But steam is not applied to the guns only; it works the windlasses, winches, and capstans that raise the anchors, braces up the yards, and lifts stores and heavy weights in and out of the ship, or moves them from place to place. It furnishes power to the steering apparatus, works the pumps, keeps the ventilating fans going; and in ships that shew the electric light at night it drives the electrical apparatus. Engines are made to start engines in some of the newer iron-clads. Instead of moving heavy levers when he wishes to set the engines going, the engineer just touches a miniature engine, which moves the levers of the larger engines for him. And all these more important engines are multiplied and made to act either together or separately, so that in the event of one being disabled, others are left to do its work. We hear of ships of war being fitted with twenty or thirty engines, without counting sundry smaller ones. Those of the turret-ship Temeraire are thus divided—two main engines for propelling the ship, with two starting engines; four feed engines, two circulating engines, two bilge engines, four fan engines, one capstan engine, one steering engine, two pumping engines connected with the hydraulic loading-gear, two turning engines for rotating the turn-tables or turrets, two engines to pump water in case of fire, four engines for hoisting out ashes, one engine for condensing air in working the Whitehead torpedo, and an engine for the electric light apparatus. Admiral Fellowes had such ships as these in his mind when, speaking before a committee of the Admiralty, he said: 'Men-of-war now are nothing more nor less than floating machines; there are the steam capstans, the steam steering-gear; every portion of your guns, slides, and carriages worked by steam; there are the double bottom and the inner bottom, and everything connected with the machinery; in fact the whole ship is now a floating machine, and is more or less under the control of the chief engineer.'
In all our great naval wars, our ships had only a single weapon, the gun, and this not a very heavy one, for the highest limit of naval ordnance was the sixty-eight pounder, which indeed was looked upon as a very terrible weapon. To the guns of nowadays, the old thirty-two and sixty-eight pounders are mere pop-guns. There is the huge eighty-one-ton gun, twenty-four feet long, and six feet thick at the breech, its huge shot of fifteen hundred pounds being capable of penetrating thirty inches of armour. There is the thirty-eight-ton gun, whose shot of six or seven hundred pounds weight has smashed a thirteen-inch plate at a thousand yards. Then there are guns of six-and-a-half, nine, twelve, eighteen, and twenty-five tons, with projectiles weighing from one to six hundred pounds, all of them capable of piercing armour, against which the old naval guns would be as useless as a schoolboy's squirt. But the gun does not stand alone. There are two other weapons, either of which is more terrible, and in certain cases more effective than the heaviest gun afloat. These are the ram and the torpedo, the latter of which has recently been described in these columns. Let us, however, have a look at the ram. In the old days, the ship herself had no attacking power. She fought with her guns; or else she was laid alongside of her enemy, and the crew with axe, pike, and cutlass clambered over the bulwarks and on to the hostile decks, which they cleared by hand-to-hand fighting. Probably no iron-clad will ever be laid alongside of another to board her. Were an iron-clad to go into action, all the openings in the deck would be closed, and every one, even the steersman, under cover. Many modern ships could continue a fight successfully with a hundred or a hundred and fifty boarders in possession of the upper deck; and their own turret guns, or the fire of friendly ships, would clear away the intruders if necessary. Thus, in the recent war between Paraguay and Brazil, during one of the river engagements, a Paraguayan ship ran alongside of a Brazilian turret-ship and sent a crowd of boarders on to her iron decks. They met with no opposition; the round turret in front of them continued its fire against a Paraguayan monitor; while another Brazilian monitor sent volley after volley of grape-shot sweeping across the decks of her consort. In a few minutes they were clear. The Paraguayan boarders had been killed, had jumped into the water, or had escaped to one of their own ships. This, we believe, is the only attempt on record at boarding an iron-clad; its failure shews how hopeless such an enterprise is against a ship the possession of whose deck does not give any control over her movements or those of her crew. It is therefore probable that it will be only in the most exceptional cases that iron-clads will approach each other with the object of boarding. If they do come to close quarters, it will be only to use the ram.
This idea of fighting with the ram is a very old one. The beak was the weapon of the ancient navies of the Mediterranean, and the beak was what we now call the ram. It is quite evident that to make the ship herself, weighing from nine to twelve thousand tons, take the place of the projectile, by driving her at a high speed against a hostile vessel, is to use a weapon more powerful than the heaviest gun. A ship like the Inflexible or the Sultan, with a speed of ten or twelve knots an hour, will strike a heavier blow than a shot from even the eighty-one-ton gun would give at a range of a few hundred yards; and while the injury done by the shot will probably be above the water-line, the ram will cut the hostile vessel down from above the water-line perhaps almost to the keel. Every one remembers how the Iron Duke sank the Vanguard by an accidental collision at a low rate of speed. But in this case the injury was such that the Vanguard did not sink for nearly an hour. Much more terrible was the sinking of the iron-clad Re d'Italia in the battle of Lissa in 1866. The Austrian admiral found himself inferior in gun-power to the Italian ships; he therefore decided on using the ram as much as possible. 'I rammed away at everything I saw painted gray,' he said himself in describing the action. One of these gray ships was the splendid iron-clad Re d'Italia, which struck fair amidships by Tegethoff's bow, went to the bottom of the Adriatic with all her crew in less than a minute. We believe that this use of the ram will play a great part in any future English naval engagement.
