The Sketcher.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 232, 19 February 1876, Page 5

The Sketcher.

RUSSIAN CIRCULAR IRONCLADS. Mr. E. J. Reed, C. 8., M.P., writing from the Black Sea on the 14th of October, gives the following interesting account of the behavior at sea of a Popoffka, the nevr circular ironclad, which ha 3 been adopted by Russia:— "On embarking at 8 p.m., with the intention of retracing our passage as far as Yalta, we found the barometer falling, with clouds gathering, the wind rapidly increasing, and a heavy sea running ; and as our passage would occupy but a few hours, and I was very desirous of seeing the Novgorpd in a seaway by daylight, our departure was defeiTed till the early morning, anchor being weighed by 6 o'clock. The wind had nrach moderated, but the south-west gale of the night, blowing across the whole width of the Black Sea from the Bosphorus, had caused a heavy swell, combined with which were shorter and confused seas, so that the circumstances were extremely favorable for developing the sort of behavior which a circular ship could exhibit in a seaway. As hu"-e mountainous promontories projected far into the sea between us and Yalta, we have had to change course considerably, so that in the course of the morning we have had the sea in succession on the starboard bow, right ahead, on the port bow, and nearly abeam. Let it be observed further that we are in a very small ship for an ironclad. The displacement or total weight of our largest ironclads exceeds 10,000 tons ; the Sultan weighs nearly 9000 tons, the Devastation the same, the Iron Duke nearly 6000, the Glatton, coast defence vessel, nearly 5000, the four small vessels built by Mr. Gladstone's Government, when the late war between France and Germany broke out, about 3500, and this Russian circular vessel Novgorod only 2500 tons. Another way of estimating her

size is to consider that, being IQOr feet only in diameter, her total length round is 314 ft., and this length of size and armor is obviously only sufficient to make the two sides of a ship o£ about 240 ft. in length, and of usual breadth—say 30ft. broad. These dimensions are not only very much less than those of the smallest ironclad abovenamed, but less than those of the tiny gunboats Viper and Vixen, which were built in 1865 for a special purpose, and which no skill at my disposal could make suitable for general sea service. Yet this circular vessel carries armor and guns which together exceed in weight the total weight of the English gunboats— hull, armor, guns, engines, masts, stores, and everything else composing them. She has, moreover, a freeboard of armored hull only 18in., above which stand along the middle of the vessel from bow to stern strong deck-houses about 7ft. high, and above these rise, in the centre of the vessel, the fixed armored breastwork, within which stand the two large guns (twenty eight tons each), and over which they fire. Near the stern is an elevated and commodious platform, on which we have been able to remain quite dry throughout this morning, even among the heaviest waves. I should add that the armored deck rounds up considerably (4ft.) from the side, which is about 18in. above water, so that (neglecting the deck-houses) the deck resembles the segment of a large sphere, and makes the real surplus buoyancy much greater than might hastily he inferred from the fact that the side rises about ISin. above the water. And now, your readers will ask, what happened to this extraordinary vessel in the waves which she encountered ? ' Well, the answer is that, while presenting an unexplained sight in many respects, and dealing with the sea as I never before saw it dealt with, she made her way though it with almost the same rate of progress as she makes in still water ; she rose and fell bodily to an almost imperceptible extent, and both her pitching and her falling were so very small and easy that there was no period this morning—whether the sea was broad on the bow, right ahead, or almost abeam—when one could not stand, walk, or even write with perfect comfort. And in order to give due weight to these remarks, I must make a public confession, which is that I am one of those who suffer at sea, and I am even miserably sensitive to the effects o£ that miserable uncertainty as to which way she will move next which an ordinary ship often exhibits, that any little philosophy or science which I may possess ashore generally dies away within me when steady rolling (a weak, paradoxical phrase) sets in ; and, in a word, that your readers may safely trust me to judge for them as to the measure of this vessel's rolling and of its effects ; and I ani bound in honesty to aver that, prepared as I was to find her steady, her steadiness astonished and still astonishes me. The reader will be disposed to say, ' But surely the heavy swell and the waves you speak of must have rolled in almost overwhelming masses over so low a deck, the edge of which was but ISin. above the sea.' But this was far from being the case. Certainly more or less considerable quantities of water did sweep occasionally over the deck, and when the waves were at the greatest almost, every wave did this to a greater or less extent; but even at the worst there was nothing like the precipitation of great solid bodies of water many feet in depth upon the deck, and none of those heavy blows of the sea against the deck-houses which most persons would think absolutely certain to be felt in such a seaway. The fact seems to be that whether the sea is rising under