PERILS OF THE SAILOR’S LIFE.
The Loss of the _Captain_—Six Hundred Souls swept into Eternity
without a Warning—The Mansion and the Cottage alike
Sufferers—Causes of the Disaster—Horrors of the Scene—Noble
Captain Burgoyne—Narratives of Survivors—An almost Incredible
Feat—Loss of the _Royal George_—A great Disaster caused by a
Trifle—Nine Hundred Lost—A Child saved by a Sheep—The Portholes
Upright—An involuntary Bath of Tar—Rafts of Corpses—The Vessel
Blown up in 1839-40—The Loss of the _Vanguard_—Half a Million sunk
in Fifty Minutes—Admirable Discipline on Board—All Saved—The Court
Martial.
England, and indeed all Europe, long prior to 1870 had been busily
constructing ironclads, and the daily journals teemed with descriptions of
new forms and varieties of ships, armour, and armament, as well as of new
and enormous guns, which, rightly directed, might sink them to the bottom.
Among the more curious of the ironclads of that period, and the
construction of which had led to any quantity of discussion, sometimes of
a very angry kind, was the turret-ship—practically the sea-going
“monitor”—_Captain_, which Captain Cowper Phipps Coles had at length been
permitted to construct. Coles, who was an enthusiast of great scientific
attainments, as well as a practical seaman, which too many of our
experimentalists in this direction have not been, had distinguished
himself in the Crimea, and had later made many improvements in rendering
vessels shot-proof. His revolving turrets are, however, the inventions
with which his name are more intimately connected, although he had much to
do with the general construction of the _Captain_, and other ironclads of
the period.
The _Captain_ was a large double-screw armour-plated vessel, of 4,272
tons. Her armour in the most exposed parts was eight inches in thickness,
ranging elsewhere downwards from seven to as low as three inches. She had
two revolving turrets, the strongest and heaviest yet built, and carried
six powerful guns. Among the peculiarities of her construction were, that
she had only nine feet of “free-board”—_i.e._, that was the height of her
sides out of water. The forecastle and after-part of the vessel were
raised above this, and they were connected with a light hurricane-deck.
This, as we shall see, played an important part in the sad disaster we
have to relate.
On the morning of the 8th of September, 1870, English readers, at their
breakfast-tables, in railway carriages, and everywhere, were startled with
the news that the _Captain_ had foundered, with all hands, in the Bay of
Biscay. Six hundred men had been swept into eternity without a moment’s
warning. She had been in company with the squadron the night before, and,
indeed, had been visited by the admiral, for purposes of inspection, the
previous afternoon. The early part of the evening had been fine; later it
had become what sailors call “dirty weather;” at midnight the wind rose
fast, and soon culminated in a furious gale. At 2.15 in the morning of the
7th a heavy bank of clouds passed off, and the stars came out clear and
bright, the moon then setting; but no vessel could be discerned where the
_Captain_ had been last observed. At daybreak the squadron was all in
sight, but scattered. “_Only ten ships instead of eleven could be
discerned, the __‘__Captain__’__ being the missing one._” Later, it
appeared that seventeen of the men and the gunner had escaped, and landed
at Corbucion, north of Cape Finisterre, on the afternoon of the 7th. _All
the men who were saved belonged to the starboard watch_; or, in other
words, none escaped except those on deck duty. Every man below, whether
soundly sleeping after his day’s work, or tossing sleeplessly in his
berth, thinking of home and friends and present peril, or watching the
engines, or feeding the furnaces, went down, without the faintest
possibility of escaping his doom.
Think of this catastrophe, and what it involved! The families and friends
of 600 men plunged into mourning, and the scores on scores of wives and
children into poverty! In _one_ street of Portsea, thirty wives were made
widows by the occurrence.(43) The shock of the news killed one poor woman,
then in weak health. Nor were the sad effects confined to the cottages of
the poor. The noble-hearted captain of the vessel was a son of
Field-Marshal Burgoyne; Captain Coles, her inventor; a son of Mr.
Childers, the then First Lord of the Admiralty; the younger son of Lord
Northbrook; the third son of Lord Herbert of Lea; and Lord Lewis Gordon,
brother of the Marquis of Huntley, were among the victims of that terrible
morning. The intelligence arrived during the excitement caused by the
defeat and capitulation of Sedan, which, involving, as it did, the
deposition of the Emperor and the fate of France, was naturally the great
topic of discussion, but for the time it overshadowed even those great
events, for it was a national calamity.
