“I have no doubt it would suit the purposes of all those who are or who have been responsible for those ships if I were to allow myself to be drawn, in connection with this question, away from the essential points just adverted to into a controversy upon the efforts made by the Admiralty to give to these ships, which have been denied a reasonable amount of armor protection, such relief from the grave dangers thus incurred as thin sheet compartments, coffer-dams, coals, patent fuel, stores, etc., can afford. (Cork is what was at first relied upon in this connection, but we hear no more of it now.) But I do not intend to be drawn aside from my demand for properly armored ships of the first class by any references to these devices, and for a very simple reason, viz., all such devices, whether their value be great or small, are in no sense special to armored ships; on the contrary they are common to all ships, and are more especially applied to ships which are unable to carry armor. The application of these devices to ships stripped of armor does not make them armored ships, any more than it makes a simple cruiser or other ordinary unarmored vessel an armored ship; and what I desire, and what I confidently rely upon the country demanding before long, is the construction of a few line-of-battle ships made reasonably safe by armor, in lieu of the present ships, which, while called armored ships, in reality depend upon their thin unarmored parts for their ability to keep upright and afloat. Besides, I do not believe in these devices for ships intended for close fighting. I even believe them likely, in not a few cases, to add to their danger rather than to their safety. If, for example, a raking shot or shell should let the sea into the compartments on one side of the ship, while those on the other side remain intact and buoyant, this very buoyancy upon the uninjured side of the ship would help to capsize her.
“Mr. White says that no vessel can fight without running risks, and thinks that thick, vertical side-armor, even over a portion of the ship’s length, is not a necessary guarantee of the life of a ship. Well, sir, we are all at liberty to think, or not think, what we please, so far as our sense and judgment will allow us; but Mr. White, like all other depreciators of side-armor, fails utterly to show us what else there is which can be relied upon to keep shell out of a ship, or what can be done to prevent shell that burst inside a ship from spreading destruction all around. He refers us to no experiments to show that the thin plate divisions and coffer-dams, and like devices, will prove of any avail for the purpose proposed. In the absence of any such experiments, he tells us, as others have told us, that Signor Brin and colleagues in the Italian Admiralty consider ‘a minutely subdivided region’ at and below the water-line ‘sufficient defence against gun-fire.’ But I do not think Signor Brin believes anything of the kind; what he believes is that the Italian government cannot afford to build a fleet of properly armored line-of-battle ships for hard and close fighting, and that, looking at their limited resources, a few excessively fast ships, with armor here and there to protect particular parts, and with ample capabilities of retreat to a safe distance, will best serve their purpose. I do not say that he is wrong, and I certainly admire the skill which he has displayed in carrying out his well-defined object. But that object is totally different from ours, and our naval habits, our traditions, our national spirit, the very blood that flows in our veins, prevent such an object from ever becoming ours.
“Mr. White all through his letter, in common with some of his late colleagues at the Admiralty, thinks and speaks as if naval warfare were henceforth to be chiefly a matter of dodging, getting chance shots, and keeping out of the enemy’s way; and this may be more or less true of contests between unarmored vessels. But why is not the line-of-battle ship Collingwood to be supposed to steam straight up to the enemy, I should like to know? and if she does, what is to prevent the enemy from pouring a raking fire through her bow, and ripping up at once, even with a single shell, every compartment between the stem and the transverse armored bulkhead?
“It distresses me beyond measure to see our ships constructed so as to impose upon them the most terrible penalties whenever their commanders dare, as dare they ever have, and dare they ever will, to close with their foe and try conclusions with him. Why, sir, it has been my painful duty over and over again to hear foreign officers entreat me to use all my influence against the adoption in their navy of ships with so little armored surface as ours. On one occasion the Collingwood herself was imposed upon them as a model to be imitated, and I was besought to give them a safer and better ship. ‘How could I ever steam up to my enemy with any confidence,’ said one of the officers concerned, ‘with such a ship as that under my feet?’
“Mr. White coolly tells us that the Collingwood, with five hundred tons of water logging her ends to a depth of seven or eight feet, will not be much worse off than a ship whose armored deck stands two and a half or three feet above the water’s surface, and his reason is that even above this latter deck the water would flow in when the ship was driving ahead with an injured bow. Well, sir, I will only say that sailors of experience see a very great difference between the two cases, and I can but regard such theorizings as very unfortunate basis for the designs of her Majesty’s ships.
“I have said that Mr. White’s assumptions as to the immunity of the above-water compartments and coffer-dams from wide-spread injury by shell-fire rest upon no experimental data; I go on to say that such data as we have to my mind point very much the other way. The Huascar was not an unarmored vessel, and such shell as penetrated her had first to pass through some thin armor and wood backing; yet after the Cochrane and Blanco Encaloda had defeated her she presented internally abundant evidence of the general destruction which shell-fire produces. An officer of the Cochrane, who was the first person sent on board by the captors, in a letter to me written soon afterwards, said: ‘It requires seeing to believe the destruction done.... We had to climb over heaps, table-high, of débris and dead and wounded.... We fired forty-five Palliser shell, and the engineers who were on board say that every shell, or nearly so, must have struck, and that every one that struck burst on board, doing awful destruction.’
“Speaking of the injury which the Cochrane received from a single shell of the Huascar, he said: ‘It passed through the upper works at commander’s cabin, breaking fore and aft bulkhead of cabins, breaking skylight above ward-room, thwartship bulkhead of wood, passed on, cut in two a 5-inch iron pillar, through a store-room, struck armor-plate, glanced off, passing through plating of embrasure closet at corner, finishing at after gun-port, and went overboard. This shell passed in at starboard part of stern and terminated at after battery port on port side, which is finished with the wide angle-iron, carrying out a part of the angle-iron in its flight.’
“This was a shell of moderate size, from a moderate gun, but it is obvious that it would have made short work of penetrating those very thin sheets of steel which constitute the compartments, coffer-dams, etc., upon the resistance of which, to my extreme surprise, those responsible for the power and safety of our fleets seem so ready to place their main dependence.