the side of the ship (and the word ' side' may here stand for bow and stern as well in this respect), or whether the side be descending upon the sea, in either case the vessel drives out from under her a wave of her own making, and this wave, encountering the approaching one, opposes itself to it, and greatly reduces if it does not destroy its velocity. In many cases this wave, which the vessel drives from, her, entirely stops the on-coming wave, and even forces it back from her, so that not a drop of it falls upon the deck except in the form of spray. At other times the on-coming wave in part prevails, and precipitates a portion of its water upon the deck, but even this : portion is so reduced in bulk and in velocity ! that its effect is very much .less than it would be if the wave had broken upon a rock or a shelving shore. Many people speak of the low-decked vessels as «half-tide rocks,' but for the reason I have stated this circular ship, at least, does not justify the simile, but presents a totally different phenomenon from that which the sea-struck rock offers. Of course I do not pretend, or wish it for a moment to be understood that the sea which we encountered yesterday even approached the heaviest seas, or that the heaviest seas would not have given much o-reater motion to the Novgorod or tried her more severely. I am simply recording fact?, and wish them to be taken exactly for what they are worth; but I confidently draw from, them the inference that a circular ship of low freeboard, such as the Novgorod, small as she is, is a very much better seaboat than most persons would expect to find her, and also that in her we have (apart from considerations of size, height of side, and other secondary matters), a type of vessel possessing very remarkable sea-going qualities." Mr. Reed considers that the ironclad ship question has been materially changed by the existence of the Novgorod and the Admiral Popoff. In support of this opinion he says : "Before these vessels were built, or one of them tried, it was easy, and perhaps natural, for the great bulk of naval architects and naval officers to slight the principle, and even to lauo-h at it. For my part, I have always spoken of these vessels with respect andfavor, and after my recent experience at sea in the Novgorod, I shall speak of them with more respect and favor than ever. They have many very important advantages. Besides carrying heavy armor, they have this armor disposed in the best manner, without any of those compromises which other navies are resorting to, perhaps more than ever. These circular ships have no unarmored ends, like some of. the latest ironclads ; no unprotected broadsides, like others ; no tapering belt, no armor getting:

thin and still thinner near the ends. Their armor is uniformly thick, and uniformly deep down, and uniformly high up everywhere, and therefore I maintain they are in this respect fighting ships par excellence. They have also tetter %eck protection than any vessels that I know of, and they have it in such a form and at such a height as to give thoroughly efficient protection to all the vital parts and contents of the ship. The armament is in the best possible place—namely, the centre of. the ship ; it may be of the most powerful kind ; it has the greatest range, and not only is it carried upon a very steady platform, but carried where that platform has next to no rise or fall, and where such rolling and pitching motions as do exist are scarcely appreciable. Their huge guns may be carried on any preferred principle, whether it be in a turret or on a Moncrieff carriage, or on a plan which Sir Joseph Whitworth and I projected, that of making the gun big enough to defy shot and shell, and with a breech big to hold the men who work it. Instead of a single set of engines and screw propeller, or of two, as in the Devastation, the Novgorod has six, and the Admiral Popoff will have the same, so that while having a rudder tad obeying it well, the circular ship is in no degree dependent upon it, but may still be both steamed and steered perfectly well with rudder gone and several engines or screws disabled. Of their behavior at sea these vessels have already given excellent promise, and for my part, I would prefer o-oing to sea in a good circular ironclad of proper size to going there in an ordinary armorplated ship. The two ships which I have seen have not been fitted as rams, torpedo arrangements being preferred, but there is nothing whatever to prevent them from being ; and their extreme handiness —which greatly surpasses, I am bound to say, even the handiest of my own vessels, which are themselves handier than any previous ones—especially adapts them for adopting this mode of attack with terrible effect. For resisting or sustaining the attack of a ram they are the best form of ship afloat, because, as the ram can only attack their the engines, boilers, magazines, and all large internal spaces may be kept well away from its reach. The question of draft of water is effectually solved by the circular ships, and solved In the very best manner. And, finally—though I might mention other advantages—these ships are thoroughly healthy and commodious for the very small number of men which they really require. Of the great economy and cheapness of such vessels I need not say a word, because they obviously possess the advantages of limiting the whole extent, and therefore the whole expense, of the ship to the armored hull, instead of requiring long and costly ends to be built and equipped after the manner of