In our ballad literature not a little is heard of 'the wooden walls of Old England.' History is so full of exploits by three-deckers and frigates, that one feels as if the general disuse of these engines of naval warfare would lead to national disaster. England, however, does not stand alone in exchanging wooden walls for iron-clads of an entirely new type. All the navies of the world have been thus transformed in the twenty years which have elapsed since our last great war. There are ships of war now afloat which could single-handed meet and defeat the whole fleet that followed Nelson and Collingwood at Trafalgar. These great changes have been brought about by the use of armour-plating, the growth of the guns, the improvement of marine engines, and the adoption of machinery to aid in the working and the fighting of the ship. We remember a few months ago hearing one of our admirals, a man of the old school, talking of naval war. 'In past times,' he said, 'war was all courage and chivalry. What is it now? Cunning and machinery!' And to some extent he was right. Cunning and machinery will play a great part in the naval battles of the future; but of course there must be courage, and iron courage too, behind them, or iron plates and monster guns will avail but little. In the new class of war-vessels, the massive plates are bolted on to iron frames; the only wood is the 'backing' of Indian teak behind and sometimes between them. Oak, so far as beams and planks are concerned, has disappeared from the navy. The 'hearts of oak' are left, however, it is to be hoped, in the brave fellows who happily still man our new navy.

Our Navy List tells us that we have something like eight hundred ships of war, including in round numbers sixty iron-clads. These figures given in this way of course require some explanation. In the list are included gun-boats, tenders, store-ships, tug-boats, old wooden ships which are really waiting to be broken up, training-ships, and wooden guard-ships stationed at various ports. Our fighting navy really consists of the iron-clads and the unarmoured cruisers built for high speed; to these we may add gun-boats of a recent type built to carry one very heavy gun. And with regard to the iron-clads it must be noted that even they are not all fitted to take a place in line of battle. Many of them are ships built from 1861 to 1864, having very thin armour, comparatively light guns, and we fear in many cases worn-out boilers. The Warrior, our first real iron-clad man-of-war (for we can hardly count as such the floating batteries), was launched in 1861. She was built on the lines of a fast sailing-ship, and has none of the heaviness of form which was unavoidably given to most of her successors. When she was launched, armour was still in the region of doubtful projects, and it was considered a remarkable success to give her four-and-a-half-inch plates on her central portion only, for the ends were wholly unprotected. The Warrior too was an enormously long ship—no less than three hundred and eighty feet from stem to stern; but even this length was exceeded in the sister ships Northumberland and Minotaur. These ships are neither strong in armour nor handy in manoeuvring; they have of course their uses, but they cannot be compared with the later ships constructed when we had acquired some practical knowledge of what an iron-clad should be.

As soon as it was recognised that rapidity in manoeuvring—in other words, power of turning easily and certainly—was a necessary quality of a good iron-clad, ships were built much broader in proportion to their length; and this facility of manoeuvring was further increased by the general introduction of the twin-screw; that is, the placing of two screw propellers one on each side of the stern-post, each being independent of the other; so that one or both can be used to drive the ship; or one can be reversed while the other continues driving ahead; thus enabling the ship to turn as easily as a boat when the oarsman backs water with one hand and continues pulling with the other.

While the increase of armour kept pace with the growth of the guns, and rose gradually from four inches on the Warrior to two feet on the Inflexible, a species of internal defence was gradually developed by the division of the ship into numerous compartments; so that if she were pierced below the water-line by the explosion of a torpedo or the blow of an enemy's ram, the water would only partially fill her, and she would still be able to keep afloat. All the later iron-clads have a double bottom, the space between the inner and outer bottom being divided into numerous cells. The body of the ship is divided by the water-tight bulkheads extending from side to side, and from the bottom to the upper deck. To these transverse bulkheads Mr Barnaby, the present chief constructor, has added in all the iron-clads which he has designed a longitudinal bulkhead extending from stem to stern, and dividing the ship into two halves in the direction of her length. Further, there are minor compartments formed by strong bulkheads, designed for the protection of the engines and boilers. In a large ship these compartments of various kinds are very numerous; the Inflexible contains upwards of one hundred and twenty; great care, therefore, has to be taken in planning them, in order to insure that this isolation of the various parts of the ship may not interfere with the working of her guns, engines, and steering apparatus while she is in action.

Side by side with this development of defensive power, there went on an equally rapid development of machinery and mechanical appliances for the working of the ship. The first necessity of an iron-clad is powerful engines, to drive her at a speed of thirteen or fourteen knots an hour on an emergency, though of course in ordinary times a much lower rate of speed is considered sufficient, and the engines work at half their power, or are stopped entirely, while the ship proceeds on her way under sail. But the propulsion of the ship is only one of the numerous duties to be discharged by this new adoption of steam, a power which was only just really establishing itself in our navy when we went to war with Russia in 1854. An iron-clad does not carry anything like the crew that used to be put on board of an old three-decker. Eleven hundred men used to be the complement of a ship of one hundred and thirty-one guns; one-third of the number is more than the crew of some of our most formidable vessels of to-day. In former days guns could be handled and worked by men and even by boys, provided the number of hands were sufficient; and nowadays it is very different work running in and out guns weighing thirty-five, thirty-eight, and eighty-one tons, and dragging along and ramming down shot and shell weighing from six hundred pounds up to three-quarters of a ton, and cartridges each of which contains perhaps more than two barrels of gunpowder. This kind of fighting is work for giants, and so the giant Steam lends his strong hand to do it. Steam turns the turrets of the monitor, steam exerts its force through the medium of hydraulic machinery, checks the recoil of the heavy gun as it runs in, forces the mechanical sponge into its bore, works the shot-lift that brings up the ammunition, works the rammer that drives it home into the gun; finally runs the gun out and points it, the huge gun raising or lowering its muzzle, or turning to right or left, as the captain of its crew touches a valve-handle or presses down a little lever.

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.