SELLING THE ROYAL NAVY,

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 18, Issue 1146, 14 October 1871, Page 2

SELLING THE ROYAL NAVY,

[FROM TIIK LOXBOX TELEGRAPH.] Any gentleman of wealth desirous of becoming "a naval power" might have gratified hit- ambition when the splendid fleet of war-ships was offered for sale at Lloyds' Captains' Rooms. There was the Queen a magnificent screw steamship of 3,249 tons, with engines of the force of 500 horses; the Shannon, a splendid screw frigate of 2,667 tony burden, and engines of 600 horse power; the Hero, a somewhat larger vessel than the Shannon, with similar machinery ; and the Orlando, as beauti ful a ship as ever swam the sea, of 3,7i0 tons burden, with horizontal trunk engines of 1,000 horses-power. From this last the boileis, screw, and frame had been removed ; but, taken together, the war-ships were such as, some fifteen years ago, »vould have been clashed among the finest in the world. They are Mill, indeed, noble and commanding craft, which, with a little overhauling, might "go anywhere and do anything, 1 ' always provided that they did not come across those iron skinned leviathans with the monstrous guns which are now in vogue. Along with the great screw frigates, the auctioneer submitted to public competition a group of steam gunboats —the Dotterel, the Clinker, and the Penguin — comparatively little things of a tonnage ranging from 250 to 350, with raachinery proportioned to their size. But, with such a fleet as these seven vessels, what wonders might have been performed in tip old days ! Had Nelson owned them, he would Jmve swept the wide seas clean of Spaniards and Frenchmen ; for, with theiu speed and heavy armament of eighty-fours, the ancient three and four deckers could have stood no manner of chance. One of the four big screws would have scattered the entire Spanish Armada as a lion might a flock of sheep ; while at Actium and in the naval engagements of classical story, the smallest gunboat out of the second lot would have settled the fate of the Roman world in a trice, by merely running the triremes and biremes down one after the other, and peppering those which got out of the way with her long bow-chaser. Even now, if a buyer of ambitious views chose to invest in such a ship as the Shannon or the Orlando, put her engines in repair, man her with a good darerdevil crew, and sail into Arab or African waters, what a potentate he might become ! There are kingdoms which he might have for asking—Princesses, black, blown, and yellow, whom he might marry by the half-dozen—great islands of outlying Pacific groups and Oceanic principalities where no law exists sa\e that of strength, on whose coasts the mere presence of such a vessel would be the same thing as conquest. Or, if he wanted to combine adventure and philanthropic usefulness, wlnit " sport royal " an amphibiously-minded Briton might enjoy with the best among these little gun boats, fitted qnt for a private war upon the pirates and water-thieves of the Malay and Chinese inlets ! But then, it- may be asked, why dqes the Admiralty offer such vessels for sale? The answer is, that their fighting days are really oven* smart and stately as those line-o' Rattle ships unci handy

as the little gag boats have prove*) themselves, they are «* snuffed out" by the great invulnerables of iron. LOOIS at the prices offered last week at Lloyd's. The Queen was withdrawn when the biddings had stopped at .£8,400 ; the Shannon was sold for the ridiculous figure of £8,70Q ; the Hero could command no higher an estimata than £9,0p0, at which she was bought in by the Government j and the splendid Orlando could not tempt any of the shipowners present to proffer more than £7,000 ; while the gunboats were withdrawn one after tlje other, nobody having offered so much even us a thousand pounds for any of them. Three pounds a ton for vessel, fitting-, copper, and in many cases, engines and gear! That was about all which, the proudest men-o'-war ot the Navy of fifteen years ago could fetch ; so quickly do the fashions of the sea change. And yet handsomer war-ships than these, never were launched. To this day, the eve which know.'" a good model from a a" bad model will give the palm of marine beauty to one or two such veterans ovei well nigh all the craft that ever sailed or steamed. JSlever did seaman's gaze rest upon a more glorious vessel than the Orlando in her palmy days, before the ironmongery of modem warfare swept away the longbreasted bow, and straightened the overhanging stem into an ugly up and down wall. All these perfect lines of beauty perished when the Belierophon, the Penelope, and <he Lord Warden first loaded the waves with the ; r ugly form?, and introduced a still more novel and unlovely style of metallic construction, Tiwi Mersey, Liverpool, and Orlando represented' the "new" screw wooden frigates, which were so imposing to study and such fine sea-boats. The world paw the last of then), along with the Sultan and the Khedive, in tlie. Royal Review off the Isle of Wight, They fired their own funeral guns that day ; for moored opposite to them in a long hideous line, from the little squirting Waterwitch to the huge black Archilies and his fellows, were those monstrous sea-kettles called ironclads, the disastrous invention of the A.meri can «ar. £fa doubt there is a certain beaute du diable- about those same naval monsters; and when we can build them so as to be sure that that they will not "turn turtle" like the unfortunate Captain, or can make up our minds how many inches of armor they shall carry, and how many scores of tons their guns shall weigh, sailors may come to like them, Meanwhile, it is of course clear that we must have such craft to keep the sceptre of the seas in our hands, and that the pretty, grace ful, wooden beauties mus.t go Yet it cannot be >vithout a pang —here and for once a positively Consei native pang, that we see them consigned to the auctioneer. The Shannon is an imperishable part of our maritime history. It was in this comely frigate that the gallant officer, Captain William Peel, carried hi-* brave Line jackets to the Hooghly, and then landed her heavy gun* and dragged them all the way tip co intry to help to put an end to the Indian Mutiny. And then what seagoing craft they were ! Witness that awful night ofthe2oth Oct, 1859, in which the Royal Charter was wrecked on the Anglesea coast. The Channel Squadron, containing this very vessel, the Hero, and a sister ship of the Orlando, the Mersey, was canght in the terrible gale between Land's End and Plymouth. The Mersey ran home with the Emerald, and took shelter inside the Sound ; but the other five sh.ips had to fighc th<e tempest out. They were kept together by signal off the land, and maintained steady order by lanterns all night long; steaming at eieyen knots into Portland, when day came, and taking up their anchorage " without loss of a sail, a spar, or even a rope yarn," though 106 vessels were cas fc away along the coast. Such ships bred sailors ; they kept up the high mark of British seamanship; and, as old tars have pathetically observed, "if tlie worst comes to the worst it was a comfort to be drowned in such vessels.' Poor faded beauties ! their day JW past —their glory is o\er. Useless at sea in presence of the iron-skin» eC behemoths of the. ocean, they have long been condemned to tame harbor duty, wliere the barnacles arid weeds haV?

crusted them, aDd their fittings have justed and rotted till Death, in the shape of the "man with the hammer," claims them for his own. And even bow, when they come to auction, nobody purchases them, nobody knows what to do with the by-gone wooden walls of England, which are too big for commerce, and too soft for war.