A PROFESSIONAL OPINION OF THE BRITISH NAVY.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 5, 25 February 1871, Page 3

A PROFESSIONAL OPINION OF THE BRITISH NAVY.

The following appears in the London “ Times”:— To the Editor of the London “ Times” —Sib, —The official communication which has been made public through you and the press generally of the superior stability of her Majesty’s ship Monarch under canvas over that of the lost Captain, obliges me to break silence, which I otherwise would have preferred to maintain until the First Lord of the Admiralty’s promised minute had been published. If ever the truth of the old English proverb “ Murder will out,” was proved, it is in the figures proclaimed from the Shipbuilding Department of the Admiralty, and it only strengthens still more the case against that department, which, put in the mildest terra, I maintain, amounts to a charge of gross incompetency. For I would ask you, or any rational person, irrespective of any sailor knowledge, whether two ships of such disproportionate stability should have been sent to sea to compete one against the other under canvas, without this melancholy fact being made known to the gallant officers who commanded them or to the Admirals who were responsible for the valuable ships under their charge. If the department, to avoid the charge of manslaughter, now pleads that this information was only known afterthe catastrophe, I reply that this is an acknowledgment of the negligence and incompetency which it will be Mr Childers’ duty to bring home to his subordinates, and to punish the offenders. I, and naval officers in general, are waiting in perfect reliance on Mr Childers’ courage and good faith in dealing with this important question. No one, I am sure, can feel more deeply than he does the serious charge which now lies at the door of the Board * of Admiralty. One of its departments has inflicted on the British navy a loss only equal to that which we have previously suffered when carrying off some great victory like Trafalgar or the Nile. In this case 500 lives have been disastrously sacrificed, and a disgrace lies at the door of Whitehall. It is for Mr Childers to say who is in fault and what his punishment shall be. If a pointsman or. signalman on a railway had occasioned the loss of 500 souls from even unintentional neglect of duty, all England would have rung with it, and the wretch been certainly sentenced to a period of servitude. Are we going to allow those who ought to have cautioned our officers of the danger they were incurring in sailing the Captain in equinoctial gales to escape with greater impunity, when by the figures they furnish you to-day they acknowledge that it was within their power to give the in-

formation which would have saved Her Majesty’s ship Captain, Passing from this to another subject, I think the time has come when a royal commission ought to be assembled to consider the lamentable position into which the Comptroller’s Department of the Navy is drifting us. The most that can be said of our iron-clad fleet at this moment is that it is a better one than the French fleet; hut when you ask me what that is worth, I reply: “ It’s value in old iron!”

After spending some millionsin trying to make iron-clad ships resemble in form and appearance the obsolete type of wooden men-of-war, after puffing one after another the various iron productions of our late conductor’s genius, and stowing away in Bermuda and our coastguard his many failures, we have to-day a fleet of which one of our ablest captains, and one who has up to to-day been afloat in the fleet, and seen all its cruising capacities, writes as follows :

“ I do not believe that we have today six vessels that could keep the sea and together in a very , ordinary winter’s gale.” In this, I would ask you, the position in which we ought to be after ten years’ lavish expenditure in ironclads? Look at. the French fleet. Has it been able to strike one blow for France? Has it captured a single German iron-clad, fortress, town, or village ? Has not France in 1870 committed the same gross blunder with iron ships that we perpetrated fifteen years ago in the Baltic —viz, sending vessels to do work for which they were utterlv unfit. Their iron-clads, like ours, are hampered with a mass of masts, yards and sails, which necessitates their being vessels of great draught of water. Directly war was proclaimed all top hamper had either to be landed or piled on the decks,and enginepoweralone trusted to; but they could not get rid of the serious impediment offered to their utility their very forms, being calculated to carry the sails and masts, so unless in real warfare, and a fleet which numbered six to one of the German squadron has been unable even to attack it, though lying temptingly before them off Jalide Bay. Their lofty sides intended to give stability under sail, have been a source of weakness not only known to the French officers, but equally so to the Germans.

I know as a fact, that on board the German fleet every officer in charge of a gun, had a diagram supplied him from Berlin, showing the thickness of plating on the side of every French broadside ironclad, so directly the officer commanding knew which ship of the French fleet he was coping with, he could at once direct his fire on the portions where the thin plating exists, and avoid the patches of thick armor. Now, this weak feature is a part of all our ironclads, including the Monarch. They are full of soft spots, and my informant assures me that diagrams showing the thick and thin armor-plating of our ships are better known at Berlin than to any officers of our own fleet; and no German naval officer would be so ignorant of his work as to amuse himself by firing at the solitary thick belt of the Hercules or the Monarch when he knows that he could penetrate their sides with his guns in almost any other direction. One shell well planted in the many soft parts of our broadside ironclads will send them reeling out of action.

Our Board of Admiralty has been so engaged in reforms connected with expenditure of stores, dockyard economies, and the still more serious question of the personnel of the navy, that the Controller and Constructor have had it all their own way, and brought us to a lamentable position. Mr Childers has done much in the direction to which he, as a civilian, has mainly turned his attention, and I, for one, feel grateful to him for it; hut it. is high time he looked to the condition of the fleet, and that lie took into his counsels men of less plastic temperament than those it was, perhaps, necessary for him to instal at Whitehall, so as to carry out the reforms he has been busied upon. Had Mr Seeley’s motion some years since in the House of Commons for an enquiry into the structure of our fleet been supported as it ought to have been by the liberal parties, two year 3 wasteful expenditure would hsve been saved. I must now, however, be done, and since

the state of alarm in which for fifteen years we have been kept by the naval armaments of France is disposed of, the moment is most opportune for an enquiry, and if a royal commission was appointed to arrive at facts, irrespective of all party considerations, I have very little doubt the result would be the adoption of principles for which my lamented friend Cowper Coles struggled so long, and perished at last in the unequal conflict between an individual and a department-—viz,, low freeboards and heavy armor plating, no masts or sails, motive to he dependent on steam engines, moderate draught and size, so as to enable iron-clads to defend our own shores, or break into an enemy’s port whenever a hostile armada might threaten our liberties or commerce ; and these are the elements which have been entirely lost sight of in the British armored fleet. I am, air, yours faithfully, Sherrard Osborn, Capt. Royal Navy. London, November 10.