introduction, the money which has been spent on a wooden fleet about to

become valueless would have given England a fleet greatly more powerful than the combined navies of the world.”[163] It may be conceded that in this public argument Scott Russell had the advantage: the architect of the _Great Eastern_ had little difficulty in confuting the views of the artillerist. But by this time the battle between wood and iron had been fought and won. The Board of Admiralty, influenced by the arguments of Scott Russell and their own constructors, and in the presence of gigantic achievements in the form of iron-built liners, felt unable to agree with Sir Howard in his continued advocacy of timber; Sir John Pakington expressed his personal doubts to him in a correspondence. Expert opinion, naval officers and architects, leaned more and more in the direction of the new material, and, early in 1859, the decision was made to build an armoured frigate _of iron_. It was a momentous decision. The “wooden walls” had crumbled at last, and iron had won acceptance as alone able to cope with the new forces brought into existence by the progress of artillery and steam machinery. The opponents of iron could not sustain for long their arguments in favour of timber; experience was accumulating against them, and it was necessary to accept defeat. Chief among them was Sir Howard Douglas. There is, surely, something pathetic in the episode of his long-continued struggle against radical change; something tragic in the spectacle of this scientist, whose labours had done more, perhaps, than any other man’s for the efficiency of the nineteenth-century navy, in his old age casting the great weight of his influence unwittingly against the navy’s interest? How gamely the old general fought for his convictions is told us by his biographer, who with a natural warmth denounced the fierce criticism which Scott Russell had directed against a veteran of eighty-five winters, devoting his last hours to the service of his country. “His resistance to armour ships bore him down, his arguments met with unbelief, or elicited taunts, and ceased to influence the public. ‘All that I have said about armour ships will prove correct,’ he remarked, twenty-four hours before his death, toward the end of ’61. ‘How little do they know of the undeveloped power of artillery!’” § In June, 1859, some months before the launching of the _Gloire_, the reply was given: the _Warrior_ was laid down. Up to this time the initiative, in the slow evolution of naval material, had rested mainly with France. From this moment England, having taken up the challenge, assumed the initiative and its responsibilities; and from now onwards, in spite of false moves, failures, and ineffective expenditures of money and labour, she regained more and more surely the preponderance in naval strength which she had possessed of old. At last a scientific era of naval architecture had opened. Up to this time the design and construction of warships had been treated as a mere craft: a craft hampered, moreover, by absence of method, reluctance to adopt new views, limitations as to size, interference and ever-varying decisions as to such factors as the extent of sail-power or the number of guns to be carried. By the official acceptance of scientific methods this was largely changed. By the raising of the old office of Surveyor to the dignity of Controller of the Navy, by the institution of a new school of naval architecture to take the place of that suppressed in 1832 (whose most eminent graduates, fittingly enough, were the chief witnesses against the debased state and management of naval construction as it was prior to 1860), by utilizing the services of men trained in mathematics, the effect on naval architecture soon became apparent. Originality had scope, forethought and cleverness had full play; men of considerable technical knowledge were pressed into service, who proved well able to cope with the new developments. The outcome of this new orientation was the _Warrior_. It is usual to think of her as similar to the _Gloire_; like her she was designed to resist the 68-pounder unit of artillery, like her she carried a belt of iron armour 4½ inches thick, and was equipped with steam machinery to give her a high speed. Yet in important respects she differed from her French rival. [Illustration: THE _WARRIOR_ From a photograph in the possession of Dr. Oscar Parkes, O.B.E.] Firstly, her size in relation to her armament caused general surprise. Admittedly the policy of restricting dimensions, pursued with such rigour from the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, had operated to the detriment of our naval construction; admittedly the long and fine-shaped sailing vessels built during recent years were greatly superior to those of the older models; yet no reason presented itself for building a ship, of armament equal to that of the 5000-ton French frigate, which would displace over 9000 tons. Were not cost and tonnage directly related, and was there some real necessity forcing us to build ships of so large a size? Was it true that the basins at Portsmouth would require to be enlarged to take such a ship, and that her draught would be such that she could only be docked at certain tides? The question was debated vigorously by the Board itself. Three considerations, according to an authoritative