ordinary armor-clads. In this, as in so many other respects, these ships furnish a very striking example of the simplicity and directness with which the objects in view have been attained. Tn all other ironclads the fighting elements are more or less interfered with and sacrificed for the sake of preserving the usual features of ships ; but in these Popoff ka offensive and defensive power has not been sacrificed to anything ; the desired draft of water also has been conformed to; and in all ways what I may call the value of the vessel as a fighting engine has been made the great and ruling object. This is what I so much admire in them ; and now we know that they are just as successful in a naval sense as if all kinds of sacrifices had been made in order to conform them to naval ideas and traditions." SEBASTOPOL. (From the Mail, October 29.) Twenty years have passed since the hopes and fears' of England were rivetted upon the City of Sebastopol. Humors of victory and apprehensions of defeat were then sending a painful thrill through quiet English homes. Men of business and men of no business, the restless speculator and the soldier's wife or mother, eagerly studied the " news from the seat of war," pored painfully over the map, and mastered the intricacies of Crimean geography and the strange spelling of Russian or Tartar names. In those days the besieged city and the country surrounding it were as familiar to English people as the suburbs of London or Epsom Downs. The Malakoff, the Redan, and the Mamelon, Fort Alexander, Fort Constantine and Fort St. Michael, the Sevemay and the Karabelnaya, became for a time household words. Thousands of hearts beat high or sank low at the tale of every advance and every check; for, if the fruits ef victory were then over-valued, the dangers of failure were not misjudged. One English army had melted away in cold and want on the bleak heights around the beleaguered fortress, and "only the steadfastness of the English character, which held on through bitterness worse than death, saved the Expedition from disaster, if not disgrace. But the terrible trials of the winter that followed Inkerman left their impression on the English anind, and anxiety did not give way to confidence until the closing act of the drama had well-nigh begun. Then there was wild, almost fierce rejoicing, which subsided rapidly enough to the calm level of diplomatic discussions. Before the Treaty of 1856 was signed, people an England set themselves as quickly as possible to forget the knowledge they had gathered, at the cost of no little laboi', about the greac port on the Black Sea. Not much either of the interest or of the knowledge was revived by the political controversies arising out of Russia's repudiation of the Treaty excluding her fleets from the Euxine, and at present, it may be taken for granted, :aot one of our countrymen in a thousand knows what constituted the common-places of popular talk and writing twenty years ago. This is all natural and reasonable enough ; yet, though none of us have any longer intimate personal interests connected with Sebastopol, the fate of the city which our fleets and armies strove to batter down and trample out of existence, deserves the notice of intelligent political observers. The interesting letter

from Mr. E. J. Reed which we publish to-day tells a tale which ought to find sympathetic readers in this country. While war is the actual business of a nation s life, it is not possible that its havoc should be clearly perceived. To be ruthless is a necessary element in military success, and, as the aim of the Allies in the Crimean expedition was to uproot, the naval power of Russia on the shores of the Black Sea by utterlv destroying the centre of that power, the nun that was wrought seemed to us, and at the time justly, to be good work. But the war, and the objects of the war, have now faded into the cool half-light of history, and there is nothing to prevent us from being struck, when our attention is drawn to it, as Mr. Reed draws it very forcibly, by the prodigious waste of warlike operations. The siege of Sebastopol was a vast undertaking, though, vast as it was, it has been dwarfed by later episodes in warfare ; but setting aside the consideration of the present value of what we then won there, do we often think of its cost ? Two facts cited bv Mr. Reed will, perhaps, bring to many minds "a new and clear idea of the pitiless levy which this enterprise made upon the best energies of the contending nations. In the two principal cemeteries attached to the town lie the bodies of more than 100,000 Russian soldiers killed during the Siege, and in this number we presume those who fell in the great battles —Alma, Balaklava, Inkerman, Tchernaya—are not included. But the fearful hail of missiles which the besiegers poured upon the place surpasses even the largest estimate that would probably be formed from the actual loss of life. A tax, Mr. Reed tells us, of sixpence per hundredweight levied by the Government on the proceeds of sales of old iron, shot and shell, picked up in the town and sold by the people, realised a sum of nearly £15,000. # Add to this the return fire of the besieged, the "pelting blast of mitrail," with which*at every point Todleben strove to meet the enemy, and we arrive at an aggregate of destructive means and forces expressed _ in numbers and quantities under which the mind staggers. It is not astonishing that, as Mr. Reed says, " wherever you go throughout the town, whether in the lower streets or on the higher levels, you