The transformation undergone by our navy which strikes the eye most forcibly is of course the replacement of the wooden walls by the floating ironclad and the substitution of steam for wind-filled sails as the propelling power of our fleet. A naval officer, Sir William Symonds, instead of a member of the School of Naval Architecture, was appointed Surveyor of the Navy; the first step towards improving ship construction was taken. Almost on the eve of the Queen’s accession, certainly during all the earlier thirties, steamers 5 of which in all existed, were only used to tow ships of the line in and out of harbour; or at the utmost for a trip to Gibraltar or Malta. When Captain Charles Napier predicted that steam would soon become to the navy what cavalry is to the army, and have the post of honour, the prediction seemed impossible. The adoption of steam was a very gradual and tentative process. First the ‘Active,’ a 46-gun frigate was fitted with paddles, but not as yet engines. The result was progress at a maximum of from 2 to 3 knots an hour. Captain Napier carried the experiment a little further; but in no case was steam yet exclusively relied on for working the paddles. When Queen Victoria came to the throne the navy included 5 steam paddle vessels. Each of them had three masts furnished with sails. All were generically known as steam sloops. The largest was 830 tons; the maximum of speed from 8 to 10 knots. Larger steamers called steam frigates, from 1,200 to 1,800 tons were introduced soon after the reign began. They were first actively employed at the bombardment of Acre in 1840, and notwithstanding their old lines of construction, proved the usefulness of armed ships at sea against forts on land. The Acre operations seem to have been important, as showing for the first time the skill of Victorian seamen in gunnery and in the management of the machinery of steam ships. Similarly, long before this only the skill with which English ships were handled had overcome, in their encounters with French, the faults of their design. The weight of metal thrown by the largest guns on board these earlier craft, e.g. the ‘Nelson,’ was 2,750 lbs. Further steam progress was marked when, eight years after the reign began, the ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’ in which Sir John Franklin’s expedition sailed for the Pole, were fitted with the screw.
As yet iron had not been employed on the present scale in ship construction. Both in 1857 and 1858 larger ships than had yet been known, the ‘Niagara’ first, the ‘Orlando,’ the ‘Mersey,’ afterwards, were built, all, however, of wood. Long after steam was partially employed, sails were retained. Even during our Black Sea and Baltic operations in Crimean days, screw and paddle were still combined with canvas. Such success as our fleet secured at this time was not promoted by the excellence of our naval organization which according to Captain Eardley Wilmot, was not much better than our military.[73] The first lesson as to the new mode of motion by sea learnt from the naval operations in Crimean waters was recognized by Kinglake and is confirmed by Captain Eardley Wilmot as being that ‘in regions where land and sea much intertwine, steam is stronger for attack than for defence.’
The iron ships now almost as essential to the idea of a navy as steam itself, had been tried for different purposes long before our Admiralty adopted them; the material had been used, first in 1812 for canal barges, secondly, a little later, for the mercantile marine. Iron was not employed for our navy till the last days of William IV. The tragic fate of the first iron ship, the ‘Birkenhead,’ may well have prejudiced both the Department and the public against the new material.
The iron-plated ship of the modern type appears to have been a French idea, first tried by Colonel Paixhaus in 1825. The floating batteries employed in the Crimean War in which Napoleon III. was specially interested, marked a fresh advance in this direction. Nor does it seem easy to overrate the value of the lessons in scientific seamanship derived from the French and English operations on the Black Sea, 1854-5. The result was the invitation by the Admiralty of designs from all quarters, the ordering of the ‘Warrior,’ designed by Mr Scott Russell, in 1859, completed in 1861.[74] This vessel was equipped with a battery extending her whole length. Before the fifties were out, the naval and the national mind had been familiarized with the idea of mastless ships, long repulsive to the national sense of the picturesque at sea. The ‘Warrior,’ however, was furnished with sails in addition to steam and marked an epoch in the development not only of the English navy, but of the navies of the world, as the first absolutely complete iron ship ever built.
The French ships, earlier in point of time were not equally perfect as regards material. They were, in fact, wooden ships cut down and plated with iron. Thus with literal truth referring to the launch of ‘Warrior’ could our Naval Minister of the day, Sir John Pakington, describe the whole world as interested in the bold experiment. Other ships of the same kind soon followed, and of even larger proportions. It is to the credit of English workmanship that the building of these vessels at Chatham was performed by shipwrights who had hitherto worked only on wood; and that the craftmanship shown by them in the new material was pronounced by experts to be excellent. Timber having been definitely superseded by metal, there followed the long and technical controversy about the relative merits of turret and broadside armaments. The concentration of guns into a single citadel on board ship was first in England powerfully advocated by Sir E. Reed. Since then, the naval warfare between Federals and Confederates on the other side of the Atlantic, followed by the exciting manœuvres off Cherbourg between the ‘Alabama’ and the ‘Keersage,’ and in Europe the naval portions of the Austro-Italian war of 1866 have taught lessons the full results of which are not, perhaps even yet, perfectly realized. So long is the experimental stage which has to be traversed before the newest system of maritime defence and attack with its complicated machinery can be said entirely to have reached what is alone to be called properly the scientific stage.[75]
CHAPTER XXIII
TRANSFORMATIONS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE
The Prince Consort’s influence in organizing pursuits and departments of knowledge, a characteristic of the Victorian age. The Prince not only the advocate of the 1851 Exhibition, but most active in the movement that has given us South Kensington as an instrument in the knowledge of art and science. The British Association foreshadowed by a like organization in Germany which may have impressed the youthful Prince Albert, but certainly set the example to the leaders of English science. Like its German forerunners the British Association gradually grew in popular favour. Its progress as shown by facts and figures. Modern course of science summarized. The transforming influences of science traced in all intellectual pursuits.