statement made to parliament, prompted the decision to depart widely from the design adopted by the French: considerations one or more of which have influenced all subsequent construction in this country. Firstly, the world-wide duties of the British navy demanded a type of ship capable of making long and distant voyages either with steam or sail: in short, a fully rigged ship, a good sailer, and at the same time one with sufficient carrying capacity to enable her to keep the seas for a long time. Secondly, to ensure good sailing qualities and to avoid a defect which had been experienced in our own ships fitted with heavy pivot guns, and which was predicted in the case of the _Gloire_, the extremities must be as lightly loaded as possible, and not weighed down with heavy armour. Thirdly--and this was more or less special to the period--since artillery was already in a state of rapid transition to higher power, any protective armour approved must sooner or later be insufficient and require to be augmented. These conditions, and the advantages which increase of length were known to give in reducing the propeller power necessary to obtain a certain speed, governed the specifications to which the _Warrior_ was built. She was given a length of 380 feet, machinery for a speed of nearly 14 knots, full canvas, telescopic funnels, and waterline armour over her central parts: the ends being left unarmoured, but subdivided by watertight compartments. Of her forty-eight smooth-bore guns, twenty-six were behind armour and twelve were outside of the protective belt; the remaining ten were mounted on the upper deck, also without protection. In another respect the _Warrior_ bore witness to the foresight of the Board. Hidden behind, and altogether disguised by, the shapely bow with its surmounting figure-head, was a stout iron ram-stem, worked to the knee and side-plates of the bow: an inconspicuous but significant feature. Ever since steamers had been established in the navy the possibilities of ramming had been discussed. The revolution in tactics resulting from the introduction of steam as motive power had been examined by authorities such as Bowles and Moorson, Douglas, Dahlgren and Labrousse, and all of them saw in the new conditions an opening for the use of the ram. In ’44 Captain Labrousse had suggested strengthening the bows of wooden ships for this purpose, and in England Admiral Sartorius had become the advocate of a special type of warship built expressly to ram. The circumstances of the naval warfare of the Crimea, in which slow-moving steamers operated in restricted waters, had displayed to naval men the advantages to be obtained from actual collision--from the use of their ship itself as a projectile against the enemy’s hull. In the case of the _Warrior_ an additional argument was now to hand for providing a ram. The use of iron as armour had restored the equilibrium between defence and attack which had been disturbed by the adoption of shell fire; nay more, it had actually turned the scale against artillery, the 68-pounder being unable to penetrate the armour of the ship in which it was carried. For this reason, that for the moment armour had the ascendancy over the gun, a ram was considered to be necessary as an additional means of offence; and a ram was accordingly embodied in the _Warrior_, to the strength of which her converging iron-plate structure aptly contributed. And now, leaving the _Warrior_ for a moment, it will be convenient to glance ahead and note the part played by the ram and the value set upon it in connection with later types of warships. In 1860 no doubt was felt but that ramming would play a very important part in future warfare. The experiences of the American Civil War of ’62 seemed to supply a perfect confirmation of this opinion. “We fought the _Merrimac_ for more than three hours this forenoon,” wrote the engineer of the _Monitor_ to John Ericsson, “and sent her back to Norfolk in a sinking condition. Ironclad against ironclad, we manœuvred about the bay here (Hampton Roads), and went at each other with mutual fierceness.... We were struck twenty-two times, the pilot house twice, the turret nine times, the side armour eight times, deck three times.... She tried to run us down and sink us, as she did the _Cumberland_ yesterday, but she got the worst of it. Her bow passed over our deck, and our sharp upper-edged side cut through the light iron shoe upon her stem, and well into her oak. She will not try that again. She gave us a tremendous thump but did not injure us in the least.... The turret is a splendid structure....” On the preceding day the iron-covered _Merrimac_ had sunk the wooden sailing ship _Cumberland_ by ram alone, without the aid of artillery, the shots from her victim’s guns glancing off her iron casing “like hailstones off a tin roof.” She had then opened on the wooden _Congress_ with shell fire, and in a short time the crowded decks of that ship had been reduced to a shambles. Then she had fought the inconclusive duel with the armoured _Monitor_. What lessons were at length driven home by these three single actions! What a novel warfare did they not foretell! The helplessness of the wooden ship when attacked by an ironclad was apparent, the terrific effects of shell fire were once again conclusively proved. The value of thick armour was once more shown, but, above all, the power