REVOLUTIONS IN NAVAL ARCHITECTURE.
ON his return from Europe, in 1839, Captain Perry purchased a plot of
land near Tarrytown, New York. He built a stone cottage, to which he
gave the appropriate name of “The Moorings.” The farm comprised about
120 acres; and, needing much improvement, he set about utilizing his few
leisure hours with a view to its transformation. Revelling in the
exercise of tireless energy, he set out trees and planted a garden.
To get time for his beloved tasks he rose early in the morning, and long
before breakfast had accomplished yeoman’s toil. If no nobler work
presented itself, this man of steam and ordnance weeded strawberry beds.
In due time this Jason sowing his pecks, not of dragon’s teeth, but of
approved peas and beans, rejoiced in a golden fleece and real horn of
plenty in the darling garden which produced twelve manner of vegetables.
At “Moorings” Perry was surrounded by most pleasant neighbors and a
literary atmosphere which stimulated his own pen to activity during the
winter, when long evenings allured to fireside enjoyments or studious
labor.
About this time, Lieutenant Alexander Slidell MacKenzie, impelled by a
request of the dead hero’s son, and irritated at the criticisms of J.
Fenimore Cooper, began his life of Oliver Hazard Perry. In this he was
assisted somewhat by Captain Perry, who corresponded with General
Harrison and other eye-witnesses of the Lake Erie campaign of 1814.
Among Perry’s papers, are several autograph letters in the cramped
handwriting of the hero of Tippecanoe. Although admiring Harrison as a
military man, and highly amused at the popularity and oddities of his
hard cider and log cabin campaign, Perry voted, as was his wont, the
Democratic ticket.
Another neighbor was Washington Irving, the great caricaturist of the
Hollanders in America, who dwelt in the many gabled and weather-vaned
Woolfert’s Roost. This quaint old domicile which Woolfert the Dutchman
built to find _lust in rust_ (pleasure in rest), crowned a hill
over-looking the Tappan Zee, in the south of Tarrytown, while the
“Moorings” was in the northern part towards Sing Sing. Perry maintained
with Irving a warm friendship to the last. He was an ardent admirer of
the genial bachelor author of Sunnyside, and like him was a devoted
reader of Addison. A humbler but highly appreciated neighbor was Captain
Jacob Storm, who owned the sloop _William A. Hart_, on which both Irving
and Perry often sailed up from New York. Storm was a genial and unique
character, famous until his death in 1883, alike for his mother-wit and
devotional spirit.
James Watson Webb, then the Hotspur, and afterwards the Nestor, of the
press was a genial neighbor and life-long friend.
The changes in naval construction required by the necessities of war,
have been many. The history of ship building is literally one of ups and
downs. Three great revolutions, of the oar, the sail, and the boiler,
have compelled the changes. The ancient sea-boats grew into high decked
triremes with many banks of oars, and these again to the low galleys of
the Vikings and Berbers. The sides of these, in turn, were elevated
until cumbersome vessels with lofty prow, many-storied and tower-like
stern, and enormous top-hamper sailed the seas. Again, the ship of the
Tudor era was only, by slow processes, cut down to the trim hulls of
Nelson’s line-of-battle ships.
In the clean lines of the American frigate, the naval men of our century
saw, as they believed, the acme of perfection. They considered that no
revolution in the science of war could seriously affect their shape.
Down to 1862, this was the unshakable creed of the average sailor. Naval
orthodoxy is as tough in its conservatism, as is that of ecclesiastical
or legal strain.
Yet both Redfield and Perry as early as 1835, clearly foresaw that the
old models were doomed; the many-banked ships must be razed, and the
target surface be reduced. Steam and shells had wrought a revolution
that was to bring the upper deck not far from the water, and ultimately
rob the war-ship of sails and prow. The next problem, between resistance
and penetration, was to make the top and bottom of ships much alike, and
to put the greater portion of a war vessel under water. It is scarcely
probable, however, that either of them believed that the reduction of
steam battery should proceed so near the vanishing point, as in the
Monitor, to be described as “a cheese-box on a raft” or “a tomato-can on
a shingle.”
The first idea concerning “steam batteries” as they were called, was
that they were not to have an individuality of their own as battle
ships, but were to be subordinate to the stately old sailing frigates.
They were expected to be tenders to tow the heavy battering ships into
action, or to act as despatch boats and light cruisers. They were
conceived to be the cavalry of the navy; ships mounted, as it were.
Redfield and Perry, on the other hand, laid claim for them to the higher
characteristics of cavalry and artillery united in a single arm of the
service.
The first English steamers were exceedingly cumbrous and unnecessarily
heavy. It was, with their ships, as with their wagons, or axe-handles.