move among ruin and desolation." Pompeii itself, he affirms, " is not to be compared with Sebastopol for magnitude and extent of visible destruction." We may now spare some regrets for the havoc we were compelled to spread around us at Sebastopol twenty years ago. We may also, and with greater internal satisfaction, indulge our sympathies with the gallant efforts which Mr. Reed describes the inhabitants as making for the restoration of the town and harbor. It is not a good thing for the world that the traces of war should be allowed to remain untouched and unrepaired, to stir up incessantly the smouldering fires of former feuds, and to keep an outward sign of international hostility under the eyes of a nation which, perhaps, would gladly cast out of sight the dismal obligation of revenge. We have exhausted the passions of the Crimean War ; but it is easy to understand that to the Russians, who have always before them the desolation which Mr. Reed so graphically describes, oblivion and a. calm historical temper do not come so easily. We are heartily glad to hear, therefore, of the vigor with which the work of clearing away the ruins left by the. Siege and of rebuilding the town has been entered upon. Somethingmay be done in this direction by the intelligent and well directed operations of public bodies, and the Sebastopol of to-day appears to be as fortunate in its municipal governors as the city beleaguered in 1854 was in the genius and gallantry of its defenders; but, upon the whole, we cannot hope to see Sebastopol renewed and the ravages of the war obliterated until commerce has fixed itself permanently on the shores of that splendid harbor. Mr. Reed gives sufficient reasons for believing that the commercial progress of the place, which has hitherto been delayed by causes readily assignable, will henceforward be steady and rapid. The completion of the great trunk railway which joins Sebastopol with Moscow and St. Petersburg was an indispensable condition of even the beginnings of trade. But, moreover, it is only during the present year that the port which was previously dedicated exclusively to military purposes has been freely opened to commerce. The Imperial decree making this concession has been followed by loans of Government money for the improvement of the harbor, the construction of piers and warehouses, the establishment of a Government lank, Government schools, and so forth. We should have more confidence in the stability of these movements if private enterprise had more to do with them, but we must bear in mind that the Russian theory of government is very much akin to Socialism, and that every nation must be allowed to advance by its own paths. THE PALMER RIVER. A Mr. Peter Dungan has kindly allowed a West Coast contemporary to publish a portion of a letter which he has received from Mr. R. A. Isbester, who is now at the Palmer, but who, with his brother, formerly worked at the Greenstone. No doubt it will be read with interest by the numerous friends of the writer : —" Oakey Creek, 10th December, 1875. Dear Dungan—Your kind letter of the 6th October I received here on the Bth inst., also one from John and one from James McDonald. I was happy to see by it that you were well, and am happy to say that it leaves us quite well at present time, but I must inform you that on the sth November, within one hour, both Henry and myself got the Queensland fever. Henry only had it one day, but I had it for five days, but we took medicine at once. Exactly at the end of the fourth week Henry got it again, and three days after his child also, but with us it has been nothing, not half as bad as a common cold, but we have been very careful of our diet, which is the principle thing to look after. I believe at the present time more than half of the men here are laid up ; this is the sickliest time of the year, and again after

the rain knocks off. We have been expecting the rain this last eight weeks, but none as yet; that is what has detained us here. We have got a big lot of washdirt, and when the ram does come it will prevent us from getting down perhaps until March. Yes, Mr. D., that is the worst with this confounded Queensland ; too much sickness —a man is continnally taking the medicine ; every tent you would fancy is a chemist's shop, yet the weather is nothing to compare with the heat I have seen on the Eachlan and different other places in New South Wales, and mostly a fine breeze of wind. A great many Chinamen are dying, and the half of them starving. Mostly all the water got finished where the principal part of the Chinese were working about the Ist of November, and they all are mostly new chums, and they get the fever quite as soon as the white man, and very few of them have got any medicine. But the best lark is where they bury their dead —all the dead man's mates leave on the top of the grave all his things—pick, shovel, tin dish, clothes, brandy, oysters, and different other things. The first night the white man only leaves his clothes. The rest he takes home. lam sorry for the poor devils ; many a feed we have given them. I believe there are 8000 Chinese on the Palmer by what I can learn, and 3000 whites, so you will see it takes some gold to keep -sucli a population. I believe at the lowest estimate that it will take 30s. per week each man between provisions and medicine, so I should think Palmer is not a very great El Dorado after all. In the first a lot of men did very well, but the Chinese have cooked what might have been profitably wrought for years by white men."