Such are the means of defence and attack possessed by our fleet. There has never yet been anything like a grand engagement between two great iron-clad navies; when that takes place, we shall see what the new naval warfare really is; meanwhile one thing is quite certain—that iron-clads are neither as handy nor as comfortable as the grand old ships of say forty years ago. Sailors in the royal navy have had to exchange the well-lighted, airy lower-decks of the line-of-battle ship for the hot dark 'compartments' of the iron-clad; for oil-lamps, hot rooms, and artificial ventilation, and perhaps the prospect of being battered with monster guns or blown up with torpedoes. This change of conditions may have serious consequences, not contemplated by designers of iron-clads. At present the crews of these vessels have been nearly all engaged as boys, put on board training-ships. They turn out a fine set of young men, but they do not remain in the service. Before they are thirty, most of them have gone, and are engaged in employment on shore, or in yachts, or in ocean steam lines. We believe there will be also a growing difficulty in procuring a good set of officers, including surgeons, for the iron-clads. Young men of good education, with numerous openings for them in civil life, do not like to be immured in dark floating hulks, with the risk at any moment of being helplessly sent to the bottom of the sea. We at anyrate know the fact of two young men trained as surgeons for the royal navy who on these grounds have shrunk from following their intended profession. In short, science may invent ships of overpowering destructive grandeur, but it cannot invent men who will agree to live under conditions of dismal discomfort in these floating dungeons. Such, we imagine, will be found to be weak points in a navy of iron-clads. Nor can we look with indifference on the many instances of disaster in the mere working of these new-fashioned vessels. Explosions and other fatalities follow in pretty quick succession. Furnaces and steam-machinery are constantly going wrong. Shafts and bearers are going wrong. There seems to be such a complication in all departments, that one can have little confidence in matters going quite right in case of that kind of active service involved in absolute warfare. A contemplation of these several contingencies, it must be owned, is far from pleasant.
Since this article was written, news has come of a successful naval engagement which shews that our sailors are as brave and as skilful as ever they were. One day last May a rebel Peruvian iron-clad, the Huascar, having committed piratical acts in the Pacific, was attacked by two of our fine wooden cruisers, the Shah and the Amethyst. The two English wooden ships fairly beat the iron-clad turret-ship, which was so damaged that the rebel crew were only too glad to go into harbour and surrender to the Peruvian authorities. This is the first English action with an iron-clad; and slight as it is in itself, the fact that our ships were only wooden cruisers meant for no such severe work, gives it some importance, and makes the victory a legitimate cause for well-founded satisfaction.
[THE 'SOFTIE'S' DREAM.]
IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER I.
In the fertile valley of the river Suck, just where some years ago such consternation was created by a portion of the Bog of Allen shewing an inclination to settle for good, there stood many years since a farm-house of rather a better class than any of those in the immediate neighbourhood, or indeed in any of the adjacent villages. The house stood a little off the high-road from Castlerea to Loughlinn, and few people who passed failed to observe its well-to-do, comfortable appearance and 'smug' haggard (steading). Its occupier, Owen Kearney, was a very hard-working sober man, who not only minded his own business, but let his neighbours' affairs alone. He was never in arrears with his rent, had his turf cut a year in advance, and got his crops down first and in earliest; so that it was not without some reason that people said he was the most comfortable farmer in the village of Glenmadda. Added to being the most industrious, Owen Kearney was (what few tenant farmers in the west of Ireland were thirty years ago) something of a speculator. He did not tie his savings up in an old stocking and hide it in the thatch of the barn or cow-house, as the majority of his neighbours who had any savings usually did; but despite the repeated warnings of Shaun More Morris, the philosopher and wiseacre of the village, invested in new and improved farming implements and in horses, of which he was not unjustly considered the best judge in the County Roscommon. As he did all his business when he was perfectly sober, he seldom had any cause to complain of his bargain; and the 'luck-penny,' instead of spending in the public-house, he made a rule of giving to the priest for the poor of the parish.
Not being in the habit of gossiping either about his own or his neighbours' affairs, no one could form any correct idea of how rich Owen Kearney really was; but it was generally known that he kept his money at the bank, as on fair and market days he went into that building with his pockets well filled and came out with them empty, and mounting his cob, rode home quietly, long before the fun or the faction fights commenced.