Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/119

SHIP. from 4.5 to 6.75 inches. The keel was not laid until 1854, only two months before the commencement of the ‘Kinburn batteries’ in France, but it is to be noted that the French vessels were floating batteries and not high-speed sea-going ships, as was Stevens's. The latter, whose construction, after the death of R. L. Stevens (1856), was continued by his brother, E. A. Stevens, was never completed, and the French were the first to produce a sea-going armorclad, the Gloire (for description see ), which was a screw line-of-battle ship rebuilt in 1858-59 and armored; they also commenced the first iron-hulled armorclad (the Couronne). The Gloire and Couronne were quickly followed by the Warrior, which was laid down in England in 1859. In 1860 the Italians ordered the armored frigates Terribile and Formidabile in France; and in the latter part of 1861 the Russians changed the plans of the wooden frigate Petropavlovsk, then building, and gave her a complete water-line belt and casement of iron. So far the application of armor to vessels had brought about no change in the type except to reduce the number of decks on which guns were carried. But in

1861 the Monitor and Merrimac (Virginia) were designed. They differed from all previous men-of-war in being mastless; each was completely armored: one mounted its guns in a revolving turret and one in a central armored battery. If you place a monitor's turret at each end of the Merrimac's citadel, make the sides more nearly vertical, and raise the upper deck sufficiently to give seaworthiness, you have the general features of the battleship of 1903.







In 1861, under an act of Congress providing for armored vessels, the Galena, the New Ironsides, and the Monitor were constructed. The Galena was an armored gunboat of the ordinary type, except that her sides amidships inclined inward (‘tumbled home’) at an angle of about 45 degrees and were covered with 2.5 inches of armor. Her plating was found to be too thin to be of much use and she was regarded as a failure. She was completed early in 1862 and took part in the attack on Drewry's Bluff forts, when her armor was repeatedly perforated. In this case, since the forts were elevated, the inclination of her sides was a disadvantage. The New Ironsides was finished late in 1862 and attached to the blockading fleet off Charleston, where she remained for two years. She was built of wood and her general plans were similar to those of an ordinary steam frigate of her day, except that she had a ram bow and a retreating stern like that of many recent battleships. Her sides ‘tumbled home’ at an angle of about 30 degrees from the vertical for about two-thirds her length, and over this portion she was covered by 4.5-inch iron plates of large size from some distance below the water line to the upper deck. The broadside armor was joined at the ends by thwartship plating of equal thickness, the whole forming a citadel protecting the battery, boilers, and engines. She was 232 feet long, 58 feet broad, and had a displacement of 4120 tons at her designed load draught. Her battery consisted of sixteen 11-inch Dahlgren smooth-bores, two 220-pounder Parrot rifles, and four 24-pounder howitzers. She was the most successful armored ship of her day, was in action more times than any other vessel ever built (so far as existing records show) and was struck by more projectiles than any other vessel, yet her armor was never pierced, she was never put out of action, and she was never forced to go to a home port or depend upon outside assistance,