of the ram, the new _arme blanche_ of sea warfare, seemed to be indisputably demonstrated. On both sides of the Atlantic a revision of values took place: the wooden navies of the world sank into insignificance, the _Warrior_ and her type were seen to be the main support and measure of each nation’s naval power. “The man who goes into action in a wooden ship is a fool,” Sir John Hay was quoted as saying, “and the man who sends him there is a villain.” The ocean-sceptre of Britain was broken, thought an American writer forgetful of the limitations of monitors, by the blow which crushed the sides of the _Cumberland_ and _Congress_. Four years later the battle of Lissa, in which the ironclad squadrons of Austria and Italy were engaged with one another, gave confirmation that the lessons of Hampton Roads were also applicable to blue-water actions. “Full speed. Ironclads rush against the enemy and sink him,” was the signal made by the Austrian admiral, Tegetthof. The ram was his chief weapon of offence, the gun being a useful auxiliary in gaining him the victory; gunfire, by disabling the steering gear of the _Ré d’Italia_, making her an easy prey for the ram of his flagship, _Ferdinand Max_. Of all the factors influencing the evolution of naval material, the experiences and records of actual warfare are naturally considered to carry the greatest weight in council: they are, indeed, the only data whose acceptance is indisputable. The claims and achievements put forward in time of peace, however their excellence may have been attested by the most realistic experiments, are all referred to actual war for trial, and are accepted only in so far as they fit in with war experience. But sea actions between ironclads have been few and far between. It has been the more difficult, therefore, to draw from them the true lessons conveyed; the fixed points have been insufficient in number, so to speak, to allow of the true curve of progress being traced. Not only has this insufficiency been evident, but the restriction in the area of war experience has had another harmful effect, in that undue weight has been given to each individual experience. Difficult as it always is to strip each experience of its special circumstances and deduce from it the correct conclusion, errors have undoubtedly been made; and these errors have had a prominence which would not have been theirs if the number of experiences had been greater. On the other hand, an altogether insufficient weight has commonly been given to the experiences of peace-time. These remarks find one application in the ram, and in the value placed upon it in the ’sixties and ’seventies. During this period artillery was undergoing a continuous and rapid improvement, eventually turning the scales against defensive armour; steam power was expanding and the manœuvring capacities of ships were being extended, so as to make ramming an operation more and more difficult to perform. Yet faith in the ram grew rather than decreased, influenced almost entirely by the evidence of the two sea-actions. What was the actual experience of ramming gained in peace-time? In ’68 Admiral Warden, commanding the Channel Fleet, reported: “So long as a ship has good way on her, and a good command of steam to increase her speed at pleasure, that ship cannot be what is called ‘rammed’; she cannot even be struck to any purpose so long as she has room, and is properly handled. The use of ships as rams, it appears to me, will only be called into play after an action has commenced, when ships, of necessity, are reduced to a low rate of speed--probably their lowest.” As time progressed the chances of ramming certainly grew less. Yet Lissa and Hampton Roads continued to influence opinion to such a degree, as to lead to a glorification of ram tactics; in the press, and in the technical institutions which had now come into being, the ram retained a lustre which it no longer deserved. So long as artillery was feeble and gunnery of low efficiency, and so long as speeds of ships were slow and manœuvring power restricted, the ram was of great potential value. As these conditions changed, the value of the ram declined. But for a time it was actually in question which of the two forms of power, the steam engine or the gun, would ultimately exert the greater influence as a weapon in action. The subject of a Prize Essay for 1872 was, “The Manœuvres and System of Tactics which Fleets of Ships should adopt, to develop the powers of the Ram, Heavy Artillery, Torpedoes, etc., in an action in the open sea”; and it was the opinion of the prize-winner, Commander G. H. Noel, that the ram was at that time fast supplanting the gun in importance. “The serious part of a future naval attack,” wrote Captain Colomb, in _Lessons from Lissa_, “does not appear to be the guns, but the rams.” And the French Admiral Touchard described the ram as “the principal weapon in naval combats--the _ultima ratio_ of maritime warfare.” “There is a new warfare,” said Scott Russell in 1870. “It is no longer, Lay her alongside, but, Give her the stem, which will be the order of battle.” And he predicted fleets of high-speed vessels, equipped with powerful rams and twin-screw engines, in which both guns and armour were merely of secondary importance. And writers on tactics discerned future squadrons in action charging each other after the manner of heavy cavalry. The