From the statements of survivors we now know that the watch had been
called a few minutes past midnight; and as the men were going on deck to
muster, the ship gave a terrible lurch to starboard, soon, however,
righting herself on that occasion. Robert Hirst, a seaman, who afterwards
gave some valuable testimony, was on the forecastle. There was a very
strong wind, and the ship was then only carrying her three top-sails,
double reefs in each, and the foretop-mast stay-sail. The yards were
braced sharp up, and the ship had little way upon her.(44) As the watch
was mustered, he heard Captain Burgoyne give the order, “Let go the
foretop-sail halyards!” followed by, “Let go fore and maintop-sail
sheets!” By the time the men got to the top-sail sheets the ship was
heeling over to starboard so much that others were being washed off the
deck, the ship lying down on her side, as she was gradually turning over
and trembling through her whole frame with every blow which the short,
jumping, vicious seas, now white with the squall, gave her.(45) The roar
of the steam from her boilers was terrific, “outscreaming the noise of the
storm,” but not drowning the shrieks of the poor engineers and stokers
which were heard by some of the survivors. The horrors of their situation
can be imagined. The sea, breaking down the funnel, would soon, no doubt,
extinguish the furnaces, but not until some of their contents had been
dashed into the engine-room, with oceans of scalding water; the boilers
themselves may, likely enough, have given way and burst also. Mercifully,
it was not for long. Hirst, with two other men, rushed to the
weather-forecastle netting and jumped overboard. It was hardly more than a
few moments before they found themselves washed on to the bilge of the
ship’s bottom, for in that brief space of time the ship had turned
completely over, and almost immediately went down. Hirst and his
companions went down with the ship, but the next feeling of consciousness
by the former was coming into contact with a floating spar, to which he
tied himself with his black silk handkerchief. He was soon, however,
washed from the spar, but got hold of the stern of the second launch,
which was covered with canvas, and floating as it was stowed on board the
ship. Other men were there, on the top of the canvas covering. Immediately
after, they fell in with the steam-lifeboat pinnace, bottom-up, with
Captain Burgoyne and several men clinging to it. Four men, of whom Mr.
May,(46) the gunner, was one, jumped from off the bottom of the
steam-pinnace to the launch. One account says that Captain Burgoyne
incited them, by calling out, “Jump, men, jump!” but did not do it
himself. The canvas was immediately cut away, and with the oars free, they
attempted to pull up to the steam-pinnace to rescue the captain and others
remaining there. This they found impossible to accomplish. As soon as they
endeavoured to get the boat’s head up to the sea to row her to windward to
where the capsized boat was floating, their boat was swamped almost level
to her thwarts, and two of the men were washed clean out of her. The pump
was set going, and the boat bailed out with their caps, &c., as far as
possible. They then made a second attempt to row the boat against the sea,
which was as unsuccessful as before. Meantime, poor Burgoyne was still
clinging to the pinnace, in “a storm of broken waters.” When the launch
was swept towards him once, one of the men on board offered to throw him
an oar, which he declined, saying, nobly, “For God’s sake, men, keep your
oars: you will want them.” This piece of self-abnegation probably cost him
his life, for he went down shortly after, following “the six hundred” of
his devoted crew into “the valley of death.” The launch was beaten hither
and thither; and a quarter of an hour after the _Captain_ had capsized,
sighted the lights of one of their own ships, which was driven by in the
gale, its officers knowing nothing of the fate of these unfortunates, or
their still more hapless companions. Mr. May, the gunner, took charge of
the launch, and at daybreak they sighted Cape Finisterre, inside which
they landed after twelve hours’ hard work at the oars.
[Illustration: THE “CAPTAIN” IN THE BAY OF BISCAY.]
One man, when he found the vessel capsizing, crawled over the
weather-netting on the port side, and performed an almost incredible feat.
It is well told in his own laconic style:—“Felt ship heel over, and felt
she would not right. Made for weather-hammock netting. She was then on her
beam-ends. Got along her bottom by degrees, as she kept turning over,
until I was where her keel would have been if she had one. The seas then
washed me off. I saw a piece of wood about twenty yards off, and swam to
it.” In other words, he got over her side, and walked _up_ to the bottom!
While in the water, two poor drowning wretches caught hold of him, and
literally tore off the legs of his trousers. He could not help them, and
they sank for the last time.
