Page:The Development of Navies During the Last Half-Century.djvu/26

 ship built by Sir William Symonds—he was knighted in 1836—was launched at Portsmouth. Her dimensions were, size 3100 tons, length 204 ft., and beam 61 ft. The armament consisted of a hundred 32-pounders and ten 68-pounders. Her total cost was £115,000. The shape of the stern was elliptical, an improvement on Seppings's round stern. The 'Queen' was justly considered a remarkably fine vessel, and formed the model on which many future designs were based. Up to 1830 the want of precision in our ideas as to the best types of line-of-battle ships to adopt had been very apparent. But after that date we discontinued building small three-deckers, and converted some into two-decked ships of eighty guns. In the same way small two-deckers were cut down to 50-gun frigates. These were termed Razées. A certain lot of vessels were known as Jackass frigates, because it was said they could neither fight nor run, while a batch of small two-deckers were called the 'forty thieves.' The general outcome of the old wars had brought home to the minds of all who studied the question that neither the very great nor the very small in ship construction was desirable. Number, not size, was our great requirement, and moderate dimensions had sufficed to maintain the sea against all comers. The next great war will probably lead to the same result in modern naval architecture.

Turning to the armaments of ships of war at that period, we find little advance since the beginning of the century. Cast-iron smooth bore ordnance was universally employed, with spherical projectiles. In 1838 the