Cyril Field

Evolution of the Ironclad Battleship

"Our ironclads and torpedo-boats
Have never met the foe,
But times of peace don't alter us,
Our hearts are right, you know;
As right and tight as in the days
When glorious fights were won,
And if duty call, we'll on them fall
With torpedo, ram, and gun, my boys,
With torpedo, ram, and gun.
They may blow us up,
They may blow us down,
They may blow us every way;
But we'll sink or win,
And ne'er give in,
Though they blow us right away, my boys,
Though they blow us right away!"
"Sink or Win" (Joe the Marine). From "Per Mare",
Jane's Naval Annual, 1895.

We are accustomed to think of the armour-clad war-ship as entirely a thing of to-day, or at any rate of the last fifty or sixty years. This is, however, not altogether correct. Armour is not necessarily steel or iron—witness the derivation of "cuirass" from the French cuir, i.e. "leather". A French battleship is called cuirassÉ.

Protective devices of various kinds and materials have been used for hundreds, nay thousands, of years for the defence of ships specially designed for fighting purposes, though never, it must be admitted, so generally and extensively as at the present day. Raw hides were constantly used in ancient and mediÆval times to protect ships and the wooden towers used in sieges on shore. Thick felt was also utilized for this purpose. The Normans hung their galleys with this material in a battle with the Saracens off Palermo in 1071, and it played not only a defensive but a decorative part in the equipment of the big "dromons" of the Saracens and Byzantines, which were covered with thick woollen cloth soaked in vinegar to render it fire-proof, and hung with mantlets of red and yellow felt—a rather gaudier war-jacket than the slate-grey of our "Dreadnoughts".

Whatever the advantages of felt, there were naval constructors who stood fast by the old "adage", "There's nothing like leather". Thus, at the siege of Tyre in 1171 and the forcing of the entrance of the Nile in 1218, an extensive use was made of a species of small craft known as "barbots" or "duck-backs", whose crews were protected by a strong domed deck or roof covered with leather. Again, in 1276, Pedro III of Aragon cuirassed two of his biggest ships with leather—probably raw hides—before sending them to engage the fleet of Charles of Anjou. Lead was also used for ship armour in mediÆval times. It is said that the great dromon captured by Richard I off Beyrout had some kind of leaden plating. Later on, this heavy metal preceded copper as a sheathing for the under-water portions of ships: the Grande FranÇoise, launched in 1527, was lead-sheathed from her keel to the first wale above her water-line. Three years later than this date a regular "lead-clad" was launched at Nice, where she had been built to the order of the Knights of Malta, who had not very long before been driven out of Rhodes by the Turks.

This big vessel, the Santa Anna, was a regular "Dreadnought" in her day. While as fast as other unprotected vessels of her time, she was heavily plated with lead, fastened to her sides with brazen bolts, from her upper deck down to her keel; and this armour was so strengthened by the thick backing of her timbers that, "having been many times engaged, and received much cannonading, she was never pierced below the bulwarks". She carried fifty heavy guns, besides numerous smaller pieces, of which not a few were carried aloft in her many fighting-tops.

It is interesting to note that she had a large armoury, a chapel, forges, a bakery, and a band. "She had various lodges and galleries round the poop, and chests and boxes full of earth, wherein were planted cypresses and divers other trees and flowering shrubs, after the fashion of a garden, small but beautiful." This is about the only garden I have ever heard of afloat, except the mythical "garden in the main-top", where are said to be grown any vegetables, "tin-bag" or other, which arouse the inquisitiveness of ship-visitors. But the main-top has now gone, and I suppose the "garden" with it.

The funnel on the poop is presumably the galley funnel, though placed in an unusual position.

It has been stated, but without any authority being quoted for the statement, that "chain-netting of iron was suspended to the sides of men-of-war, which were also strengthened by plates in the time of Henry VIII and Elizabeth". I should say this is very doubtful, since Sir William Monson, in his Naval Tracts, published at that period, does not mention this practice, although he refers to a number of other protective devices. But, as we have already seen, iron was used as a protection—probably against ramming—by the Viking ships of many centuries before this time.