Many and varied were the explanations given of the causes of this
disaster. There had evidently been some uneasiness in regard to her
stability in the water at one time, but she had sailed so well on previous
trips, in the same stormy waters, that confidence had been restored in
her. The belief, afterwards, among many authorities, was that she ought
not to have carried sail at all.(47) This was the primary cause of the
disaster, no doubt; and then, in all probability, when the force of the
wind had heeled her over, a heavy sea struck her and completely capsized
her—the water on and over her depressed side assisting by weighting her
downwards. The side of the hurricane-deck acted, when the vessel was
heeled over, as one vast sail, and, no doubt, had much to do with putting
her on her beam-ends. The general impression of the survivors appeared to
be that, with the ship heeling over, the pressure of a strong wind upon
the under part of the hurricane-deck had a greater effect or leverage upon
the hull, than the pressure of the wind on her top-sails. They were also
nearly unanimous in their opinion that when the _Captain’s_ starboard side
was well down in the water, with the weight of water on the turret-deck,
and the pressure of the wind blowing from the port hand on the under
surface of the hurricane-deck, and thus pushing the ship right over, she
had no chance of righting herself again.
It is to be remarked that long after the _Captain_ had sunk, the admiral
of the squadron thought that he saw her, although it was very evident
afterwards that it must have been some other vessel. In his despatch to
the Admiralty,(48) which very plainly indicated that he had some anxiety
in regard to her stability in bad weather, he described her appearance and
behaviour up till 1.30 a.m.—more than an hour after her final exit to the
depths below. In the days of superstitious belief, so common among
sailors, a thrilling story of her image haunting the spot would surely
have been built on this foundation.
In the old fighting-days of the Royal Navy, when success followed success,
and prize after prize rewarded the daring and enterprise of its
commanders, they did not think very much of the loss of a vessel more or
less, but took the lesser evils with the greater goods. The seamanship was
wonderful, but it was very often utterly reckless. A captain trained in
the school of Nelson and Cochrane would stop at nothing. The country,
accustomed to great naval battles, enriched by the spoils of the enemy—who
furnished some of the finest vessels in our fleet—was not much affected by
the loss of a ship, and the Admiralty was inclined to deal leniently with
a spirited commander who had met with an accident. But then an accident in
those days did not mean the loss of half a million pounds or so. The cost
of a large ironclad of to-day would have built a small wooden fleet of
those days.
The loss of the _Captain_ irresistibly brings to memory another great loss
to the Royal Navy, which occurred nearly ninety years before, and by which
900 lives were in a moment swept into eternity. It proved too plainly that
“wooden walls” might capsize as readily as the “crankiest” ironclad. The
reader will immediately guess that we refer to the loss of the _Royal
George_, which took place at Spithead, on the 28th of August, 1782, in
calm weather, but still under circumstances which, to a very great extent,
explain how the _Captain_—at the best, a vessel of doubtful
stability—capsized in the stormy waters of Biscay. The _Royal George_ was,
at the time, the oldest first-rate in the service, having been put into
commission in 1755. She carried 108 guns, and was considered a staunch
ship, and a good sailer. Anson, Boscawen, Rodney, Howe, and Hawke had all
repeatedly commanded in her.
From what small causes may great and lamentable disasters arise! “During
the washing of her decks, on the 28th, the carpenter discovered that the
pipe which admitted the water to cleanse and sweeten the ship, and which
was about three feet under the water, was out of repair—that it was
necessary to replace it with a new one, and to heel her on one side for
that purpose.” The guns on the port side of the ship were run out of the
port-holes as far as they would go, and those from the starboard side were
drawn in and secured amidships. This brought her porthole-sills on the
lower side nearly even with the water. “At about 9 o’clock a.m., or rather
before,” stated one of the survivors,(49) “we had just finished our
breakfast, and the last lighter, with rum on board, had come alongside;
this vessel was a sloop of about fifty tons, and belonged to three
brothers, who used her to carry things on board the men-of-war. She was
lashed to the larboard side of the _Royal George_, and we were piped to
clear the lighter and get the rum out of her, and stow it in the hold....
