From Sail to Steam: Recollections of Naval Life — Chapter II, Part 1

THE VESSELS

Less far-reaching, because men are greater than ships, but still of immense timeliness as a preparative to the war, was the reconstitution of the material of the navy, practically coincident with the regeneration of the personnel.

The causes which led to this are before my time, and beyond my contemporary knowledge.

They therefore form no part of my theme; but the result, which is more important than the process, was strictly contemporary with me.

It marked a definite parting with sails as the motive reliance of a ship-of-war, but at the same time was characterized by an extreme conservatism, which then was probably judicious, and certainly represented the naval opinion of the day.

It must be remembered that the Atlantic was first crossed under steam in 1837, a feat shortly before thought impossible on account of coal consumption, and that the screw-propeller was not generally adopted till several years afterwards.

In 1855 the transatlantic liners were still paddlers; but the paddle-wheel shaft was far above the water, and so, in necessary consequence, was much of the machinery which transmitted power from the boilers to the wheel.

All battle experience avouched the probability of disabling injury under such exposure; not more certain, but probably more fatal, than that to spars and sails of sailing-ships.

Despite this drawback, paddle wheel men-of-war were being built between 1840 and 1850. Our own navy had of these two large and powerful vessels, sisters, the _Missouri_ and the _Mississippi_.

Singularly enough, both met the same end, by fire; the _Missouri_ being burned in the Bay of Gibraltar in 1843, the _Mississippi_ in the river whence she took her name, in the course of Farragut's passage of the batteries at Port Hudson in 1863. This engagement marked the end of the admiral's achievements in the river, throughout which, beginning with the passage of the forts and the capture of New Orleans, the _Mississippi_ had done good work.

At the time of her destruction, the present Admiral Dewey was her first lieutenant.

Besides these two we had the _Susquehanna_, "paddle-wheel steam-frigate," which also served manfully through the war, and was in commission after it.

It was she that carried General Sherman on his mission to Mexico in 1866. As usual, the principal European navies had built many more of these vessels; that is, had adopted improvements more readily than we did.

During my first cruise after graduation, on the coast of Brazil, 1859-61, the British squadron there was composed chiefly of paddlers; the flag-ship _Leopard_ being one.

As I remember, there was only one screw-steamer, the sloop-of-war _Curacao_.

By that time, however, the paddlers were only survivals; but it may be noted, in passing, with reference to the cry of obsolescence so readily raised in our day, that these survivals did yeoman service in the War of Secession.

It is possible to be too quick in discarding, as well as too slow in adopting.

By 1850 the screw had made good its position; and the difficulty which had impeded the progress of steam in men-of-war disappeared when it became possible to place all machinery below water.

There were, however, many improvements still to come, before it could be frankly and fully accepted as the sole motive power.

It is not well to let go with one hand till sure of your grip with the other.

So in the early days of electric lighting prudent steamship companies kept their oil-lamps trimmed and filled in the brackets alongside of the electric globes.

Apart from the problem experienced by the average man--and governments are almost always averages in adjusting his action to novel conditions, the science of steam-enginery was still very backward.

Notably, the expenditure of coal was excessive; to produce a given result in miles travelled, or speed attained, much more had to be burned than now, a condition to which contributed also the lack of rigidity in the wooden hulls, which still held their ground.

Sails were very expensive articles, as I heard said by an accomplished officer of the olden days; but they were less costly than coal.

Steam therefore was accepted at the first only as an accessory, for emergencies.

It was too evident for question that in battle a vessel independent of the wind would have an unqualified advantage over one dependent; though an early acquaintance of mine, a sailmaker in the navy, a man of unusual intelligence and tried courage, used to maintain that steam would never prevail.

Small steamers, he contended, would accompany sailing fleets, to tow vessels becalmed, or disabled in battle; a most entertaining instance of professional prepossession.

What would be his reflections, had he survived till this year of grace, to see only six sailmakers on the active list of the navy, the last one appointed in 1888, and not one of them afloat.

Likewise, in breasting the continuous head-winds which mark some ocean districts, or traversing the calms of others, there would be gain; but for the most part sailing, it was thought, was sufficiently expeditious, decidedly cheaper, and more generally reliable; for steamers "broke down."