The first regular ironclad ship armed with cannon appears to be that quaint craft christened the Finis Belli, which was constructed by the burghers of Antwerp what time they were closely besieged by the redoubtable Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, in the year 1585. With this floating battery, for it was little else, the besieged hoped to be able to break the Spanish blockade. There are various accounts of her. One states that she was protected by iron plates, another that her sides were from 5 to 10 feet thick, "filled with rotten nets, well rammed in, which made them firm and almost impenetrable". Probably the hull proper, which was very low in the water, was protected in this way, and the built-up battery or casemate, which she had amidships, was covered more or less with iron. She mounted twenty heavy guns, besides lighter pieces, and carried a large number of musketeers, some in her fighting-tops, some behind a loopholed bulwark over her battery, and others, "which could not be hurt, being lodged lower than the cannon could batter".

Unfortunately for les braves Belges the Finis Belli was a total failure. In spite of her three rudders she was "very troublesome to govern", and eventually ran aground and had to be abandoned. The Spanish besiegers laughed prodigiously at this effort, and nicknamed the abandoned ironclad the Caramanjula or "Bogey-bogey". As for her designers, they re-named her PerditÆ ExpensÆ, or "Money thrown away".

The Dutch patriots struggling for freedom from Spanish tyranny had tried their hands at a somewhat similar contrivance about ten years earlier, which was known as The Ark of Delft. This seems to have been a double-hulled arrangement, with three hand-turned paddle-wheels placed between the two hulls. The Ark only rose 5 feet above the water-line, was 110 feet long and 46 feet broad. She mounted twenty guns, and "a large gallery was suspended from her three military masts"—whatever that may mean. It is a curious but generally accepted fact that a great many more or less modern "inventions" have been forestalled in the Far East. Gunpowder was first made in China; water-tight compartments were commonly used in the ships of that country hundreds of years before they found a place in our men-of-war. It is not altogether strange, therefore, that the Japanese should have been in possession of what may well have been a pretty formidable armour-clad so far back as the year 1600—a remarkable-looking craft, more like a big turtle than anything else. She was cased with hexagonal plates of iron and copper, fitted closely together. She had a rudder at both bow and stern, and was propelled by a paddle-wheel amidships, something like the Ark of Delft. A Captain Saris, who made a voyage to Japan in 1613, mentions that he there saw a junk of from 800 to 1000 tons, sheathed all over with iron. This was probably the one just described, which, by the way, is stated to have carried a battery of cannon.

It is hardly necessary to point out that impenetrability does not necessarily imply armoured protection. An earthen rampart may well be impenetrable, as may a thick-sided wooden ship, as was the Great Michael to the artillery of her day; yet, while affording protection to those behind it, neither the one nor the other is armoured. Between 1600 and 1800 there were many attempts at special forms of protection, from the floating batteries employed by the English in the mismanaged expedition to La Rochelle to the famous Spanish floating batteries destroyed at the Siege of Gibraltar in 1781; but iron ship-armour does not appear again till the year of Trafalgar.

In the Naval Chronicle for that year we have an account of a vessel designed by a son of the General Congreve who is famous as being the inventor of the "Congreve rocket", once a somewhat highly esteemed missile. The ship—it does not appear whether it was actually built or not—was intended for the attack of the French invasion flotillas which were blockaded inside their ports by our fleets. It was to have sloping sides covered with iron plates and bars, proof against any gun of the period, and was to be armed with four big mortars and the same number of 42-pound carronades. Her rudder, anchors, and cables were to be entirely under water, and so not exposed to hostile artillery, while she was to be rigged in such a way that masts, yards, and sails could be lowered or erected in a quarter of an hour. When these were "struck" and housed under the armour she could be moved—probably at a very slow pace—by oars pulled by forty men, worked entirely under cover.

Fulton, the famous American inventor, who built a submarine boat, and invented mines and torpedoes and other weapons of war, turned his attention to the protection of war-vessels. He was probably responsible for a little paddle-wheel-propelled vessel for towing torpedoes, which is described as being covered with ½-inch iron plates, "not to be injured by shot". Later on he built a steam frigate, which he called the Demologos, or "Voice of the People". This relied on 13-feet-thick sides to protect her crew, but was not armour-plated. She was blown up by accident in 1829, and replaced by the Fulton the Second, which seems to have been to some extent protected by iron armour.

But it was not till towards the end of the Crimean War that real steam-propelled armour-clad ships appeared, in the shape of a series of slow and unwieldy floating batteries, specially designed for the attack of the massive Russian fortifications. If anyone would like to see what these were like—that is, as regards their hulls, for the masts have long since disappeared—he has only to travel as far as Chatham Dockyard and ask the policeman on duty at the main gate to direct him to the Thunderbolt pier.