evolution of artillery falsified these expectations. With the growing advantage of artillery over the defence, and with the coming of the torpedo, fighting ranges increased and the use of the ram declined. With greater speeds and greater ranges the possibility of ramming became (as might be deduced mathematically) a diminishing ratio; before the end of the century it was sufficiently clear, and was confirmed by actual warfare, that the ram formed but a very secondary factor of a warship’s offensive power. But for some years ramming, and “bows-on” fighting in which ramming was intended to play an important part, influenced to a great extent the designs of warships. So much for the ram, first fitted in the _Warrior_. In her sister ship the ram was less pronounced and, before Hampton Roads had drawn attention to its possibilities, it was even in question to renounce it altogether. In the case of the _Warrior_ the heavy figure-head so overhung the ram that many were dubious whether the latter would seriously damage an enemy; and, moreover, the wisdom of driving a fully rigged ship against another vessel, and risking the dismantling of her masts and rigging, was widely doubted. In other respects, except for her armour belt and for the material of which she was built, that vessel was not radically different from her predecessors; the first of iron-built ironclads was a handsome screw frigate not unlike previous British ships of her type, from whom she was lineally descended. Although on the whole she was a conspicuous success, it was soon apparent that the great length of the _Warrior_ tended to make her difficult to manœuvre: in fact, made her deficient in that very quality--handiness--which was indispensable to her effective use as a ram. And this unhandiness was accentuated in the _Minotaur_ class which was begun in 1861. These ships were given a belt an inch thicker than that of the _Warrior_, and, partial protection being considered objectionable, especially as leaving exposed the steering gear and a portion of the gun armament, the belt was made continuous over the whole length of the ship. This length, owing to the extra weight of the armour, was 400 feet: 20 feet greater than that of the _Warrior_ and a hundred greater than that of the longest timber-built ships. At first, five masts were fitted, in order to obtain a large sail-area while at the same time keeping the size of each sail within desirable limits; but these were afterwards reduced to three. Sail power and steam machinery were seen to be an imperfect combination in so large a vessel. The _Minotaur_ class proved to be costly, unhandy and vulnerable ships, and signalled a return to smaller dimensions. It was found possible to design ships equally fast and equally well armed and protected, by the use of fuller lines and less length and an increased engine power. “Increased manœuvring power and reduction in prime cost,” wrote the designer of the new type, “more than make amends for the moderate addition to the steam power.”[164] Here we may briefly note the conversion of the timber-built fleet. In ’57 Captain Moorsom had submitted a scheme of cutting down ships to a short height above the water-line and using the weight thus gained to provide an armour belt. Sir Charles Napier had advocated a similar policy in parliament. As soon as the necessity for armour was accepted this policy was adopted; not only were the resources of the private ship-yards bent to the building of a fleet of new iron warships, but the best of the old navy was metamorphized in the royal dockyards by the process of the _razee_: the cutting down of two-deckers and their conversion into iron-belted frigates. By these exertions France was soon outstripped in the struggle. For a long time she clung to wooden ships, though in ’62 she adopted iron for upper works; and of such ships, of wooden bottoms but of iron above the water-line, she built a fleet “possessing only one possible merit--uniformity; which the new English construction lacked.” The combination of heavy steam machinery and wooden hulls was the cause of continuous difficulties; the growth of artillery rendered the ships obsolete almost before they were built. § By the time the _Warrior_ and her sister ships were afloat the great struggle between armour and artillery was well in progress. It was a struggle which was to lead to unsuspected developments in naval architecture. For the moment, and in the presence of the new iron-built ironclads, the gun was at its lowest point of effectiveness. But rifling had conferred new powers on it, and the greatest efforts were being put forth to improve its position. As it grew rapidly in size and power, naval experts were faced with a succession of problems of extraordinary difficulty. Two things were in question: both the type and the disposition of gun best suited for a warship’s armament. With regard to type, the adoption of armour inevitably gave a set-back to the value of the shell gun. Shells, which would rend and set on fire a wooden ship, would not pierce armour or inflame iron plates; of which facts Hampton Roads afforded a demonstration. It seemed clear also from that incident, to experts in this country and in France, that no extension of the Paixhans principle was likely to compete with armour in the future. The system of shell fire of General Paixhans, like the shot system of