18 THE SEA. 



witness a capitulation. He arrived in time to see the total destruction of the floating 

 batteries and a large part of the combined fleet. Attempting a somewhat feeble joke, he 

 wrote to France: "La balterie la plus effective etait ma batterie de cuisine" Elliott's 

 cooking-apparatus and "roasted balls " beat it all to nothing. Red-hot shot has been 

 entirely superseded in " civilised " warfare by shells. It was usually handled much in the 

 same way that ordinary shot and shell is to-day. Each ball was carried by two men, 

 having between them a strong iron frame, with a ring in the middle to hold it. There 

 were two heavy wads, one dry and the other slightly damped, between the powder and 

 ball. At the siege of Gibraltar, however, matters were managed in a much more rough-and- 

 ready style. The shot was heated at furnaces and wheeled off to the guns in wheelbarrows 

 lined with sand. 



The partial failure of the navy to co-operate successfully with the laud-forces, so far 

 as bombardment was concerned, during the Crimean war, has had much to do with the 

 adoption of the costly ironclad floating fortresses, armed with enormously powerful guns, 

 of the present day. The earliest form, indeed, was adopted during the above war, 

 but not used to any great extent or advantage. The late Emperor of the French* saw 

 that the corning necessity or necessary evil would be some form of strongly-armoured 

 and protected floating battery that could cope with fortresses ashore, and this was the 

 germ of the ironclad movement. The first batteries of this kind, used successfully at 

 Kinburn, were otherwise unsea worthy and unmanageable, and were little more than 

 heavily-plated and more or less covered barges. 



The two earliest European ironclads were La Gloire in France and the Warrior in 

 England the latter launched in 1860. Neither of these vessels presented any great 

 departure from the established types of build in large ships of war. The Warrior is an un- 

 deniably fine, handsome-looking frigate, masted and rigged as usual, but she and her sister-ship, 

 the Black Prince, are about the only ironclads to which these remarks apply every form 

 and variety of construction having been adopted since. As regarded size, she was con- 

 siderably larger than the largest frigate or ship of the line of our navy, although greatly 

 exceeded by many ironclads subsequently built. She is 380 feet in length, and her dis- 

 placement of more than 9,100 tons was 3,000 tons greater than that of the largest of the 

 wooden men-of-war she was superseding. The Warrior is still among the fastest of the 

 iron-armoured fleet. Considered as an ironclad, however, she is a weak example. Her armour, 

 which protects only three-fifths of her sides, is but four and a half inches thick, with eighteen 

 inches of (wood) backing, and five-eighths of an inch of what is technically called "skin- 

 plating," for protection inside. The remote possibility of a red-hot shot or shell falling 

 inside has to be considered. Her bow and stern, rudder-head and steering-gear, would, of 

 course, be the vulnerable points. 



From this small beginning one armoured vessel our ironclad fleet has grown with 



* Some have even gone so far as to consider Louis Napoleon the inventor of iron-plated and armoured vessels. 

 This is absurd. The ancients knew the use of plates of iron or brass for covering ships of war and battering-rams. 

 One of Hiero's greatest galleys was covered that way. That it must come to this sooner or later was the published 

 idea of many, both in this country and in France. The Emperor's sagacity, however, was always fully alive to 

 questions of the kind. 