The Thunderbolt is one of these old ironclads which has come down to the useful but inglorious duty of acting as a landing-stage in the River Medway. Neither she nor any of her English sisters was ever in action; they were too late in the field—or rather the water. But several of the French floating batteries, almost precisely similar vessels, took a prominent part in the bombardment of the Russian fortress of Kinburn, where their fire proved most effective. As for the shot and shell from the Russian forts, they rebounded from their sloping iron sides like so many tennis-balls. These armoured batteries were, however, slow, clumsy, flat-bottomed affairs, with no speed under steam or sail and but moderately seaworthy. It remained for the French—whose models in the "days of wood and hemp" were generally better than our own—to go another step forward and produce a regular sea-going ironclad.

This was the famous La Gloire. She was no beauty. She had an extremely ugly bow and was very short in proportion to her beam. She was not a new ship, but the old two-decker Napoleon cut down, lengthened, and covered along her whole side with iron plating 5 inches in thickness. She took two years to finish, and was not ready till the end of 1859. She naturally created a good deal of excitement, and it was at once seen that we must follow suit.

But our naval men did not see why they need be content with so unsightly a war-ship. They had been much impressed, a year or two before, by the Niagara, a fine United States frigate which had visited the Thames, and which had what was then regarded as the immense length of 337 feet. Our constructors, therefore, were rather inclined to follow her lines than those of La Gloire, and turned out the Warrior, a magnificent-looking vessel, not improvised out of an old wooden ship, but entirely built of iron. Her armour-plating, however, did not extend from bow to stern, but only covered her battery amidships, which occupied somewhere about two-thirds of her total length. The Warrior was 382 feet long, and fitted with a not very obtrusive ram. As a matter of fact, it was not perceptible at all, since the stem was finished off with a very graceful swan bow adorned with one of the finest figure-heads ever executed. She was fully rigged, did 14½ knots under steam at her trials, and carried an armament of thirty-eight 68-pounders, then the heaviest guns afloat. In short, the Warrior was a triumph of British shipbuilding, and a worthy ancestor of the magnificent armour-clad fleet which has played such an important part in the history of the nation. She had one sister, the Black Prince, after which a few smaller ironclads were built, the Defence, Resistance, Hector, and Valiant. Next came four bigger ships, the Achilles, Minotaur, Northumberland, and Agincourt. These were all improved Warriors, armoured along their whole length, with ram bows, a heavier armament, and no less than five masts. They were imposing-looking ships, though, of course, to-day about as obsolete as the Henri Grace À Dieu.

I have a vivid recollection of a visit to the Minotaur when a boy. Possibly a few extracts from notes made at the time may be of interest. "She has five masts and is a tremendous length. Her upper deck is furnished with a good many small guns for repelling boat attacks. Round the masts are placed some of the shot and shell for the large guns below, painted white, and the knobs (i.e. studs to fit the rifling) and points gilded. Were here shown a Gatling gun for service on shore or for clearing the decks of boarders, &c. On going below we saw a couple of rocket-tubes burnished like a looking-glass.... In the steerage we saw a 7- or 9-pounder boat gun polished beautifully (as was all the metalwork in the ship) which had an arrangement for reducing the recoil by a cylinder full of oil. The main-deck battery consisted of 12-ton guns, lacquered to look like jet." The carriages, I remember, were painted white and the slides under them scarlet, which, with their burnished gun-metal machinery, gave them a most brilliant appearance, very different from the slate-coloured monsters of to-day. These guns were some which had replaced her original armament of more numerous but lighter cannon, and in consequence every other port in the battery was vacant. But the long line of guns presented a most imposing appearance. "Between the guns were field-guns, boat-guns, &c. Round the hatchways were ranged shot, shell, and canister, which also appeared in every available corner."

Among other notes, too long to be transcribed, I find that the Whitehead torpedoes in the Minotaur were made of copper, a material which has long since been superseded by steel, and that I was shown "the Rumpf coil for generating the electric light which can be shown in three places". Compare this very modest installation with the numbers of powerful search-lights which a battleship carries to-day, to say nothing of the thousands of incandescent lamps which light her interior. The "cylinder full of oil" for checking the recoil of a small boat-gun, which is referred to above, is noteworthy as the prototype of the almost universal system now in use both ashore and afloat, though in the Minotaur none of the big guns were fitted with this very effective apparatus.