the inventor of the carronade, had relied on low muzzle velocities and curved trajectories, to effect its purpose. His shells were for lodgment rather than penetration, and did not gain their effect by their kinetic energy; and in view of this their inventor had himself conceived the use of iron armour as the very means whereby they might be countered. Nevertheless the Americans had been strongly attracted by the Paixhans principle, and with their Dahlgrens and Columbiads had extended it in practice to embrace the use of guns of the largest calibres. The action between the _Monitor_ and the _Merrimac_ did nothing to shake their faith in this class of ordnance. Subsequent experiments appeared to confirm the national predilection; and one of their writers, in giving credit to the navy chiefs for adhering to the principle of the large smooth-bore gun, recorded that the small-bore-and-high-velocity theory had received its quietus by the utter demolition of a 6-inch plate by a ball from a 15-inch gun at Washington in February, 1864.[165] In France and England it was held, and held rightly, that high velocities were necessary for the attack of armour. If shell guns were of small value, what was suitable? Were the old spherical solid shot still capable of beating the defence? A serious effort was made in this country to bring them to do it. The Armstrong rifled breech-loading guns recently adopted had been proving defective and indifferent on service; a return was wisely made to muzzle-loading; and it was in question also to revert to spherical shot and shell. Spherical shot of hardest steel were tried by the _Excellent_, in the hope that they would penetrate 4½-inch plates. Experimental guns were also made, in 1864, to discharge 100-pound balls with charges of 25 pounds of powder; guns so heavy (6½ tons) that it was doubted at the time whether they could be efficiently worked on the broadside of a rolling ship. Should not increased power be obtained by persevering with rifled guns? The advantages possessed by the rifled gun in ranging power, accuracy, capacity of shell, were admitted; nevertheless the navy as a whole favoured the smooth-bore, with its simplicity, rapidity of fire, strength, and greater initial velocity, and thought that, at close ranges, the 100-pounder 6½-ton smooth-bore gun was the best and most suitable weapon for the service. But the rifled gun was advancing rapidly. “By May, 1864, the 7-inch muzzle-loading rifled shunt gun of 6½ tons had been tried in the _Excellent_, and had a good deal shaken the position of the smooth-bore. Captain Key reported that it was more than equal to naval requirements.... It was admirably adapted for the naval service.”[166] This fired a projectile 115 pounds in weight. By June of the following year the target of 9-inch plate representing the side of the _Hercules_ had beaten the latest Armstrong achievement, a 12½-ton 300-pounder. And on this pretext, and judging the defensive power of the whole ship by the defensive power of the thickest patch of its armour, a still more powerful gun was demanded for the navy by the inventor and by the press: a 25-ton 600-pounder. So rapidly the power of ordnance grew. It has been observed that of this feverish evolution of armour and artillery the circumstances were doubly remarkable. Firstly, no foreign pressure existed which called for such overleaping and experimental advances. The Americans still clung to their smooth-bore system; the French, who like us had adopted breech-loading guns, retained the system in their service and suffered for some years from its continuous inefficiency. Secondly, the navy was itself “unwillingly dragged into the cul-de-sac of experimental construction induced by the clamour of public opinion.” The type, the size of the gun which was to be embodied in our latest warships, was decided mainly by forces outside the navy, and changed from year to year. Naval architecture changed with it. The adoption of the succession of increasingly powerful rifled guns set experts at their wit’s ends devising warships suitable for carrying them; entailed continuous alterations both in the armaments of new ships and in the design of the new ships themselves; but also, as it happened, had the effect of giving this country a mastery over naval material which it has never since surrendered. The type having been decided for each individual vessel, there remained the question of the disposition of the armament. Two main considerations guided the evolution of the ironclads of this period in respect of the disposition of their guns: one mainly tactical, the other mainly constructive. It appears probable that, from the date of Trafalgar onward, the limitations of merely broadside fire had been realized; that the end-on attack, such as had obtained in the supreme actions fought by Nelson and Rodney, had shown the weakness of the broadside ship in ahead fire and had made obvious the anomaly that, in all ships-of-the-line, the course of the ship, the direction in which the attack was made, was the very direction in which gunfire was least powerful, if not altogether non-existent. With the coming of steam and the consequent growth of the ram and ramming tactics, this anomaly was more and more apparent; and from the _Warrior_ onwards each new type presented an enhanced effort to provide, particularly, ahead fire. The growth of the