At first, no danger was apprehended from the ship being on one side,
although the water kept dashing in at the portholes at every wave; and
there being mice in the lower part of the ship, which were disturbed by
the water which dashed in, they were hunted in the water by the men, and
there had been a rare game going on.” Their play was soon to be rudely
stopped. The carpenter, perceiving that the ship was in great danger, went
twice on the deck to ask the lieutenant of the watch to order the ship to
be righted; the first time the latter barely answered him, and the second
replied, savagely, “If you can manage the ship better than I can, you had
better take the command.” In a very short time, he began himself to see
the danger, and ordered the drummer to beat to right ship. It was too
late—the ship was beginning to sink; a sudden breeze springing upheeled
her still more; the guns, shot, and heavy articles generally, and a large
part of the men on board, fell irresistibly to the lower side; and the
water, forcing itself in at every port, weighed the vessel down still
more. She fell on her broadside, with her masts nearly flat on the water,
and sank to the bottom immediately. “The officers, in their confusion,
made no signal of distress, nor, indeed, could any assistance have availed
if they had, after her lower-deck ports were in the water, which forced
itself in at every port with fearful velocity.” In going down, the
main-yard of the _Royal George_ caught the boom of the rum-lighter and
sank her, drowning some of those on board.
At this terrible moment there were nearly 1,200 persons(50) on board.
Deducting the larger proportion of the watch on deck, about 230, who were
mostly saved by running up the rigging, and afterwards taken off by the
boats sent for their rescue, and, perhaps, seventy others who managed to
scramble out of the ports, &c., the whole of the remainder perished.
Admiral Kempenfelt, whose flag-ship it was, and who was then writing in
his cabin, and had just before been shaved by the barber, went down with
her. The first-captain tried to acquaint him that the ship was sinking,
but the heeling over of the ship had so jammed the doors of the cabin that
they could not be opened. One young man was saved, as the vessel filled,
by the force of the water rushing upwards, and sweeping him bodily before
it through a hatchway. In a few seconds, he found himself floating on the
surface of the sea, where he was, later, picked up by a boat. A little
child was almost miraculously preserved by a sheep, which swam some time,
and with which he had doubtless been playing on deck. He held by the
fleece till rescued by a gentleman in a wherry. His father and mother were
both drowned, and the poor little fellow did not even know their names;
all that he knew was that his own name was Jack. His preserver provided
for him.
[Illustration: THE WRECK OF THE “ROYAL GEORGE.”]
One of the survivors,(51) who got through a porthole, looked back and saw
the opening “as full of heads as it could cram, all trying to get out. I
caught,” said he, “hold of the best bower-anchor, which was just above me,
to prevent falling back again into the porthole, and seizing hold of a
woman who was trying to get out of the same porthole, I dragged her out.”
The same writer says that he saw “all the heads drop back again in at the
porthole, for the ship had got so much on her larboard side _that the
starboard portholes were as upright as if the men had tried to get out of
the top of a __chimney, with nothing for their legs and feet to act
upon_.” The sinking of the vessel drew him down to the bottom, but he was
enabled afterwards to rise to the surface and swim to one of the great
blocks of the ship which had floated off. At the time the ship was
sinking, an open barrel of tar stood on deck. When he rose, it was
floating on the water like fat, and he got into the middle of it, coming
out as black as a negro minstrel!
When this man had got on the block he observed the admiral’s baker in the
shrouds of the mizentop-mast, which were above water not far off; and
directly after, the poor woman whom he had pulled out of the porthole came
rolling by. He called out to the baker to reach out his arm and catch her,
which was done. She hung, quite insensible, for some time by her chin over
one of the ratlines of the shrouds, but a surf soon washed her off again.
She was again rescued shortly after, and life was not extinct; she
recovered her senses when taken on board our old friend the _Victory_,
then lying with other large ships near the _Royal George_. The captain of
the latter was saved, but the poor carpenter, who did his best to save the
ship, was drowned.
In a few days after the _Royal George_ sank, bodies would come up, thirty
or forty at a time. A corpse would rise “so suddenly as to frighten any
one.” The watermen, there is no doubt, made a good thing of it; they took
from the bodies of the men their buckles, money, and watches, and then
made fast a rope to their heels and towed them to land.” The writer of the
narrative from which this account is mainly derived says that he “saw them
towed into Portsmouth Harbour, in their mutilated condition, in the same
manner as rafts of floating timber, and promiscuously (for particularity
was scarcely possible) put into carts, which conveyed them to their final
sleeping-place, in an excavation prepared for them in Kingstown
churchyard, the burial-place belonging to the parish of Portsea.” Many
bodies were washed ashore on the Isle of Wight.