As guns grew more powerful, and, in consequence, armour increased in thickness and weight, the amount of side protection had perforce to be reduced, so that as time went on the battleship's cuirass was cut down to a comparatively narrow water-line belt, with a "box-battery" containing her heavy guns amidships. In later types the foremost and aftermost guns in these batteries were placed at an angle and the port "recessed" in the ship's side, so that these guns could fire on the broadside and nearly ahead as well. In some ships, such as the Sultan, Alexandra—which, by the way, was long flagship of the Mediterranean fleet and a notable ship in her day—Triumph, and Iron Duke, the box-battery was arranged in two tiers, one above the other. All these were broadside ships and fully rigged. If they could not get along very fast under sail alone, the sails, under some circumstances, were useful in "easing the engines" and getting a little more speed out of the ship.

But in any case naval officers had not then brought themselves to accept the idea of relying on their engines alone; they liked to have a second string to their bow. Besides, the work and evolutions aloft were undeniably a splendid thing for the seamen; it rendered them quick, smart, and self-reliant, and kept them in excellent physical training.

The reverse side of the picture was the weight of yards, rigging, and sails, the resistance they offered to the wind when the ship was steaming against it, the danger in action to those quartered on the upper deck from the fall of yards,[155]
[156] blocks, and spars from aloft, and the time taken in preparing them for action. The top-gallant masts were sent down on deck as well as the upper yards, the top-masts were generally lowered till they only showed a few feet above the heads of the lower masts, extra slings had to be put in place to secure the lower yards, the shrouds supporting the masts on either side had to be "snaked down", by coiling wire hawsers in a species of zigzag from top to bottom, so that if one or more shrouds were cut the whole would hang together, and many other precautions taken which occupied valuable time and were, perhaps, after all of a merely negative nature—that is to say, the rigging was more of a danger in action than a useful asset. The tops were the only part of it that were of use. As in ancient days they afforded stations for archers and stone-throwers, and later on for musketry, swivel-guns, and grenade-throwers, so they were at this time utilized for mounting machine-guns to fire down upon an enemy's decks.

For at that period "close action" was always expected. Boarders were told off when the ship "went to quarters for action", and boarding-pikes and cutlasses were provided for their use, while the small upper-deck guns—usually breech-loading Armstrongs—were mounted on carriages which enabled them to be fired downward to repel a boat attack or the rush of a steamboat with a spar torpedo. The ideas of an action at sea were practically the same as those which obtained in the days of Nelson. "Masts and yards" were the source of yet another danger. The "smartness" of a ship was still generally gauged by her "smartness" aloft. All evolutions in the Navy are done "against time", and for a ship to get her "royal yards across" some seconds before any other ship in the squadron was a notable feat of which every soul on board was proud to a degree. These ideas were those of the old sailing navy, and in spite of the advent of steam, ironclads, rifled guns, and torpedoes, the conservatism of our great sea service rendered them still paramount, so that even gunnery took a second place. There were regulation quantities of ammunition to be fired—"expended" was the usual term—at regulated periods, there were orders that torpedoes were to be run at stated intervals, that bluejackets and marines should be landed for drill ashore every week when in harbour. But in most ships these things were regarded as secondary and annoying performances, to be got over and done with as soon as possible, if they could not be avoided altogether, so that all hands might be set to their "games with sticks and string", as, in course of time, irreverent observers began to call the cherished evolutions with mast and yards, and the important business of cleaning paintwork, burnishing "brightwork", and generally making the ship as spick and span as possible.

"Spit and polish" were the idols worshipped in those days by captains and more especially commanders, for it was almost universally recognized that their promotion depended more on the brilliant appearance of their ships at an inspection than on any other earthly matter. But for all that the days of "sticks and string" were numbered, as were those of broadside ironclads and box batteries.