The British, ignorant of the virtues of American hickory, knew not how
to combine lightness with strength. Redfield proposed to apply the
Yankee jack-knife and whittle away all superfluous timber. Denying that
the British type was the fastest or the best, he pled earnestly that our
naval men should discard transatlantic models, and create an American
type. Regretting that our government and naval men held aloof from the
use of steam as a motor in war, he yet demonstrated that even a clumsy
steamer, like the _Nemesis_, had proved herself equal to two
line-of-battle ships. He prophesied the speedy disappearance from the
seas of the old double and trebled-banked vessels then so proudly
floating their pennants. Redfield writing to Perry as a man of liberal
ideas, said “Opinions will be received with that spirit of candor and
kindness which has so uniformly been manifested in your personal
intercourse with your fellow-citizens.” The confidence of this eminent
man of science and practical skill in the naval officer was fully
justified.
One thing which occupied Perry’s thoughts for a number of years was the
question of defending our Atlantic harbors from sudden attacks of a
foreign enemy. Steam had altered the old time relations of belligerents.
He saw the modern system of carrying on war was to make it sudden, sharp
and decisive, and then compel the beaten party to pay the expenses. A
few hostile steamers from England could devastate our ports almost
before we knew of a declaration of war. While England was always in
readiness to do this, there was not one American sea-going war steamer
with heavy ordnance ready to meet her swift and heavily armed cruisers,
while river boats would be useless before the heavy shell of the enemy.
He did not share the ideas of security possessed by the average
fresh-water congressman. The spirit of 1812 was not dead, in him, but he
knew that the brilliant naval duels of Hull and Decatur’s time decided
rather the spirit of our sailors than the naval ability of the United
States.
He proposed a method for extemporizing steam batteries by mounting heavy
guns on hulks of dismantled merchant vessels. These were to be moved by
a steamer in the center of the gang, holding by chains, and able to make
ten knots an hour. If one hulk were disabled, it could be easily
separated from the others. Such a battery could be made ready in ten
days and fought without sailors. The engines could be covered with bales
of cotton or hay made fire-proof with soap-stone paint.
With the aid of his friend W. C. Redfield, he collected statistics of
all the privately-owned steamers in the United States with their cost,
dimensions and consumption of fuel, showing their possible power of
conversion for war purposes. Encouraged by Perry, Mr. Redfield treated
the whole question of naval offence and defence in a series of letters
on “_The Means of National Defence._” These were printed in the New York
_Journal of Commerce_ during the summer of 1841, and afterwards
reprinted in the _Journal of the Franklin Institute_ in Philadelphia.
His note-books with illustrations, diagrams and pen-sketches show that
his coming ideal war-ship was like the _Lackawanna_ of our civil war
days which, while but five feet narrower, is sixty-two feet longer than
“Old Ironsides,” the _Constitution_ of 1812. His favorite type was a
long narrow and comparatively low vessel like the _Kearsarge_ which is
twenty-two feet less in breadth than an old “seventy-four.” Like Perry,
he looked forward to the day when one eleven-inch shell gun would be
able to discharge the metal once hurled by a twenty-gun broadside of the
old _President_.
During July 1840, Perry conducted a series of experiments on the
_Fulton_, to determine the effect on the ship’s timbers of the firing of
heavy ordnance across the deck of a vessel. The introduction of pivot
guns on board men-of-war, rendered these experiments of great value. The
bowsprit and bulwarks removed, and the eight-inch Paixhans placed in the
middle part of the forward cross bulwarks, thirty feet of the _Fulton’s_
deck was exposed to concussion. Thirty-four rounds fired at a target on
shore, showed that every discharge produced an upheaval of the deck.
Empty buckets reversed and placed at various distance and positions on
the deck approaching the gun, were upset, kicked into the air,
destroyed, or shaken overboard. The ease with which men could be killed
by the windage of the balls, was demonstrated. A stout cask twelve feet
forward of the gun but out of line of fire was knocked overboard. A
glass phial which was hung three feet above the cannon’s muzzle
withstood the shock, but three feet forward at the same elevation was
shattered. Tarpaulin of two thicknesses fastened over a scuttle was
rent, and pine boards securely nailed withstood only two or three
firings.
Perry at once gave the natural explanation that the expansion, pressure,
and sudden contraction of the gases generated by the gunpowder, caused
the air of the hold to rush up to fill the vacuum, and thus pressed upon
the planking of the deck. The heavily built _Fulton_ could resist, where
a weaker vessel would start her planks, just as a fish brought up in a
trawl from deep-sea beds, bursts when coming to the air. He suggested
that any slightly built vessel could be rendered safe, simply by
flooding the decks with three inches of water. This he demonstrated
after many curious and interesting experiments, thus adding to the sum
of knowledge which every naval officer, in the changed conditions of
warfare, ought to obtain.
Perhaps no finer illustration of the value and power of pivot guns was
ever given than upon the _Kearsarge_ when sinking the _Alabama_. Yet of
that very ship, the British newspapers had said, “Her decks cannot
withstand the concussion and recoil of her heavy guns.” They were
evidently unaware of the knowledge obtained by Perry on the _Fulton_,
and applied by American builders of our men-of-war.