PERRY DISCOVERS THE RAM.
AN accident which happened to the _Fulton_ belongs to the history of
modern warfare. It revealed to Perry’s alert mind a valuable principle
destined to work a revolution in the tactics of naval battles. Like the
mountaineer of Potosi who when his bush failed as a support, found
something better in the silver beneath, so Perry discovered at the roots
of a chance accident a new element of power in war.
The _Fulton_ was rather a massive floating battery than a sea-steamer.
Once started, her speed for those days was respectable, but to turn her
was no easy matter. To stop her quickly was an impossibility.
On the 28th of August, the _Fulton_, while making her way to Sandy Hook
amid the dense crowd of sloops, schooners, ships and ferry-boats of the
East river, came into partial collision with the _Montevideo_. The brig
lay at anchor, and Lieutenant Lynch in charge of the _Fulton_, wished to
pass her stern, and ahead of her starboard quarter. When nearly up with
the brig, the flood tide running strongly caused her to sheer suddenly
to the full length of her cable and thus brought her directly in line of
the contemplated route. Lynch, to save life, was obliged to destroy
property and strike the brig.
The steamer’s cutter and gig were stove in and her bulwarks, in paint
and nails, somewhat injured. With the brig the case was different.
Though only a glancing stroke, the smitten vessel was all but sunk.
Captain Perry was not on board the _Fulton_, having remained on shore
owing to indisposition. On hearing the story of Lieutenant Lynch, there
was at once revealed to him the addition that steam had made to the
number and variety of implements of destruction. The old trireme’s beak
was to reappear on the modern steam war vessel and create a double
revolution in naval warfare. The boiler, paddle and screw had more than
replaced the war galley’s banks of oars, by furnishing a motive power
that hereafter should not only sink the enemy by ramming, but should
change the naval order of battle. The broadside to broadside lines of
evolution must give way to fighting “prow on.” In a word, he saw the
ram.
Perry required written reports of the affair from his lieutenants, and
wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy suggesting the possibilities
of the rostral prow.
To think of the new weapon was to wish to demonstrate its power. He
proposed to try the _Fulton_ again, purposely, upon a hulk, to satisfy
himself as to the sinking power of the steamer. He arranged to do this
by special staying of the boiler pipes and chimneys, so that no damage
from the shock would result. He was also prepared, by exact mathematical
computation of mass, velocity and friction, with careful observations of
wind and tide, to express the results with scientific accuracy.
The report duly was received at Washington and, instead of being acted
upon, was pigeon-holed. Perry was unable, at private expense, to follow
up the idea, but thought much of it at the time, and the subject, though
not officially noticed, remained in his mind.
After the Mexican War, having leisure, he wrote the following letter:—
WASHINGTON, D. C., Nov. 11, 1850.
_Sir_,—Since the introduction of steamers of war into the
navies of the world, I have frequently thought that a most
effectual mode of attack might be brought into operation by
using a steamer as a striking body, and precipitating her with
all her power of motion and weight upon some weak point of a
vessel of the enemy moved only by sails, and, seizing upon a
moment of calm, or when the sail vessel is motionless or moving
slowly through the water.
I had always determined to try this experiment, should
opportunity afford, and actually made preparations for securing
the boilers and steam pipes of the _Fulton_ at New York, when I
thought it probable I might be sent in her to our eastern border
ports at the time of the expected rupture with Great Britain
upon the North Eastern Boundary question.
Experience has shown that a vessel moving rapidly through the
water, and striking with her stem another motionless, or passing
in a transverse direction, invariably destroys or seriously
injures the vessel stricken without material damage to the
assailant. Imagine for example the steamer _Mississippi_ under
full steam and moving at the moderate rate of 12 statute miles
per hour, her weight considered as a projectile being estimated
as 2,500 tons, the minimum calculation, and multiplying this
weight by her velocity, say 17½ feet per second, the power and
weight of momentum would be a little short of 44,000 tons, and
the effect of collision upon the vessel attacked, whatever may
be her size, inevitably overwhelming.
It may be urged that the momentum estimated by the above figures
may not be as effective as the rule indicates, yet it cannot be
maintained that there would not be sufficient force for all the
purposes desired.
I have looked well into the practicability of this mode of
attack, and am fully satisfied that if managed with decision and
coolness, it will unquestionably succeed and without immediate
injury to the attacking vessel. Much would of course depend on
the determination and skill of the commander, and the
self-possession of the engineers at the starting bars, in
reversing the motion of the engines at the moment of collision;
but coolness under dangers of accident from the engines or
boilers, is considered, by well trained engineers, a point of
honor, and I feel well assured there would be no want of conduct
or bearing in either those or the other officers of the ship.
The preparations for guarding the attacking steamer against
material damage would be to secure the boilers more firmly in
their beds, to prepare the steam pipes and connections so as to
prevent the separation of their joints, to render firm the
smoke-stack by additional guys and braces, to strip off the
lower masts and to remove the bowsprit. All these arrangements
could be made in little time and without much inconvenience.