The prime cause of the approaching change was the appearance of a queer-looking little craft in the Civil War in America between 1861 and 1864. The United States Government had a fine fleet of wooden steamships at the outbreak of hostilities, but the naval authorities of the seceding Southern States, having raised the Merrimac, a 40-gun frigate which had been sunk at the Norfolk navy yard, cut her down, built a battery amidships armoured with two or three thicknesses of railway iron, and attacked the Federal fleet. The Merrimac had it all her own way, rammed and sank the frigate Cumberland, set the bigger Congress on fire and compelled her to surrender, and withdrew with all the honours of war. But she was yet to meet her match. John Ericsson, a Swedish engineer, was commissioned by the United States Government to construct a small ironclad of his own designing. While the Merrimac was engaged in defeating the wooden ships of the Federals in Hampton Roads, the Monitor, as the new vessel was called, was on her way south from New York. She joined the Federal fleet the very night before the Merrimac made a second sortie. On this occasion, as she came out into the Roads and opened up the fleet she intended to attack, the Merrimac spotted what someone described as looking "like a cheese-box on a raft". It was an excellent description of the little Monitor, which was built with a very low freeboard and had nothing on her deck but a cylindrical revolving turret containing a couple of guns, no masts, and but the merest apology for a funnel. Yet she proved one too many for the Merrimac with her more numerous battery of guns. She was unable actually to pierce her sides, as her commander had received the most peremptory orders not to use more than 15 pounds of powder to load his guns, but the Merrimac got so "rattled" that she had to sheer off.

This first duel between ironclad vessels attracted an enormous amount of attention, as is only to be supposed. The net result in this country was that Captain Cowper Coles, R.N., was allowed to have a cupola- or turret-ship built which he had designed some years before. The Royal Sovereign, a wooden three-decker, was cut down to within a few feet of the water-line, plated with 5½-inch iron, and fitted with four turrets. The foremost one carried two guns, the remainder one apiece. She had very light pole masts and light, hinged iron bulwarks, which gave her 3-1/3 feet more freeboard at sea but had to be lowered before she could fight her guns. Captain Coles, however, had the usual hankering after "masts and yards", and, the Royal Sovereign having proved moderately successful, induced the Admiralty to build a fully rigged turret-ship. This was the unfortunate Captain, whose low freeboard, heavy turrets, superstructures, and fully-rigged tripod masts caused her to turn turtle in a squall off Cape Finisterre on the night of 6th September, 1870. Her inventor went down in her. Her gunner and seventeen men were the sole survivors. One other full-rigged turret-ship was built—the Monarch. As she had a very considerable freeboard she proved a seaworthy ship, but she was the last of her kind.[42]

In the meantime several small coast-defence turret-vessels had been built, such as the Scorpion and Wyvern in 1865, the Abyssinia, Magdala, and Cerberus in 1870, and the Glatton, Gorgon, Cyclops, and others a year or so later. They had one or two masts, but were not rigged ships. These little turret-ships developed into the battleships Devastation, Dreadnought, and Thunderer, launched between 1873 and 1877. Each had two turrets containing a couple of heavy guns apiece. Their hulls were heavily armoured, and they had but one mast fitted with a military top for machine-guns. It is from this branch of our earlier armour-clad construction that our modern "Dreadnoughts" derive their descent rather than from the broadside type.

To explain further developments it must be noted that while in this country the success of the Monitor induced us to experiment with placing guns in revolving armoured turrets, in France the tendency was to build a fixed armoured tower in the ship, and place the guns inside on a turntable en barbette—that is to say, so mounted that they could fire over the top of the armour in any direction. We tried to go one better in the Temeraire (1877). She was a broadside ship, with a "box-battery" amidships, but forward and aft two pear-shaped armoured barbettes were built into her, the tops of which rose about 1 foot or 18 inches above her upper deck. In each of these was placed a 25-ton gun—we classified guns by weight in those days, and not by inches of calibre as we do now—on a mounting, which enabled it to sink down on being fired, and to be raised up again into its firing-position when loaded. The Temeraire, it may be said, was an experimental ship in many ways. Though heavily rigged, she had only two masts, so was like an enormous brig. I believe I am right in saying that her mainyard was the longest and heaviest in the Service. At one time, too, she was painted grey, instead of the black which was then universal, except when ships were in hot climates, when it was generally changed to white. Yellow funnels were regulation, as was "mast-colour"—a sort of deep-yellow ochre with a reddish tinge—for all masts and spars. Ships were, and had been for very many years, painted white withinboard instead of the old eighteenth-century red. Outboard the black sides were finished off generally with a white water-line, and a broad white band along the upper part of the bulwarks, known as a "boot-top". Sometimes another white line was painted on the black side a few inches below it.

