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.
I have said that the character of the ships then building constituted
a chief part of my environment in entering the navy. The effect was
inevitable, and amounted in fact simply to making me a man of my
period. My most susceptible years were colored by the still lingering
traditions of the sail period, and of the "marling-spike seaman;" not
that I, always clumsy with my fingers, had any promise of ever
distinguishing myself with the marling-spike. This expressive phrase,
derived from its chief tool, characterized the whole professional
equipment of the then mechanic of the sea, of the man who, given the
necessary rope-yarns, and the spars shaped by a carpenter, could take
a bare hull as she lay for the first time quietly at anchor from the
impetus of her launch, and equip her for sea without other assistance;
"parbuckle" on board her spars lying alongside her in the stream, fit
her rigging, bend her sails, stow her hold, and present her all
a-taunt-o to the men who were to sail her. The navigation of a ship
thus equipped was a field of seamanship apart from that of the
marling-spike; but the men who sailed her to all parts of the earth
were expected to be able to do all the preliminary work themselves,
often did do it, and considered it quite as truly a part of their
business as the handling her at sea. Of course, in equipping ships, as
in all other business, specialization had come in with progress; there
were rope-makers, there were riggers who took the ropes ready-made and
fitted them for the ship, and there were stevedores to stow holds,
etc.; but the tradition ran that the seaman should be able on a pinch
to do all this himself, and the tradition kept alive the practice,
which derived from the days not yet wholly passed away when he might,
and often did, have to refit his vessel in scenes far distant from any
help other than his own, and without any resources save those which
his ready wit could adapt from materials meant for quite different
uses. How to make a jib-boom do the work of a topsail-yard, or to
utilize spare spars in rigging a jury-rudder, were specimens of the
problems then presented to the aspiring seaman. It was somewhere in
the thirties, not so very long before my time, that a Captain Rous, of
the British navy, achieved renown--I would say immortal, were I not
afraid that most people have forgotten--by bringing his frigate home
from Labrador to England after losing her rudder. It is said that he
subsequently ran for Parliament, and when on the hustings some doubter
asked about his political record, he answered, "I am Captain Rous who
brought the _Pique_ across the Atlantic without a rudder." Of course
the reply was lustily cheered, and deservedly; for in such seas, with
a ship dependent upon sails only, it was a splendid, if somewhat
reckless achievement. Cooper, in his _Homeward Bound_, places the ship
dismasted on the coast of Africa. Close at hand, but on the beach,
lies a wrecked vessel with her spar standing; and there is no
exaggeration in the words he puts into the mouth of Captain Truck, as
he looked upon these resources: "The seaman who, with sticks, and
ropes, and blocks enough, cannot rig his ship, might as well stay
ashore and publish an hebdomadal."
Such was the marling-spike seaman of the days of Cooper and Marryat,
and such was still the able seaman, the "A.B.," of 1855. It was not
indeed necessary, nor expected, that most naval officers should do
such things with their own hands; but it was justly required that they
should know when a job of marling-spike seamanship was well or ill
done, and be able to supervise, when necessary. Napoleon is reported
to have said that he could judge personally whether the shoes
furnished his soldiers were well or ill made; but he needed not to be
a shoemaker. Marryat, commenting on one of his characters, says that
he had seldom known an officer who prided himself on his "practical"
knowledge who was at the same time a good navigator; and that such too
often "lower the respect due to them by assuming the Jack Tar." Oddly
enough, lunching once with an old and distinguished British admiral,
who had been a midshipman while Marryat still lived, he told me that
he remembered him well; his reputation, he added, was that of "an
excellent seaman, but not much of an officer," an expressive phrase,
current in our own service, and which doubtless has its equivalent in
all maritime languages.
In my early naval life I came into curious accidental contact with
just such a person as Marryat described. I was still at the Academy,
within a year of graduation, and had been granted a few days' leave at
Christmas. Returning by rail, there seated himself alongside me a
gentleman who proved to be a lieutenant from the flag-ship of the Home
Squadron, going to Washington with despatches. Becoming known to each
other, he began to question me as to what new radicalisms were being
fostered in Annapolis. "Are they still wasting the young men's time
over French? I would not permit them to learn any other language than
their own. And how about seamanship? What do they know about that? As
far as I have observed they know nothing about marling-spike
seamanship, strapping blocks, fitting rigging, etc. Now I can sit down
alongside of any seaman doing a bit of work and show him how it ought
to be done; yes, and do it myself." It was Marryat's lieutenant,
Phillott, _ipsissimis verbis_. I listened, over-awed by the weight of
authority and experience; and I fear somewhat in sympathy, for such
talk was in the air, part of the environment of an old order slowly
and reluctantly giving way to a new.