It would be desirable that the bowsprit should be so fitted as
to be easily reefed or removed, but in times of emergency, this
spar should not for a moment be considered as interposing an
obstacle to the contemplated collision.
It will be said, and I am free to admit, that much risk would be
encountered by the steamer from the guns of the vessel assailed,
say of a line-of-battle ship or frigate, but considering the
short time she would be under fire, her facilities for advance
and retreat, of choice of position and of the effect of her own
heavy guns upon the least defensible point of the enemy’s ship
on which she would of course advance, the disparity of armaments
should not be taken into view.
I claim no credit for the originality of this suggestion, well
knowing that the ancients in their sea fights dashed their
sea-galleys with great force one upon the other, nor am I
ignorant of the plan of a steam prow suggested some years ago by
Commodore Barron.[9] My proposition is simply the renewal of an
ancient practice by the application of the power unknown in
early times, and, as many believe, in the beginning of its
usefulness.
With great respect, I have the honor to be,
Your most obedient servant,
M. C. PERRY.
THE HON. WM. A. GRAHAM,
Secretary of the Navy, Washington, D. C.
Twenty years later in the river of her own name, the war steamer
_Mississippi_ became a formidable ram, though before this time in 1859,
the French iron-clad, _La Gloire_ had been launched. It had been said of
the British Admiral, Sir George Sartorius, that “He was one of the first
to form, in 1855, the revolution in naval warfare, by the renewal of the
ancient mode of striking an adversary with the prow.” It will be seen
that Perry anticipated the Europeans and taught the Americans.
Other points in this letter of Perry’s are of interest at this time.
First, last, and always, Perry honored the engineer and believed in his
equal possession, with the line officers, of all the soldierly virtues,
notwithstanding that the man at the lever, out of sight of the enemy,
must needs lack the thrilling excitement of the officers on deck. He
felt that courage in the engine-room had even a finer moral strain than
the more physically exciting passions of the deck.
We may here note that Perry really had part in the naval victories of
our civil war. The method of ramming action, as used by Farragut in his
brilliant victories of wooden steamers over Confederate iron-clads, was
that out-lined by Perry years before.
Perry also made a thorough study, so far as it was then possible, of the
problems of resistance and penetration, of rifled cannon and of
iron-clad armor.
He was for years on the board of officers appointed to report upon the
Stevens floating battery at Hoboken. Until his death, he was familiar
with the whole question, and believed in the early adoption of both
rifles and armor on ships. Prior to the Mexican War he thought the right
course was to develop to the highest stage of efficiency the ram and the
smooth-bore shell-gun. It turned out that in the war for the Union in
1861, most of the naval officers associated with him and who shared his
ideas were on the Confederate side. Hence the Southerners were in a much
better state of advanced naval science than the Northerners. Even the
_Monitor_ was the fruit of a private inventor, and not of a naval
officer. The first appearance of an iron coat on an American war vessel,
and the first ram effectively used in war were upon the Confederate
steamer _Virginia_ (the old _Merrimac_) which was the idea and
application of T. ap. Catesby Jones; while the _Tennessee_ in Mobile Bay
was wholly the creation of Franklin Buchanan. Both of these gentlemen
were life-long friends, and subordinate officers, who were also familiar
with the problem of ramming, and enjoyed Perry’s confidence and ideas.
For the methods of the _Merrimac_ in her devastation of the Federal
fleet at Hampton Roads, the epistle of Perry might seem almost a letter
of instruction.
Had good machinists and founderies existed in the South, in number
proportionate to that of Confederate naval officers, the story of Mobile
Bay and the Mississippi river might have been different. With no lack of
courage or skill in the northern sailors and their leaders, their
greatest ally lay in the poor machinery of the Confederate iron-clads.
These were true testudos in armor, but fortunately for the Union cause
they were tortoises in speed also. Or, to change the metaphor, though
meant to act as swordfish, they behaved as sluggishly as whales. They
fell a prey even to wooden vessels able to obey their helms but moving
rapidly with sinking force.
With the old system of tactics under sail, no ramming was possible, as
the vessel under propulsion would expose herself to a raking fire while
slowly working up to position. Gunpowder rendered obsolete the trireme
ram. Steam, by its gigantic propelling force, had now in turn overcome
gunpowder.
The model of the machine-ram, made by Captain Samuel Barron in 1827, and
referred to by Captain Perry is now at Annapolis Naval Academy. So far
as we can gather, Perry had not seen this at the time of his first
writing of the ram in 1839. His valuable paper was duly read, laid aside
and bound up with other “Captain’s Letters” in 1839 and forgotten. When
in 1861, the _Merrimac_, steaming out from Norfolk, by one thrust of her
iron snout turned the grand old wooden frigate, _Cumberland_, into a
sunken hulk, she revealed the powers of the ram to the whole world. The
curtain then fell on the age of wood and ushered in the age of iron.
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[9] Commodore James Barron’s model of his “prow-ship” was exhibited in
the rotunda of the capitol in Washington in 1836. As described by him in
the Patent Office reports, it was a mere mass of logs, white pine,
poplar, or gum-tree wood. Perry meant to use a real ship always
available for ramming.