gun materially assisted this effort. Ahead fire increased, between the years 1860 and 1880, from zero to a large proportion of the total fire. The broadside ship was for a time abandoned. The constructive consideration was the requirement of a protected armament capable of the maximum effective fire in all directions. In the first half of the century an increased effectiveness had been obtained, with the old-fashioned truck guns, by adaptation of the ports or by use of specially designed carriages, to permit of as large an arc of training as possible. Even so the arc through which guns could be fired was small, and in the case of the 68-pounder of the _Warrior_ was only thirty degrees before and abaft the beam. The demand for greater utility was emphasized when, with the increase in size of the unit gun, the number of pieces carried by each ship was diminished. How, then, having regard to these two considerations, should a warship’s guns be disposed? Various methods were adopted. In the first instance, it was seen to be possible to augment the ahead fire of a ship, and to give a wide sweep of training to some of her guns, by indenting the sides; by so shaping the ship’s side-plating as to allow guns mounted in the forward part to fire in the direction of the ship’s longitudinal axis. At first, slight use was made of this method: with the fine lines given to iron ships it appeared practicable in only a small degree. Moreover, it was objected to as causing a “funnelling” effect to the path of fragments of enemy shell or shot; it was found that shrapnel shell, fired at indented embrasures at Shoebury, broke up, and the number of balls which entered the portholes was ten times the number which entered similar portholes on a straight side. But, after the _Minotaur_ class, less length and greater beam were given to ships, and recessed ports and indented sides therefore became more feasible. As guns increased in weight and individual importance the advantages of concentration became apparent. It was now undoubtedly desirable to protect _all_ the guns; yet, if they had been strung out along the whole length of the ship, the weight, both of the guns and their protective armour, would prove to be an excessive burden to the ship. Hence the advantage of the _central battery_. By concentrating the guns into a central area, an armoured box amidships, the weight of armour necessary to protect them could be kept within reasonable limits, protection was afforded not only to the guns but to the vital parts of the ship, while at the same time the extremities were left lightly loaded. The complete water-line belt of armour was retained, but, both in the French and in the English navy, the system of complete protection as embodied in the _Gloire_ and _Warrior_ was given up. This device of the central battery was at first used solely for broadside guns. But the desire for ahead fire from behind armour soon caused the adaptation of the battery to allow it. Ports were cut in the two transverse bulkheads, the ship’s sides were indented, suitable gun-mountings were provided whereby some of the battery guns could be shifted from one porthole to another; and in this way it was secured that a fair proportion of the armament could be fired either on the beam or parallel with the keel-line of the ship. A power of offence was given in all directions, and no “point of impunity” existed. Ingenious were the arrangements resorted to, to obtain the maximum effect from the new medium-sized artillery which superseded the original truck-guns of the _Warrior_ and former warships. The armoured boxes, instead of being made with their sides respectively parallel, and at right angles, to the sides of the ship, were sometimes set diagonally, with their sides at forty-five degrees with fore-and-aft. Sometimes they were octagonal, sometimes with curved bulkheads, sometimes two batteries were superposed one on the other; but always the desire was to utilize each gun over as large as possible an arc of fire, and always the tendency was to augment the ahead fire. The central battery formed a powerful citadel covering the whole beam of the ship amidships. The guns of this citadel, by the power of manœuvring given by the adoption of twin-screw propelling machinery, could, it was argued, be brought to bear in any direction desired. Of all directions, “right ahead” was considered to be of the greatest importance. End-on fighting, it was assumed, would always be resorted to in future; and it was the power of keeping the ship end-on to the enemy which was the great military advantage conferred by twin screws. A further step in the direction of giving to each gun a large arc of fire was taken in the introduction of the sponson. By means of this circular platform, projecting from the vessel’s side, a gun could be carried so as to fire through an arc of 180 degrees. The same system obtained largely in the French ships of this period; by mounting guns in overhung circular turntables, one at each corner of the central battery _en caponière_, a large effective arc was obtained for them. Only one step more was necessary: that which would allow each gun to command the whole sweep of the horizon, and to be available for duty upon either beam and any bearing: the adoption of the _centre-line turret_. But before tracing the evolution of the turret, let us recapitulate the typical