Admiral Baudin; a French veteran of the Napoleonic period, was very sarcastic over the uncertainties of action of the steamers accompanying his sailing frigates, when he attacked Fort San Juan de Ulloa, off Vera Cruz in 1839; and since writing these words I have come across the following quotation, of several years later, from the London _Guardian_, which is republishing some of its older news under the title "'Tis Sixty Years Since."

"Naval manoeuvres in 1846. The Squadron of Evolution is one of the topics of the present week (June 10, 1846).

Its arrival in the Cove of Cork, after a cruise which has tested by every variety of weather the sailing qualities of the vessels, has furnished the world with a few particulars of its doings, and with some materials for speculating on the problems it was sent out to solve.

The result, as far as it goes, is certainly unfavorable to the exclusive prevalence of steam agency in naval warfare.

Sailing ships, it is seen, can do things which steamers, as at present constructed, cannot accomplish.

They can keep the sea when steamers cannot.

But the screw-steamer, which is reported to have astonished everybody, is certainly an exception.

Perhaps by this contrivance the rapidity and convenience of steam locomotion may be combined with the power and stability of our huge sailing batteries."

Under convictions thus slowly recasting, the first big steam ships-of-war carried merely "auxiliary" engines; were in fact sailing vessels, of the types in use for over a century, into which machinery was introduced to meet occasional emergencies.

In some cases, probably in many, ships already built as sailers were lengthened and engined.

As late as 1868 we were station-mates with one such, the _Rodney_, of 90 guns, then the flag-ship of the British China squadron; and we had already met, another, the _Princess Royal_, at the Cape of Good Hope, homeward bound.

She, however, had been built as a steamer.

She was a singularly handsome vessel, of her majestic type; and, as she lay close by us, I remember commenting on her appearance to one of my messmates, poor Stewart, who afterwards went down in the _Oneida_.

"Yes," he replied, "she possesses several elements of the sublime."

They were certainly imposing creations, with their double and treble tiers of guns, thrusting their black muzzles through the successive ports which, to the number of fifteen to twenty, broke through the two broad white bands that from bow to stern traversed the blackness of their hulls; above which rose spars as tall and broad as ever graced the days of Nelson.

To make the illusion of the past as complete as possible, and the dissemblance from the sailing ship as slight, the smoke-stack--or funnel--was telescopic, permitting it to be lowered almost out of sight.

For those who can recall these predecessors of the modern battle-ships, the latter can make slight claim to beauty or impressiveness; yet, despite the ugliness of their angular broken sky-line, they have a gracefulness all their own, when moving slowly in still water.

I remember a dozen years ago watching the French Mediterranean fleet of six or eight battle-ships leaving the harbor of Villefranche, near Nice.

There was some manoeuvring to get their several stations, during which, here and there, a vessel lying quiet waiting her opportunity would glide forward with a dozen slow turns of the screws, not agitating the water beyond a light ripple at the bows.

The bay at the moment was quiet as a mill-pond, and it needed little imagination to prompt recognition of the identity of dignified movement with that of a swan making its leisurely way by means equally unseen; no turbulent display of energy, yet suggestive of mysterious power.

Before the War of Secession, and indeed for twenty years after it, the United States never inclined to the maintenance of squadrons, properly so-called.

It is true, a dozen fine ships-of-the-line were built during the sail period, but they never sailed together; and the essence of the battle-ship, in all eras, is combined action.

Our squadrons, till long after I entered the navy, were simply aggregations of vessels, no two of which were necessarily of the same size or class.

When a ship-of-the-line went to sea--which never happened in my time--she went without mates, a palpable paradox; a ship-of-the-line, which to no line belonged.

Ours was a navy of single, isolated cruisers; and under that condition we had received a correct tradition that, whatever the nominal class of an American ship-of-war, she should be somewhat stronger than the corresponding vessels built by other nations.

Each cruiser, therefore, would bring superior force to any field of battle at all possible to her.

This was a perfectly just military conception, to which in great measure we owed our successes of 1812. The same rule does not apply to fleets, which to achieve the like superiority rely upon united action, and upon tactical facility obtained by the homogeneous qualities of the several ships, enabling them to combine greater numbers upon a part of the enemy.

