Modern ships of war

by Sir Edward J. Reed; Edward Simpson

It only remains, in so far as existing armored, or rather “partly armored,” ships are concerned, to advert to the Impérieuse and Warspite, two cruisers building for distant service. These ships are three hundred and fifteen feet long, and to them has been allowed, by the extraordinary generosity of the Admiralty, as much as one hundred and forty feet of length of armored belt. If this had been extended by only twenty feet, these British cruisers, which Lord Brassey—whether grandiloquently or satirically it is hard to say—calls “armored cruisers,” would have actually had one-half of their length protected by armor-plating at the water-line. In what spirit and with what object is not known, but Lord Brassey, in his outline sketch of these ships, writes the word “coals” in conspicuous letters before and abaft the belt. Can it be possible that he, undoubtedly a sensible man of business, and one who laboriously endeavors to bring up the knowledge and sense of his fellow-countrymen to a level with his own, and who was once Secretary to the British Admiralty—can it be possible that he considers coal a trustworthy substitute for armor, either before or after it has been consumed as fuel?

It is very distressing to have to write in these terms, and put these questions about Admiralty representatives and Admiralty ships; but what is to be done? Here are two ships which are together to cost nearly half a million of money, which are expressly built to chase and capture our enemies in distant seas, which are vauntingly described as “armored cruisers,” which cannot be expected always by their mere appearance to frighten the enemy into submission, like painted Chinese forts, which must be presumed sometimes to encounter a fighting foe, or at least to be fired at a few times by the stern guns of a vessel that is running away, and yet some eighty or ninety feet of the bows of these ships, and as much of their sterns, are deliberately deprived of the protection of armor, so that any shell from any gun may pierce them, let in the sea, and reduce their speed indefinitely; and in apparent justification of this perfectly ridiculous arrangement—perfectly ridiculous in a ship which is primarily bound to sustain her speed when chasing—a late Secretary to the Admiralty tells us that she is to carry in the unprotected bow some coals! May my hope formerly expressed in Harper’s Magazine find its fruition by giving to the British Admiralty a piece of information of which it only can be possibly ignorant, viz., that even while coal is unconsumed, it differs largely from steel armor-plates in the measure of resistance which it offers to shot and shell; and further, that coal is put on board war-ships that it may be consumed in the generation of steam? It is very desirable that this information should somehow be conveyed to Whitehall in an impressive manner, and possibly, if the combined intelligence of the two great nations to which Harpers’ publications chiefly appeal be invoked in its favor, it may at length be understood and attended to even by the Admiralty, and one may hear no more of the protection of her Majesty’s ships by means of their “coal.”

THE “WARSPITE.”

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF THE “MERSEY.”

Passing now from the so-called iron-clads of the British navy, we come to a class of vessels which have their boilers, etc., protected from above by iron decks sweeping over them from side to side. The section of the Mersey, one of the most important British ships of this type, will illustrate the system of construction. Various attempts have been made to impose numerous ships of this kind upon a sometimes too credulous public as armored vessels, and Lord Brassey, while publishing descriptions and drawings which demonstrated beyond all question that the buoyancy and stability of these ships are not at all protected by armor, nevertheless deliberately includes some of them in his list of “armored ships.”[6] Now, the thick iron deck certainly protects (in some degree, according to its thickness) all that is below it against the fire of guns, and armor itself is sometimes employed to protect the gun machinery; but the existence of a thickish deck under the water, or mainly under the water, occasionally associated with patches of armor above water here and there to protect individual parts, does not constitute the ship itself an armored ship in any such sense of the term as is ordinarily accepted and understood. How can that be properly called an “armored ship” which can be utterly destroyed by guns without any shot or shell ever touching such armor as it possesses? The British Admiralty, in the “Navy Estimates” for 1883-84, under some unknown influence, put forward two ships of this description as armored vessels, and was afterwards forced to remove them from that category, but only removed them to place them in another not less false, not less misleading, not less deceptive and dangerous, viz., that of “protected ships.” And this most improper description is still applied to various ships of which the special characteristic is that they themselves are not protected. If the ship’s own coal and stores may be regarded as her protection, or if the existence of a certain number of exposed and extremely thin internal plates can be so regarded, then may these vessels be deemed partly, but only partly, “protected;” but if “protected ship” means, as every honest-minded person must take it to mean, that the ship herself is protected by armor against shot and shell, then the designation “protected ship,” as employed by the British Admiralty, is nothing less than an imposition. These ships are not protected. Neither their power to float, nor their power to keep upright, nor their power to exist at all, after a few such injuries as even the smallest guns afloat can inflict, is “protected,” as any war whatever is likely to demonstrate.

Those who employ such language ignore the essential characteristic of a ship-of-war, and some of the gravest dangers which menace her. It is conceivable that in the old days, when men wore armor, the protection of the head with an “armet,” and of the breast by a breastplate, might have justified the description of the man so defended as an “armored man,” although it is difficult to see why, since he might have been put hors de combat by a single stroke. But protect the boilers and magazines of a ship how you will, if you do not protect the ship itself sufficiently in the region of the water-line to prevent such an invasion of the sea as will sink or capsize her, she remains herself essentially unprotected, liable to speedy and complete destruction, and cannot truly be called a “protected ship.”

It must not for a moment be supposed that this is a mere question of words or designations. On the contrary, it is one of the most vital importance to all navies, and most of all to the navy of Great Britain. What the Admiralty says, the rest of the government, and beyond them the country, are likely to believe and to rely upon, and when the stress of naval warfare comes, the nation which has confidingly understood the Admiralty to mean “armored ships” and “protected ships” when it has employed these phrases, and suddenly finds out, by defeat following defeat, and catastrophe catastrophe, that it meant nothing of the kind, may have to pay for its credulity, allowable and pardonable as it may be, the penalty of betrayal, and of something worse even than national humility.

On the other hand, it is not to be inferred from the objections thus offered to the employment of deceptive designations that objection is also offered to the construction of some ships with limited or partial protection, falling short of the protection of the buoyancy and the stability, and therefore of the life, of the ship itself. It is quite impossible that all the ships of a navy like that of Great Britain, or of the navies of many other powers, can be made invulnerable, even in the region of the water-line, to all shot or shell. Indeed, there are services upon which it is necessary to employ armed ships, but which do not demand the use of armored or protected vessels. Unarmored vessels, with some of their more vital contents protected, suffice for such services. Moreover, even where it would be very desirable indeed to have the hull protected by armor to a sufficient extent to preserve the ship’s buoyancy and stability from ready destruction by gun-fire, it is often impracticable to give the ship that protection. This is true, for example, of all small corvettes, sloops, and gun-vessels, which are too small to float the necessary armor-plates, in addition to all the indispensable weights of hull, steam-machinery, fuel, armament, ammunition, crew, and stores. It would be both idle and unreasonable, therefore, to complain of the construction of some ships with the protecting armor limited, or even, in certain cases, with no protecting armor at all. Such ships must be built, and in considerable number, for the British navy. But this necessity should neither blind us to the exposure and destructibility of all such vessels, nor induce us to endeavor to keep that exposure and destructibility out of our own sight. Still less should it encourage us to sanction, even for a moment, such an abuse of terms as to hold up as “armored” and “protected” ships those which, whether unavoidably or avoidably, have been deprived of the necessary amount of armor to keep them afloat under the fire of small or even of moderately powerful guns.