Futile attempts were made the following year to raise the wreck, but it
was not till 1839-40 that Colonel Pasley proposed, and successfully
carried out, the operations for its removal. Wrought-iron cylinders, some
of the larger of which contained over a ton each of gunpowder, were
lowered and fired by electricity, and the vessel was, by degrees, blown
up. Many of the guns, the capstans, and other valuable parts of the wreck
were recovered by the divers, and the timbers formed then, and since, a
perfect godsend to some of the inhabitants of Portsmouth, who manufactured
them into various forms of “relics” of the _Royal George_. It is said that
the sale of these has been so enormous that if they could be collected and
stuck together they would form several vessels of the size of the fine old
first-rate, large as she was! But something similar has been said of the
“wood of the true cross,” and, no doubt, is more than equally libellous.
It is said, by those who descended to the wreck, that its appearance was
most beautiful, when seen from about a fathom above the deck. It was
covered with seaweeds, shells, starfish, and anemones, while from and
around its ports and openings the fish, large and small, swam and
played—darting, flashing, and sparkling in the clear green water.
[Illustration: H.M.S. _VANGUARD_ AT SEA.]
There is probably no reasonable being in or out of the navy who does not
believe that the ironclad is the war-vessel of the immediate future. But
that a woeful amount of uncertainty, as thick as the fog in which the
_Vanguard_ went down, envelops the subject in many ways, is most certain.
The circumstances connected with that great disaster are still in the
memory of the public, and were simple and distinct enough. During the last
week of August, 1875, the reserve squadron of the Channel Fleet,
comprising the _Warrior_, _Achilles_, _Hector_, _Iron Duke_, and
_Vanguard_, with Vice-Admiral Sir W. Tarleton’s yacht _Hawk_, had been
stationed at Kingstown. At half-past ten on the morning of the 1st of
September they got into line for the purpose of proceeding to Queenstown,
Cork. Off the Irish lightship, which floats at sea, six miles off
Kingstown, the _Achilles_ hoisted her ensign to say farewell—her
destination being Liverpool. The sea was moderate, but a fog came on and
increased in density every moment. Half an hour after noon, the “look-out”
could not distinguish fifty yards ahead, and the officers on the bridge
could not see the bowsprit. The ships had been proceeding at the rate of
twelve or fourteen knots, but their speed had been reduced when the fog
came on, and they were running at not more than half the former speed. The
_Vanguard_ watch reported a sail ahead, and the helm was put hard aport to
prevent running it down. The _Iron Duke_ was then following close in the
wake of the _Vanguard_, and the action of the latter simply brought them
closer, and presented a broadside to the former, which, unaware of any
change, had continued her course. The commander of the _Iron Duke_,
Captain Hickley, who was on the bridge at the time, saw the spectre form
of the _Vanguard_ through the fog, and ordered his engines to be reversed,
but it was too late. The ram of the _Iron Duke_ struck the _Vanguard_
below the armour-plates, on the port side, abreast of the engine-room. The
rent made was very large—amounting, as the divers afterwards found, to
four feet in width—and the water poured into the hold in torrents. It
might be only a matter of minutes before she should go down.(52)
[Illustration: THE LOSS OF THE “VANGUARD.”]
The vessel was doomed; a very brief examination proved that: nothing
remained but to save the lives of those on board. Captain Dawkins gave the
necessary orders with a coolness which did not represent, doubtless, the
conflicting feelings within his breast. The officers ably seconded him,
and the crew behaved magnificently. One of the mechanics went below in the
engine-room to let off the steam, and so prevent an explosion, at the
imminent risk of his life. The water rose quickly in the after-part, and
rushed into the engine and boiler rooms, eventually finding its way into
the provision-room flat, through imperfectly fastened (so-called)
“water-tight” doors, and gradually over the whole ship. There was no time
to be lost. Captain Dawkins called out to his men that if they preserved
order all would be saved. The men stood as at an inspection—not one moved
until ordered to do so. The boats of both ships were lowered. While the
launching was going on, the swell of the tide caused a lifeboat to surge
against the hull, and one of the crew had his finger crushed. This was
absolutely the only casualty. In twenty minutes the whole of the men were
transferred to the _Iron Duke_, no single breach of discipline occurring
beyond the understandable request of a sailor once in awhile to be allowed
to make one effort to secure some keepsake or article of special value to
himself. But the order was stern: “Boys, come instantly.” As “four bells”
(2 p.m.) was striking, the last man having been received on the _Iron
Duke_, the doomed vessel whirled round two or three times, and then sank
in deep water.(53)
It is obvious, then, that the discipline and courage of the service had
not deteriorated from that always expected in the good old days. Captain
Dawkins was the last man to leave his sinking ship, and his officers one
and all behaved in the same spirit. They endeavoured to quiet and reassure
the men—pointing out to them the fatal consequences of confusion. Captain
Dawkins may or may not have been rightly censured for his seamanship;
there can be no doubt that he performed his duty nobly in these systematic
efforts to save his crew. However much was lost to the nation, no mother
had to mourn the loss of her sailor-boy; no wife had been made a widow, no
child an orphan; five hundred men had been saved to their country.
