Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/120

SHIP. while in some of the actions in which she was engaged other ironclads were sunk and several monitors were disabled and forced out of action. After the war, in 1866, she was accidentally destroyed by fire at the Philadelphia navy yard.

The third vessel was the far-famed Monitor. The contract for her construction was signed October 4, 1861, and she was launched January 30, 1862. Her dimensions were: extreme length, 172 feet; length of hull proper, 124 feet; extreme beam, 41.5 feet; width of hull where it joined the overhang, 34 feet; width of hull at bottom, 18 feet; depth of hold, 11.33 feet; mean draught, 10.5 feet; inside diameter of turret, 20 feet; height of turret, 9 feet; displacement, 987 tons.

The Monitor was a most remarkable vessel in many ways, but she was not a ship of war, but a floating battery, and useful only in smooth water. She was fortunate in meeting a craft equally unseaworthy. She was not even the first turret vessel to be commenced, nor was she the best when finished. Before the contract was drawn for the Monitor. Denmark had contracted with Captain Cowper Coles for the building of the double-turreted, sea-going ironclad Rolf Krake, and her keel was laid before the construction of the Monitor was authorized. The Rolf Krake was a very successful vessel, and, although she was never in close action with another ship, she several times silenced Prussian batteries and held the whole Prussian fleet in check in 1864.

Ericsson, however, was probably the first to produce plans of a practical revolving turret mounted on board a vessel, as there seems to be no design of one antedating those he sent to Napoleon III. in 1854. Ericsson's Monitor, also, was the first completed vessel carrying a revolving turret, and while many of her details were faulty, others were original and ingenious in the highest degree.

Whether the fight between the Monitor and the Merrimac was a drawn battle, as some assert, or a complete victory, the results are the same. The Monitor, as in some sense a savior of the country, was accorded an importance its intrinsic merits did not warrant. Other monitors were built, improved in some respects, but embodying many of the defects of the original and some of their own. Almost every nation in Europe also built vessels of the monitor type, but having no patriotic reasons to revere them, the evolution of the turret ship proceeded rapidly, though the value of broadside fire from numerous guns was never quite forgotten, and in many designs, in a modified form, it displaced the turret. This modified form was of two types, called the bow battery and central battery, the latter exemplifying the fullest development of the idea, which was to secure heavy end-on fire without much sacrifice of weight in the broadside.













In 1863 the British converted several vessels into turret ships with four turrets (Royal Sovereign class); the North German Confederation ordered the Arminius, a turret ship of 1600 tons, similar to the Rolf Krake; France laid down a number of turret vessels of about 3000 tons (Taureau class); Italy laid down the turret ship

Affondatore of 4400 tons, and Russia, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden began the construction of numerous monitors of the American low freeboard type. The reaction against the turret ship is noticed in the vessels produced in the next two or three years, which are mostly central battery ships. The long row of guns on the broadside is given up, for it was seen to be impossible adequately to protect so great an area with armor. The guns were decreased in number, but increased in size, and gathered in a group amidships. To secure fire ahead and astern, some guns were mounted in the angles of polygonal citadels or in circular barbette towers over the corners of the battery. Of the great Powers, Russia alone adhered chiefly to the turret, although she built one or two central battery ships. In 1866 Great Britain reverted to turret ships in the high freeboard Monarch and the rather low freeboard Captain. The uselessness of sail power in heavy fighting ships