A few dates will illustrate the swiftness of our recent
transformations. In 1838, when the French navy reduced San Juan de
Ulloa, the principal defence of Vera Cruz, and in 1840, in the British
attack upon Acre, the fighting power was wholly in sailing ships
such as had fought at Trafalgar thirty-five years before. Two small
paddle steamers towed the French frigate into position, while the
four British vessels of the same type contributed only a desultory
addition to the broadsides of seven sailing ships of the line, which
compelled the surrender of the fortress. The first screw ship of the
line in the British navy was launched in 1852; the last sailing ship
of that class went out of commission in 1860. All alike, the ships of
Vera Cruz and of Acre, and their short-reigning successors, the steam
frigates and ships of the line, are now as much things of the past,
in sails, in engines, and in guns, as are the galleys of Lepanto and
the ships of the Armada. By 1870 it had been recognized everywhere
that a type of vessel corresponding in essential features with the
present armored battle-ships had displaced all competitors. The span
of a single generation had seen the transition of the ships of Drake
and Nelson to those of our own day. The career of Farragut was run in
the intermediate period. His success for the most part was achieved and
his renown won with vessels substantially of the older type, but with
auxiliary steam-power.
It is almost needless to remark that this seemingly abrupt transition
is but one incident in the startling progress made during the century
in all the arts of peace as of war. Like the others, it is due to an
intellectual activity, greater probably than that of our predecessors,
and directed since the peace of 1815 less upon external political
interests than upon scientific investigation, and upon the application
of the results to the improvement of processes of every kind. The
changes in conception and in development of the instruments of naval
warfare result from the increased power of dealing with refractory
material which has been acquired by scientific and practical men in
the laboratory and the workshop. Thus viewed, though so rapid in
realization as to amount to a revolution, not only is the change
seen to be the outcome of a long, though silent preparation, but it
is brought also into its due relation to the general movement of the
age, and found to share its special characteristics. Our ancestors of
the eighteenth century had their own problems, noble and absorbing,
but chiefly political in character. While new worlds were being
gathered into the embrace of European civilization, the leading powers
struggling among themselves for pre-eminence in the work, and while
the harvest was ripening for the French Revolution, science crept
forward, but slowly and silently, the pre-occupation of the few, not
the interest of the many.
The object of the present article is to describe the type of war vessel
prevalent universally among civilized nations when the nineteenth
century opened, and to trace historically the sequence of ideas and of
facts which have resulted in the type whose general acceptance is seen
now in the practice of the chief naval states.