One of the officers of the _Vanguard_, in a letter to a friend,
graphically described the scene at and after the collision. After having
lunched, he entered the ward-room, where he encountered the surgeon, Dr.
Fisher, who was reading a newspaper. “After remarking on the thickness of
the fog, Fisher went to look out of one of the ports, and immediately
cried out, ‘God help us! here is a ship right into us!’ We rushed on deck,
and at that moment the _Iron Duke_ struck us with fearful force, spars and
blocks falling about, and causing great danger to us on deck. The _Iron
Duke_ then dropped astern, and was lost sight of in the fog. The water
came into the engine-room in tons, stopping the engines, putting the fires
out, and nearly drowning the engineers and stokers.... The ship was now
reported sinking fast, although all the water-tight compartments had been
closed. But in consequence of the shock, some of the water-tight doors
leaked fearfully, letting water into the other parts of the ship.
Minute-guns were being fired, and the boats were got out.... At this
moment the _Iron Duke_ appeared, lowering her boats and sending them as
fast as possible. The sight of her cheered us up, as we had been
frightened that she would not find us in the fog, in spite of the guns.
The scene on deck can only be realised by those who have witnessed a
similar calamity. The booming of the minute-guns, the noise of the immense
volume of steam rushing out of the escape-funnel, and the orders of the
captain, were strangely mingled, while a voice from a boat reported how
fast she was sinking.”
When the vessel went down, the deck of the _Iron Duke_ was crowded with
men watching the _finale_ of the catastrophe. When she was about to sink,
she heeled gradually over until the whole of her enormous size to the keel
was above water. Then she gradually sank, righting herself as she went
down, stern first, the water being blown from hawse-holes in huge spouts
by the force of the air rushing out of the ship. She then disappeared from
view. The men were much saddened to see their home go down, carrying
everything they possessed. They had been paid that morning, and a large
number of them lost their little accumulated earnings. These were, of
course, afterwards allowed them by the Admiralty.
[Illustration: THE “VANGUARD” AS SHE APPEARED AT LOW WATER.]
The _Vanguard_ and the _Iron Duke_ were two of a class of broadside
ironclads, built with a view to general and not special utility in
warfare. Their thickest armour was eight inches, a mere strip, 100 feet
long by three high, and much of the visible part of them was unarmoured
altogether, while below it varied from six inches to as low as
three-eighths of an inch. It was only the latter thickness where the point
of the _Iron Duke’s_ ram entered. Their advocates boasted that they could
pass through the Suez Canal, and go anywhere.
Every reader will remember the stormy discussion which ensued, in which
not merely the ironclad question, but the court-martial which followed—and
the Admiralty decision which followed that—were severely handled. Nor
could there be much wonder at all this, for a vessel which had cost the
nation over a quarter of a million of pounds sterling, with equipment and
property on board which had cost as much more,(54) was lost for ever. It
was in vain that the then First Lord of the Admiralty(55) told us, in
somewhat flippant tones, that we ought to be rather satisfied than
otherwise with the occurrence. It was not altogether satisfactory to learn
from Mr. Reed, the principal designer of both ships, that ironclads were
in more danger in times of peace than in times of war.(56) In the former
they were residences for several hundred sailors, and many of the
water-tight doors could not be kept closed without inconvenience; in the
latter they were fortresses, when the doors would be closed for safety.
The court-martial, constituted of leading naval authorities and officers,
imputed blame for the high rate of speed sustained in a fog; the public
naturally inquired why a high rate of speed was necessary at all at the
time, but their lordships declined to consider this as in any way
contributing to the disaster. The Court expressed its opinion pretty
strongly upon the conduct of the officers of the _Iron Duke_, which did
the mischief, and also indirectly blamed the admiral in command of the
squadron, but the Admiralty could find nothing wrong in either case,
simply visiting their wrath on the unfortunate lieutenant on deck at the
time. So, to make a long and very unpleasant story short, the loss of the
_Vanguard_ brought about a considerable loss of faith in some of our
legally constituted naval authorities.(57)
[Illustration: THE LOSS OF THE “KENT.”]