There was a good deal of controversy about this time as to the relative merits of "broadside" fire and "end-on" fire. Space forbids us from entering further into this question, but, generally speaking, if a British ship carried four guns heavier than the rest, they were so arranged that two could be fired ahead or astern, and all four on either broadside. But in a French ship the four corresponding guns would be each mounted singly in barbettes arranged diamond-fashion, so that three could be fired either ahead, astern, or on either broadside. A couple of armoured cruisers, the Imperieuse and Warspite, were built, probably as an experiment, on these lines, on the latter of which I had the honour of serving for something like twelve months. They were originally brig-rigged, like the Temeraire, but this was done away with later and replaced by a single military mast. Personally I do not think they were a success. The Warspite, at any rate, was a very wet ship. When steaming against quite a moderate sea the water ran all over her, into the barbettes and down below, and she was much cramped in many ways by the arrangement of her guns. The Devastation and her sisters proved very formidable and successful ships, but with the idea of getting a heavier fire ahead or astern a new departure was made in the Inflexible—the biggest ironclad we had yet constructed—by placing her turrets, not one forward and the other aft on the centre line of the ship, but en echelon—that is to say, diagonally amidships. Theoretically this arrangement, which had been copied from the big Italian ships Duilio and Dandolo, had a good deal to recommend it, but practically there is more to be said against it than for it. Nevertheless, four other smaller ships were built on these lines, the Ajax and Agamemnon—which gained notoriety as being almost impossible to steer—and the Edinburgh and Colossus. The last two were armed with breech-loading guns, which were now superseding the old muzzle-loaders to which the ordnance authorities had clung with such obstinacy long after every other nation had consigned them to the scrap heap.

Meanwhile a smaller single-turret ship, the Conqueror, had been built, an unwieldy-looking craft which went by the name of the "half-boot" from the resemblance her general outline had to that useful article of military equipment. But she seems to have met with the approval of the Admiralty, since an improved sister-ship, the Hero, was launched about five years later. These ships probably suggested the very much larger ones, Victoria and Sans Pareil, each of which, on a displacement of 10,470 tons only, carried a couple of 111-ton guns of 16·25-inch bore in a single turret—that is to say, as their main armament. They had also a 10-inch gun aft, and a dozen 6-inch breech-loading guns. These formed what is called her "secondary battery". The provision of such batteries marks a step in the evolution of war-ship construction which is very noteworthy. The bigger and bigger guns carried by battleships necessitated stronger and stronger armour. In spite of improvements in quality and manufacture the weight of armour tended constantly to increase. The area covered had therefore to be more and more restricted. To carry all this weight of guns and armour comparatively large ships were necessary, and a great part of their sides had to go without any protection at all. Their flotation might be preserved—against attack by gun-fire—by the combination of armoured belt and sloping armoured decks which had by now become almost universal. But it was obvious that the unarmoured portions of the ship above water could be torn to pieces by the fire of comparatively light weapons. This led to the installation of "secondary batteries" of 4-, 5-, and 6-inch guns, for the purpose of attacking an enemy's ship in this way and of neutralizing his attack by keeping down the fire of his secondary batteries.

The development of torpedo-attack brought about the Whitehead automobile torpedo, and the improvements in the speed and construction of destroyers and torpedo-boats caused also the introduction of "auxiliary batteries" of rapid-firing 3- and 6-pounder-shell guns. The machine-guns firing rifle bullets, and, later on, small steel shot, were found to have no "stopping-power" against torpedo-craft, and more powerful weapons became imperative.

The tragic end of the Victoria, which cost the nation, not only a fine ship, but the lives of the greater portion of her crew, and that very talented naval commander, Sir George Tryon, is a well-known tragedy of the sea, and there is little doubt that the enormous weight forward of her huge turret and guns, with nothing aft to counterbalance it, was one of the causes contributing to the completeness of the catastrophe.

No more ships were built on such lines, but about this period an important innovation was made by the introduction of a class of ships in which the four heavy guns were carried in a couple of high barbettes with sloping sides, instead of in turrets. The whole gun was exposed, but not its mountings or crew, since the top of the barbette was closed in by a flat shield which revolved with the guns. These were the Collingwood, Camperdown, Howe, Rodney, Anson, and Benbow. The last-named had one 111-ton gun in each barbette, instead of a pair of rather smaller cannon. Amidships, between the barbettes, were secondary batteries of half a dozen 6-inch guns (the Benbow had ten). These were entirely unprotected except from fire coming from ahead or astern, from which they were covered by armoured bulkheads reaching across the ship immediately behind each barbette.