ships built between 1860 and 1873 which composed our central-battery fleet. The germ of the central-battery idea may be seen, perhaps, in the belted _Minotaur_, in which, in order to allow the chase guns to be fought from behind armour, a transverse armour bulkhead was worked, at a distance of some 25 feet aft of the bow. Had foreign influence not exerted itself it may be supposed with reason that from the _Minotaur_ the central battery would have been evolved. However this may be, the evolution was hastened by French initiative; for in each of the two wooden ships _Magenta_ and _Solferino_, laid down in ’59, was found a complete two-decked central battery whose whole depth was faced with armour for the protection of fifty-two 5-ton cannon, the rest of the ship’s water-line being protected by an armour belt much narrower than that of the _Gloire_. In imitation of this plan our own designs were prepared; and gradually, and only by a series of steps, we achieved what our rivals had obtained in a single stride. In ’63 Sir Edward Reed, at that time Mr. Reed, one of the graduates of the school which in ’48 had been established at Portsmouth Dockyard, was appointed to the office of Chief Constructor of the Navy. Possessed of broad and original views and gifted to an unusual degree in the arts of exposition and argument, he made himself responsible for designs of warships differing widely from their large and unwieldy precursors. The first of these was the _Bellerophon_, a short and easily manœuvred, fully rigged belt-and-battery ship, carrying ten 12-ton Armstrong guns for broadside fire in the battery, and two 6-ton guns for ahead fire in a small armoured battery in the bows. Not only in the disposition of her armament was the _Bellerophon_ different from all former ships. She was a radical departure from existing practice in many important respects. Constructionally, she was built on a new “bracket-frame” system designed to give great girder strength for small expenditure of weight, already in vogue for mercantile shipping. The use of watertight compartments was extended as a defence against an enemy ram, the system of double bottoms was extended as a consequence of the introduction of the torpedo. A powerful ram was carried, but the bow took a new form; a U- instead of a V-section was adopted in order to give buoyancy and thus minimize the tendency to plunge which was inherent in a fine-bowed ship; the section near the water-line being fined away so as to form a cut-water. Steel was largely used instead of iron, with a consequent saving of weight. A novel trim was given her--six feet by the stern--to give a deep immersion for the powerful screw and to assist the ship in turning quickly on her heel under the action of the balanced rudder; an adjustment which experience showed to have a detrimental effect on the propulsive efficiency. Next came the _Enterprise_, a still smaller ship. In the _Bellerophon_, as we have seen, there was no bow fire possible from the central battery; in the _Enterprise_ this was obtained by piercing the athwartship bulkheads of the battery with ports, and substituting movable for fixed bulwarks. The same arrangement was developed in the _Pallas_ and _Penelope_, in which ships the arc of fire of the corner guns of the battery was further extended by the device of indented sides. Then came the _Hercules_, generally like the _Bellerophon_ but with indented sides and, as a novelty, alternative ports in the battery armour by means of which the corner guns could be trained, on revolving platforms, to fire either on the beam or nearly in line with the keel; a system which presented an obvious disadvantage in requiring twelve ports for eight guns. In the _Kaiser_ class, designed by Sir Edward Reed shortly afterwards for the German government, this disadvantage was obviated by the expedient of forming ports in facets of the battery set at forty-five degrees with the keel-line, and by muzzle-pivoting guns. Both in the _Bellerophon_ and the _Hercules_ axial fire had only been obtained by the provision of special batteries, at the bow and stern, of partially protected guns. Now, this accumulation of weight at the extremities was a feature viewed with disfavour by naval opinion; moreover, these bow batteries did not meet the ever-growing demand for a considerable ahead fire. So in the _Sultan_, which carried a central-battery armament similar to that of the _Hercules_, an upper deck armoured battery was embodied, superposed on the after end of the main deck battery and carrying guns which gave both astern and beam fire; while, for bow fire, two 12-ton guns were mounted in the forecastle, but without any protection. The central-battery system had now to sustain the greatest attack that had yet been made upon it by the advocates of centre-line turrets. The position of the central-battery school was already somewhat shaken; ordnance had grown to a weight and power which justified the main argument of the turret advocates; Lissa had just shown the importance of being able to concentrate on any one bearing a maximum of offensive power. Controversy raged hotly on the relative merits of turret and central battery. In these circumstances the Admiralty in ’68 determined to consider both types, with a view to embodying the best arrangement in the new class of vessels then projected. The principal shipbuilders of the