Therefore Great Britain, which so long ruled the world by fleets, attached less importance to size in the particular vessel.

Class for class, her ships were weaker than those of her enemies, but in fleet action they usually won.

At the period of which I am writing, the screw-propeller, having fairly established its position, prompted a reconstruction of the navy, with no change of the principles just mentioned.

The cruiser idea dictated the classes of vessels ordered, and the idea of relative size prescribed their dimensions.

There were to be six steam-frigates of the largest class, six steam-sloops, and six smaller vessels, a precise title for which I do not know.

I myself have usually called them by the French name corvette, which has a recognized place in English marine phraseology, and means a sloop-of-war of the smaller class.

A transfer of terms accompanying a change of system is apt to be marked by anomalies.

These eighteen vessels were the nucleus of the fighting force with which the government met the war of 1861. In the frigates and sloops steam was purely auxiliary; they had every spar and sail of the sailing ships to which they corresponded.

Four of the larger sloops--the _Hartford_, _Richmond_, _Brooklyn_, and _Pensacola_--constituted the backbone of Farragut's fleet throughout his operations in the Mississippi.

The _Lancaster_, one of the finest of these five sisters, was already in the Pacific, and there remained throughout the contest; while the _San Jacinto_, being of different type and size, was employed rather as a cruiser than for the important operations of war.

It was she that arrested the Confederate commissioners, Slidell and Mason, on board the British mail-steamer _Trent_, in 1861. The corvettes for the most part were also employed as cruisers, being at once less effective in battery, for river work, and swifter.

They alone of the vessels built in the fifties were engined for speed, as speed went in those days; but their sail power also was ample, though somewhat reduced.

One of them, the _Iroquois_, accompanied Farragut to New Orleans, as did a sister ship to her, the _Oneida_, which was laid down in 1861, after many Southern Senators and Representatives had left their seats in Congress and the secession movement became ominous of war; when it began to be admitted that perhaps, after all, for sufficient cause, brothers might shed the blood of brothers.

The steam-frigates were of too deep draught to be of much use in the shoal waters, to which the nature of the hostilities and the character of the Southern coast confined naval operations.

Being extremely expensive in upkeep, with enormous crews, and not having speed under steam to make them effective chasers, they were of little avail against an enemy who had not, and could not have, any ships at sea heavy enough to compete with them.

The _Wabash_ of this class bore the flag of Admiral Dupont at the capture of Port Royal; and after the fight the negroes who had witnessed it on shore reported that when "that checker-sided ship," following the elliptical course prescribed to the squadron for the engagement, came abreast the enemy's works, the gunners, after one experience, took at once to cover.

No barbette or merely embrasured battery of that day could stand up against the twenty or more heavy guns carried on each broadside by the steam-frigates, if these could get near enough.

At New Orleans, even the less numerous pieces of the sloops beat down opposition so long as they remained in front of Fort St. Philip and close to; but when they passed on, so the first lieutenant of one of them told me, the enemy returned to his guns and hammered them severely.

This showed that the fort was not seriously injured nor its armament decisively crippled, but that the personnel was completely dominated by the fire of many heavy guns during the critical period required for the smaller as well as larger vessels to pass.

As most of the river work was of this character, the broadsides of the sloops were determinative, and those of the frigates would have been more so, could they have been brought to the scene; but they could not.

Much labor was expended in the attempt to drag the _Colorado_, sister ship to the _Wabash_, across the bar of the Mississippi, but fruitlessly.

For the reason named, the screw-frigates built in the fifties had little active share in the Civil War.

Were they then, from a national stand-point, uselessly built?

Not unless preparation for war is to be rejected, and reliance placed upon extemporized means.

To this resort our people have always been inclined to trust unduly, owing to a false or partial reading of history; but to it they were excusably compelled by the extensive demands of the War of Secession, which could scarcely have been anticipated.

At the time these frigates were built, they were, by their dimensions and the character of their armaments, much the most formidable ships of their class afloat, or as yet designed.

