Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/581

566 confess her to be the very ugliest craft that has ever yet floated on the waters, nor to any excellence as a sea-boat which she is expected to exhibit, for she is neither supposed nor intended to be able to go out of sight of our own shores; but to the circumstance that, while all other ships are only developments or modifications of ancient systems, she exhibits the result of the exertions of a perfectly original genius. We do not, in saying this, propose here to prejudge the question, which indeed is as yet hardly ripe for decision, whether her constructor is over-sanguine or not in thinking that the armament which he has given her must ultimately supersede every other for purposes of war; but that for many kinds of service she will be pre-eminently useful there can be no doubt whatever, and still less question can there be of the credit due to a boldness of invention which has thus struck out for itself an entirely new path, while every one else employed on similar tasks has been contented with adhering to established models, and has sought to attain his objects by the mere enlargement of old plans, or the application of them to new materials.

The ship of which we are speaking is the Royal Sovereign, a wooden three-decker, cut down, and, in the place of her original armament of 130 guns, equipped with one of five under the direction of Captain C. P. Coles, R.N. The circumstances which led to the conception of so singular and unprecedented a conversion have been fully explained by Captain Coles himself on more than one occasion, and it may enable our readers better to comprehend its objects, if we briefly recapitulate the most striking points of his explanation.

Captain Coles is a nephew of the late distinguished admiral, Lord Lyons; and at the first breaking out of the Russian war in 1854 was that officer’s flag-lieutenant in the Agamemnon. He was soon afterwards promoted, and received the command of the Stromboli gunboat. In one ship or the other he had the good fortune to be present at the most important operations undertaken by our fleets in the Black Sea. Of all the ships in the fleet the Agamemnon got closest to the Russian batteries on the 17th October, 1854; and the next year the Stromboli made one of the gallant squadron of gunboats with which the lamented Lyons of the Miranda, and, after his death, Osborn of the Vesuvius (the same officer who is now captain of the Royal Sovereign), swept the Sea of Azov, and with ceaseless vigilance and energy destroyed the greater part of the stores on which the garrison of Sebastopol depended, and so contributed their full share to the fall of that all-important fortress. In the Stromboli, too, Captain Coles bore a part in the reduction of Kinburn; and from his judicious reflections on what happened under his own eyes during the attack on that place sprang, in a great degree, his conception of the new plan which the visitors to the Royal Sovereign see exhibited to them in that vessel. The performances of a raft called the Nancy with a 32-lb. gun mounted in the centre, during the campaign in the Sea of Azov, had led him to the conclusion that a gun so placed, being necessarily steadier than one at the side of a vessel, was capable of being fired with greater precision by reason of that increased steadiness. The casualties occurring among the gunners of the French floating batteries at Kinburn, several of whom were killed or wounded by shot which entered the portholes of the gun which they were serving, pointed out to him further the great need which existed of some new plan for the protection of that important portion of the crew, who, while a gun scarcely more than a foot in diameter required a porthole of at least 13 square feet for its training, were necessarily exposed to great danger. Led by these considerations, he applied his mind to devise a vessel which should combine steadiness of platform for the guns with protection to the crew, and before the end of the year he submitted to the Board of Admiralty a plan for a raft armed with one heavy gun to be worked within a hemispherical iron shield. The Board appointed a commission, composed of officers serving in the Black Sea, and presided over by Sir Houston Stewart, to examine the projector and his design; and their report was so favorable to the plan on all its most important points, that Captain Coles was ordered to repair to England, and preparations were made for constructing a number of vessels such as he had designed, which would have been sent the next year to attack Cronstadt, had not peace happily rendered them unnecessary. As far as the Admiralty was concerned the idea was, from that moment, abandoned, but it was fructifying in the fertile mind of the inventor. The raft, which, in his original plan, was to have been composed mainly of water-casks, was manifestly but a temporary expedient, of which one of the principal merits was that a whole flotilla of such vessels could be constructed with cheapness and despatch; but in the hemispherical iron shield it contained a germ which, when elaborated by patient thought and ingenuity, could not fail to produce far greater results. To work out such results, therefore, by adapting his principle to large ships, Captain Coles now began to apply himself. The more he considered