elapsed before this speed was equalled by any of the cruisers. Her sister ship, the Mercury, covered nearly 18.9 knots, or close upon twenty-two miles an hour. In 1895 the cruisers Amphion and Arethusa proved themselves able to exceed their designed speed of seventeen and a half knots, and thence onwards the increase in speed has been continuous, until we have the Invincible in the British Navy capable of exceeding twenty-nine knots under service conditions and in only moderately fine weather, and the Von der Tann, in the German navy, possessing a speed of twenty-eight knots under the most favourable conditions of weather and lightness of stores. At one time the German ship was asserted to be the fastest large cruiser afloat, but her supremacy, if it ever existed, in this respect was very short-lived.

The Phæton was one of the last class of cruisers to be given square sails. Her canvas certainly proved useful to her, for her machinery broke down during her commissioning trials preparatory to the naval review at Spithead in 1897, and had it not been for her sails she would have been totally disabled. The incident was seized upon by those who still favoured the older methods which had done duty for so many hundreds of years, as an argument for the retention of sail power for the ships of the Royal Navy, and the modernists replied that such incidents were few and far between, and with the improvements in mechanism which science was continually making would become virtually impossible.

Naval experts do not always agree as to the differences between a battleship and a cruiser. There are vessels in either category which could not possibly be placed in the other; but on the other hand there are some vessels that may be classed as either one or the other, and the types of the fast battleship and the armoured cruiser have been approaching each other in late years in so many respects, that some cruisers are fit to take their place in the line of battle against all but the heaviest battleships, and the natural result has been the appearance of the latest type of warship suitable for either duty, and known as the cruiser-battleship.

THE GERMAN DREADNOUGHT CRUISER “VON DER TANN.”

Photograph by Stephen Cribb, Southsea.

The Japanese, in their encounter with the Russian fleet, utilised cruisers against the Russian ships of the line, but whether they would have been able to do so had the Russian battleships been in as good condition as were those of their Oriental opponents is a point upon which opinions differ. The cruisers, like the latest Invincibles, have been given the armament of a battleship, but they have been less heavily protected in order to allow them superior speed; everything, should they have to take part in a naval battle, will therefore depend upon their antagonists and the exigencies of the engagement as to the duties they will have to perform.

Every nation has its own classification of warships, and the varieties of modern warships are so numerous, and the estimates of their effectiveness so much at variance, that it is little wonder the descriptions assigned to the vessels do not agree. Thus the American Maine, sunk at Havana, was described with equal accuracy as a cruiser and as a second-class battleship. But the nations have, for the most part, adopted the British classification of cruisers, though they have not failed to modify it to suit their own views. First come the unprotected cruisers, then the protected cruisers of the first, second, or third class; then the armoured cruisers; and of recent years the battle-cruiser, or heavy cruiser, capable of taking her place in the line with battleships. The unprotected cruisers have no side armour or other protection worth mentioning, and are mostly used for police duties, such as guarding fisheries, etc. They are lightly built and armed, and of relatively good speed for their size, and the duties they have to perform usually constitute the chief matter for consideration in the design of the several vessels. The protected cruisers have strong steel decks to protect their engines, etc., besides a great number of watertight compartments, and are classified according to their size, armament and speed, and the work for which they are intended.

Although the Admiralty adopted iron ships, it did not finally abandon its old wooden ships until 1874—or a year after that in which the first steel vessel was built for the Navy—in which year the British Navy was enriched by the addition of the wooden corvettes Sapphire and Diamond. Iron screw-driven cruisers or corvettes were the successors of the smaller fast wooden vessels, and a number of fast unarmoured ships of various types were built. One of them, the Bacchante, had the honour of being selected for the cruise round the world of the present King, when he and his brother, the late Prince Albert Victor, joined the Navy as midshipmen.