I well recollect my first sight of these ships, which had all been completed during four years I had been away on a distant station, though, as a matter of fact, I had seen the Rodney launched before I left England. I was on board H.M.S. Aurora, a new cruiser which had been specially commissioned for the naval manoeuvres. We left Plymouth and proceeded to Spithead, where a large fleet had been assembled to do honour to the Kaiser—with whom we were then on rather more friendly terms than latterly, and who came over at the head of a squadron of his war-ships. He was much more anxious to exhibit German war-ships to the British fleet than his naval commanders seem to have been during the Great War. We got into Spithead about six on a morning when there was a thick drizzle almost amounting to a fog, and as one after another of these monsters—as we thought them then—loomed up out of the mist and vanished astern, they presented a most impressive picture of strength and solidity. They really did look in the dim light like "castles afloat"!

But they were not by any means among our most successful efforts. No one liked the unprotected secondary batteries, and thought of the well-armoured Devastation and her sisters. They had no secondary batteries—but they were so well armoured that these were not necessary, except for purposes of offence. This consideration doubtless led to the building of the Nile and Trafalgar, in which the four big guns were carried in turrets and the secondary armament in an armoured battery amidships. They were extremely well-protected ships and would have given a very good account of any ship of their day. But the tendency was ever for bigger ships, which allowed, generally speaking, for greater speed, greater radius of action, greater seaworthiness, and afforded a steadier gun platform.

This produced the "Royal Sovereign" class, of over 14,000 tons displacement, a great advance in size on any ships which had preceded them. They created a considerable sensation at the time of their appearance, especially the Royal Sovereign herself, the first of them. My own first sight of her was somewhere in the Irish Sea, not far from the Isle of Man. I was serving on board H.M.S. Triumph in the naval manoeuvres of 1892. The Royal Sovereign passed us just at the time tea was going on in the wardroom, which would be between half-past three and four, and I remember how everybody rushed up on deck to get a look at the new marvel in shipbuilding.

The Royal Sovereign became practically the regulation type of battleship until the advent of the "Dreadnoughts", though of course each successive batch was an improvement on the preceding one in speed, protection, and gun-power. All had four heavy guns in low barbettes, covered with armoured hoods which revolved with the guns—so they may be said to have been a combination of turret and barbette. The single exception was the Hood in the "Royal Sovereign" batch, which carried her four heavy guns in two regular turrets. All had secondary batteries, whose guns were distributed in armoured casemates at considerable intervals from each other, and all had a couple of military masts, with one or two fighting-tops on each, armed with light rapid-fire guns. This fine series of battleships amounted to forty in all, and formed a homogeneous and magnificent fleet, the like of which the world had never seen. Nearly all had a displacement of from 14,000 to 15,000 tons, and a speed of from 17 to 18 knots. Most are still in service, and though they have been put rather in the background by our "Dreadnoughts" and "Super-Dreadnoughts", we may still be very proud of them.

There were two intermediate steps between them and the epoch-making Dreadnought. The first was the creation of the "King Edward" class of five ships, dating from 1902-3. These were very similar to their predecessors, but had over 1000 tons more displacement, were more thoroughly armoured, and, in addition to the four 12-inch and ten or a dozen 6-inch guns which formed their armament, were provided with four guns of 9·2 inches calibre, each placed singly in a turret at the corners of the superstructure. The final type before the Dreadnought made her sensational appearance was the "Lord Nelson" class, which, however, only comprised two ships—the Lord Nelson herself and the Agamemnon.[43] They were very little bigger than the "King Edwards", but in their case the 6-inch guns were replaced by ten guns of 9·2-inch calibre, a most formidable secondary battery, capable of penetrating a considerable thickness of armour. The Battle of Tsushima, between the Japanese and Russians, led to the temporary abandonment of the secondary battery. It was considered that battles would in future be fought at such immense ranges that a decision, one way or another, would be reached before the smaller guns could be brought within effective range of the enemy, and the events of the European War go to confirm this theory. So it was that we once more arrived at the "all-big-gun ship", and in the Dreadnought, launched in 1906, went back to the principle followed in the armament of her namesake of 1875, and confined her armament—except for a few small anti-torpedo-boat guns—to cannon of the largest size. A comparison of the two Dreadnoughts will form an appropriate termination to this chapter, which has already occupied more pages than I intended.