Of course I shared this; how should I not, at eighteen? In giving
expression to it once, I drew down on my head a ringing buffet from my
father, in which he embodied an anecdote of Decatur I never saw
elsewhere, and fancy he owed to his boyhood passed near a navy-yard
town--Portsmouth, Virginia--while Decatur was in his prime. I had
written home with reference to some study, in which probably I did not
shine, "What did Decatur know about such things?" A boy may be
pardoned for laying himself open to the retort which so many of his
superiors equally invited: "Depend upon it, if Decatur had been a
student at the Academy, he would, so far as his abilities permitted,
have got as far to the front as he always did in fighting. He always
aimed to be first. It is told of him that he commanded one of two
ships ordered on a common service, in which the other arrived first at
a point on the way. Her captain, instead of pushing forward, waited
for Decatur to come up; on hearing which the latter exclaimed in his
energetic way, 'The d----d fool!'" Decatur, however, also shared, and
shared inevitably, the prepossessions of his day. I was told by Mr.
Charles King, when President of Columbia College, that he had been
present in company with Decatur at one of the early experiments in
steam navigation. Crude as the appliances still were, demonstration
was conclusive; and Decatur, whatever his prejudices, was open to
conviction. "Yes," he said, gloomily, to King, "it is the end of our
business; hereafter any man who can boil a tea-kettle will be as good
as the best of us." It is notable that in my day a tradition ran that
Decatur himself was not thoroughly a seaman. The captain of the first
ship in which I served after graduation, a man of much solid
information, who had known the commodore's contemporaries, speaking
about some occurrence, said to me, "The trouble with Decatur was, that
he was not a seaman." I repeated the remark to one of our lieutenants,
and he ejaculated, with emphasis, "Yes, that is true." I cannot tell
how far these opinions were the result of prepossession in those from
whom they derived. There had been hard and factious division in the
navy of Decatur's day, culminating in the duel in which he fell; and
the lieutenant, at least, was associated by family ties with Decatur's
antagonist.
To deny that the methods of the Naval Academy were open to criticism
would be to claim for them infallibility. Upon the whole, however, in
my time they erred rather on the side of being over-conservative than
unduly progressive. Twenty years later, recalling some of our Academy
experiences to one of my contemporaries, himself more a man of action
than a student, and who had meanwhile distinguished himself by
extraordinary courage in the War of Secession--I mean Edward Terry--he
said, "Oh yes, those were the days before the flood." The hold-back
element was strong, though not sufficiently so to suit such as my
friend of the railroad. Objectors laid great stress on the word
"practical;" than which, with all its most respectable derivation and
association, I know none more frequently--nor more effectually--used
as a bludgeon for slaying ideas. Strictly, of course, it means knowing
how to do things, and doing them; but colloquially it usually means
doing them before learning how. Leap before you look. The practical
part is bruising your shins for lack of previous reflection. Of
course, no one denies the educational value of breaking your shins,
and everything else your own--a burnt child dreads the fire; but the
question remains whether an equally good result may not be reached at
less cost, and so be more really practical. I recall the fine scorn
with which one of our professors, Chauvenet, a man of great and
acknowledged ability, practical and other, used to speak of "practical
men." "Now, young gentlemen, in adjusting your theodolites in the
field, remember not to bear too hard on the screws. Don't put them
down with main force, as though the one object was never to unscrew
them. If you do, you indent the plate, and it will soon be quite
impossible to level the instrument properly. That," he would continue,
"is the way with your practical men. There, for instance, is Mr.
----," naming an assistant in another department, known to the
midshipmen as Bull-pup, who I suppose had been a practical surveyor;
"that is what he does." I presume the denunciation was due to B. P.
having at one time borrowed an instrument from the department, and
returned it thus maltreated. But "practical," so misapplied--action
without thought--was Chauvenet's red rag.
An amusing reminiscence, illustrative of the same common tendency, was
told me by General Howard. I had the pleasure of meeting Howard, then
in command of one wing of Sherman's army, at Savannah, just after the
conclusion of the march to the sea, in 1864. He spoke pleasantly of
his associations with my father, when a cadet at the Military Academy,
and added, "I remember how he used to say, 'A little common-sense, Mr.
Howard, a little common-sense.'" Howard did not say what particular
occasions he then had in mind, but a student reciting, and confronted
suddenly with some question, or step in a demonstration, which he has
failed to master, or upon which he has not reflected, is apt to feel
that the practical thing to do is not to admit ignorance; to trust to
luck and answer at random. Such a one, explaining a drawing of a
bridge to my father, was asked by him what was represented by certain
lines, showing the up-stream part of a pier. Not knowing, he replied,
"That is a hole to catch the ice in." "Imagine," said my father, in
telling me the story, "catching all the ice from above in holes in the
piers." A little common-sense--exercised first, not afterwards--is the
prescription against leaping before you look, or jamming your screws
too hard.