country were invited to compete, and were presented with specifications for a first-class warship so widely drawn as to leave them the greatest latitude in design. Of the seven designs submitted, three were of the central-battery type, three were turret ships, and one a compound of the two. After comparison with an Admiralty design produced by Sir Edward Reed, it was decided to adopt this in preference to those of the private firms, and to build a whole class of six ships to it. The result was the _Audacious_ class--of which the best-remembered are the _Iron Duke_ and the ill-fated _Vanguard_. In this class a strong all-round fire was obtained by arranging two central batteries of the same size, one on the main and one on the upper deck. The main deck battery had only broadside ports for its six 12-ton guns, each gun training thirty degrees before and abaft the beam; the upper deck battery had four guns of the same calibre mounted at ports cut in armour facets at forty-five degrees with the keel-line, and training through ninety degrees. To allow axial fire from these guns the upper battery was made to project slightly, sponson fashion, over the sides of the ship, and the bulwarks forward and aft of the battery were set slightly back toward the centre line to enable the guns to fire past them. A final stage in the evolution of the central-battery ship was attained in the _Alexandra_, laid down in ’72. The type had proved tenacious of life, and, for masted vessels, still held its own up to this point against the turret system. The design for the _Alexandra_ gave as complete an all-round fire as was attainable in a central-battery ironclad; for the first time, it was said, we really had a masted ship with satisfactory all-round fire. Generally like the _Audacious_ class, the _Alexandra_ possessed an advantage in that the two forward guns of the upper deck battery were 25 ton instead of 18 ton, and in having, in addition to the six broadside guns of the main deck battery, two additional 18-ton guns mounted so as to be capable of firing nearly ahead and on the beam as well. Designed to fulfil the requirements of “end-on” fighting, she made a heavy sacrifice of broadside fire to obtain a maximum of bow fire; and at a later date, when a different valuation had come to be placed on axial fire, this sacrifice was noted against her. “She could only take her place at a disadvantage in any form of battle which was suited to the armaments of the ironclads that had gone before her.”[167] Nevertheless she was a formidable vessel. Defensively, too, she was pronounced to be conspicuously successful; her armour belt, which attained a thickness of 12 inches at the water-line amidships, was carried down at the bow to cover and strengthen the stem, and to protect the vessel from a raking fire. For the protection of the stern against a raking fire, an armour bulkhead was worked across the after part, extending to a depth of 6 feet below the water-line. The _Alexandra_ was the last of the purely “central battery” ships.[168] By the time she was launched experience had set the seal of approval on another type, to the evolution of which we must now revert. § It is difficult to trace to its source the invention of the armoured gun-turret. The inventive Ericsson is said to have envisaged at an early age the idea of a protected gun carried on a mobile raft, “an idea probably inspired by his river-rafts in Sweden”; and it is known that at a later date he planned in detail a primitive monitor, the design of which at the outbreak of the Crimean War he offered to Napoleon III. Perhaps the idea, which M. Paixhans first developed in public, of applying iron armour to a sea-going ship, induced the idea of a pivot-gun protected by an armour shield. A protected armament was found, as we have seen, in the French batteries built for the assault of Kinburn: the armoured vessel and the armoured gun were first embodied in the same unit; and though these units were the first to be tried in actual war, yet some years previously, in 1842 or thereabouts, a Mr. Stevens of New York had proposed and made an armoured floating battery. But in neither of these instances was the gun in a turret. The turret idea, like so many other inventions, had an independent development in Europe and in America. In each case war supplied the incentive. In America, in ’62, Ericsson himself produced in a national emergency the _Monitor_, the low, shallow-draft armoured vessel carrying two 11-inch Dahlgren guns in a steam-rotated turret which served to counter the Southern _Merrimac_, the rasée with the fixed penthouse armour roof over its guns which the Confederates had built by the light of French experience. The _Monitor_, both in design and in the circumstances of its production, was a great achievement; its success gave sanction to the revolving turret as a form of structure by means of which a big gun could be carried and trained. Nevertheless it is doubtful whether it influenced to an appreciable degree the evolution of the sea-going turret ship on this side of the Atlantic. Already, when the _Monitor_ fought her action with the _Merrimac_, the turret had been adopted in coast-defence ships ordered for European powers; and, dramatic though it was, the incident of Hampton Roads afforded merely a confirmation of the effectiveness of the turret form of gun mounting. It was to an