Though correctly styled frigates--having but one covered deck of guns--they were open to the charge, brought against our frigates in 1812 by the British, of being ships-of-the-line in disguise; and being homogeneous in qualities, they would, in acting together, have presented a line of battle extorting very serious consideration from any probable foreign enemy.

It was for such purpose they were built;

and it was no reproach to their designers that, being intended to meet a probable contingency, they were too big for one which very few men thought likely.

At that moment, when the portentous evolution of naval material which my time has witnessed was but just beginning, they were thoroughly up-to-date, abreast and rather ahead of the conclusions as yet reached by contemporary opinion.

The best of compliments was paid them by the imitation of other navies; for, when the first one was finished, we sent her abroad on exhibition, much like a hen cackling over its last performance, with the result that we had not long to congratulate ourselves on the newest and best thing.

It is this place in a long series of development which gives them their historical interest.

But if the frigates were unfitted to the particular emergency of a civil contest, scarcely to be discerned as imminent in 1855, the advantage of preparation for general service is avouched by the history of the first year of hostilities, even so exceptional as those of 1861 and 1862. Within a year of the first Bull Run, Farragut's squadron had fought its way from the mouth of the Mississippi to Vicksburg.

That the extreme position was not held was not the fault of the ships, but of backwardness in other undertakings of the nation.

All the naval vessels that subdued New Orleans had been launched and ready before the war, except the _Oneida_ and the gunboats; and to attribute any determinative effect in such operations to the gunboats, with their one heavy gun, is to misunderstand the conditions.

Even a year later, at the very important passage of Port Hudson, the fighting work was done by the _Hartford_, _Richmond_, _Mississippi_, and _Monongahela_; of which only the last named, and least powerful, was built after the war began.

It would be difficult to overrate the value, material and moral, of the early successes which led the way to the opening of the great river, due to having the ships and officers ready.

So the important advantages obtained by the capture of Port Royal in South Carolina, and of Hatteras Inlet in North Carolina, within the first six months, were the results of readiness, slight and inadequate as that was in reference to anything like a great naval war.

A brief analysis of the composition of the navy at the opening of the War of Secession, will bring out still more vividly how vitally important to the issue were the additions of the decade 1850-60. In March, 1861, when Lincoln was inaugurated, the available ships-of-war at sea, or in the yards, numbered sixty-one.

Of these thirty-four were sailing vessels, substantially worthless; although, as the commerce of the world was still chiefly carried on by sailing ships, they could be of some slight service against these attempting to pass a blockade.

For the most part, however, they were but scarecrows, if even respected as such.

Of the twenty-seven steamers, only six dated from before 1850; the remainder were being built when I entered the Naval Academy in September, 1856. Their construction, with all that it meant, constituted a principal part of the environment into which I was then brought, of which the recasting of the list of officers was the other most important and significant feature.

Both were revolutionary in character, and prophetic of further changes quite beyond the foresight of contemporaries.

From this point of view, the period in question has the character of an epoch, initiated, made possible, by the invention of the screw-propeller; which, in addition to the better nautical qualities associated with it, permitted the defence of the machinery by submersion, and of the sides of the ship by the application of armor.

In this lay the germ of the race between the armor and the gun, involving almost directly the attempt to reach the parts which armor cannot protect, the underwater body, by means of the torpedo.

The increases of weight induced by the competition of gun and armor led necessarily to increase of size, which in turn lent itself to increases of speed that have been pushed beyond the strictly necessary, and at all events are neither militarily nor logically involved in the progress made.

It has remained to me always a matter of interest and satisfaction that I first knew the navy, was in close personal contact and association with it, in this period of unconscious transition; and that to the fact of its being yet incomplete I have owed the experience of vessels, now wholly extinct, of which it would be no more than truth to say that in all essential details they were familiar to the men of two hundred years ago.

Nay, in their predecessors of that date, as transmitted to us by contemporary prints, it is easy to trace the development, in form, of the ships I have known from the mediaeval galley; and this, were the records equally complete, would doubtless find its rudimentary outlines in the triremes of the ancient world.

Of this evolution of structure clear evidences remain also in terminology, even now current; survivals which, if the facts were unknown, would provoke curiosity and inquiry as to their origin, as physiologists seek to reconstruct the past of a race from scanty traces still extant.