Man on the Ocean: A Book about Boats and Ships

by R. M. Ballantyne

We shall now briefly describe the Devastation, one of the largest and most powerful of all our ironclads. The Devastation in her after-part rises but four feet and a half above the water; but to meet bad weather she is furnished with an armour-plated half-raised forecastle, so that forward she is nine feet out of the water. The free-board amidships is still higher, being at this point level with the platform on which the two turrets are placed. In the centre of the ship rises a circular iron erection, on the top of which is the hurricane-deck. Through this structure runs a passage, in which are situated the entrances to the hatchways and to the hurricane-deck overhead.

From the hurricane-deck rise the ship’s two funnels; and here also are the captain’s fighting box, already alluded to in describing the coast-defence ships, the fire-proof shield for protecting the steering gear, and the boats. In a gale the hurricane-deck is the only safe place in ships of this kind—the only place where one would not get speedily washed overboard. As for the below part of the ship, it is there almost impossible to breathe, even when air has been pumped in from above, which is the only means of ventilating this portion of the vessel.

The Devastation carries two guns in each of her turrets, placed side by side, each weighing thirty-five tons. The turrets, directly the guns have been fired, can be wheeled rapidly round, thus turning the exposed parts away from the enemy.

Ships such as the Devastation, the Thunderer, and the Fury do not, at first sight, strike one as particularly well adapted for rough weather, to put it in the mildest phrase. Nevertheless, the Devastation has been fairly well tested in this way, having encountered some pretty rough weather, and, it is affirmed, behaved satisfactorily. The great danger about all ships of this class is that they may not rise to the seas, but that the waves, breaking over them, may press them down and founder them. The Thunderer has been known to have her forecastle, which is somewhat lower than that of the Devastation, completely submerged, and this, too, when no very high sea was running. These ships are designed, not for home service and coast defence merely, but for general action in mid-ocean.

To attempt to describe even a single specimen of each type of modern war-ships would to a certainty weary the reader, for to any but an expert there would inevitably be a sense of repetition in the perusal of such a narrative. But in order to place before our readers something like an approximate idea, at any rate, of the present state of our navy, we shall examine briefly one other first-class ironclad, the Inflexible, which may be regarded as a leading example of ironclad ships, and, at the time of writing, as one of the highest achievements of modern naval architecture.

The Inflexible is the vast size of 11,400 tons burden, her horse-power being 8000. The length is 320 feet, her armour-plating from 16 to 24 inches thick, with an inner lining of wood from 17 to 25 inches in thickness. She is divided into 135 compartments, and her engines are placed at such a distance from each other that should one be disabled from any cause the other would still be in working order.

The chief characteristic of the Inflexible is the position of the turrets. The majority of ships of this description have their turrets in the middle line, from which it results that only one half of their guns can be directed on an enemy, whether ahead or astern. The Inflexible has her turrets on each side—the fore-turret on the port-side, the after-turret on the starboard. She can thus use the whole of her guns against an enemy at the same time, whether it be ahead or astern.

It will be seen that the thickness of the armour-plating with which the Inflexible is protected is enormous; and yet this thickness of iron has been pierced. The question, then, that immediately suggests itself is, Can a vessel be constructed to carry much heavier armour-plating than this? A recent writer in the Times declares not. “So far as the exigencies of the navy are concerned,” he says, “the limit of weight seems to have already been reached, for the simple reason that the buoyancy of our ironclads cannot with safety be further diminished by the burden of heavier armour and armaments.”

The following very graphic description of the interior of a turret-ship was written by an eye-witness of the scene described. It is an extract from a narrative supplied to the author of “The Sea: its Stirring Story of Adventure and Peril,” from which we take it. The vessel described was the Miantonoma, an American ironclad turret-ship.