THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 1905 FIGHTING SHIPS : 1805-1905

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 26, 29 June 1905, Page 17

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 1905 FIGHTING SHIPS : 1805-1905

j^gjpsw?) UNDRY bundles of stranded cop,pier wires \KS|§s~ that run along tne floors of summer and wintry seas are, so to speak, the antennae ttjg&i&y or fe^ 1^ b y which we, on the outer rim of <Agir??^* the world, get speediest knowledge of tne movements of events in other lands. Some j^iiS* days ago a message came \ibrating along 'c~^ them which told of the massive bulk and greyhound speed of the ' Dreadnought,' the new monster which is to add to the fighting strength of the King's navee and to help Britannia to ' rule the wa\es.' The big leviathan's birth-notice (if we may so call it) comes close on the centenary of the day—October 21, I.Bos— when Nelson won the great \iok>ry of Trafalgar. Events ha\ e moved swiftly in battleship construction since the days when Nelson and Collingwood swept the main, when sailors ' were sailors ' and not mechanics, and when the last argument on sea was the order : ' Out cuilasses to board ! '

On Trafalgar day the British fleet consisted of good old ' wooden walls ' that mo\ed at the whim of the shifting winds. There was no more complicated machinery in them lhan a staer ing-wheel and a powdor-lift. Those heavy-ribbed, phlegmatic old water-walkers slood a wondrous deal of pounding with scrap-iron balls. Nelson's cannon consisted of 3, 6, 12, 18, 21, 32, and 42 pounders— unsighted cast-iron smooth-bores, that took from one to about fourteen pounds of the smoky black gunpowder of the day and made a splondid uproar for the amount of damage which they did to oaken beam and human limb. Tne 12-« pounders weighed (if our memory is not at fault) some three tons each. The others diminished in length and girth like a battery of Pan's pipes, till the little carronades, that ' talked iback ' to the- enemy with three-pound spherical balls, weighed only seven hundred each and Siwallowed a paltry pound of gunpowder at a mouthful.- Nelson's flagship had been rocked in the cradle of the deen for full forty years when she tackled the Frank at Trafalgar. She remained in the first fighting line of Britain's no^y for another ten years— fifty years all told. Nowadays things nio\e faster afloat as well as ashore. A battleship well on in its teens is now oniy fit for ( the scrap-heap.

Times have changed. But the laws of strategy jhai c not changed. Now, as on Trafalgar's day, the battleship is ■defined ' merely a moving gun-platform.' Buc

there has been o, revolution in the material, sfae/fbrm, and methods of construction of that platform. In the immechanical ships of Nelson's day there 4 was nothing (apart from guns and binnacle) more complicated than the blacksmith might So. ' The twentieth century battleship,' says the author of ' Naval Efficiency,' 'is a box of complicated machindry for dealing destruction — a self-contained floating battery of which it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the crew press the. button and machines 6f one type or another do the rest.' Nelson's battleships cost only some £50,000 each and upwards. His own great flagship was completed and ready to spit fire and pump cast-iron at an enemy at a cost of less than £100,000. An up-to-date battleship like the ' Dreadnought ' oasts, when ready for sea, they tidy fortune of albout a million an 3 a half sterling. The big battleships of tihe siting Edward VII.' class are of 16,350 tons each. One recentiy launched in Great Britain for Japan is of 16,400 tons. And the end is not yot. Did we not hear, after the battle of Tsushima, of the proposal to lay down shins of 16,000 tons ?

Mr. Archibald O. Hurd, a noted writer on Britishna^al subjects, describes as follows the armament of a clasa of ships now in commission or under construction for the British fleet : l The " King Edward VII." will mount four 850-pounders (12-in.-calibre), lour 350pounders (9.25-in.), ten 100-pounders (6~in.), and twentyeight 12- and 3-pounders, all weapons of .the greatest penetrative power, owing to high explosives and rifled bores. The largest pieces on board these newest men-of-war, costing nearly £10,000 each, are wound with 122 miles of wire-ribbon to give strength and elasticity, an occupation which occupies three weeks, working night and day, -and a single gun cannot be manufactured under twelve months, so elaborate is the process. Any one of .these wonderful pieces of ordnance can perforate 32 inches of iron at 2000 yards, and throw a shell ol f>solb. nearly 20 miles. In every detail of the construction and fitting out of modern men-of-war the latest secrets oS science are applied.' These huge vessels (says the Name author), when they settle down to discuss business with a foe, ' can hurtle through space anything up to nine, ten, or eleven tons of metal from their guns each minute, ahd possess complete belts of Krupp armor from nine to eleven incnes thick ; their hulls are divided and subdivided into hundreds o{ cellular compartments, as a partial safeguard agafiist sinking in case of injury ; they have propeHijng machinery .rejpresenting the strength of 90,000 men— a s'inall army corps ; with seventy or eignty auxiliary engines for supplying ammunition, training the guns, raising and lowering boats, steering, ventilating, and heating the shins ; equipment for discharging torpedoes and mining a harbor, and capacity for carrying some 2000 tons of coal and quantities of food and stores sufficient to go half round the world.'

And then there are the armored cruisers, great, swift sea-corsairs that cost anywhere from three quarters of a million to a million pounds eaoh, and fastmo\ ing destroyers and mosquito-craft as well. The power and range of attack has b«en enormously developed since the days of Trafalgar. But there never was in history a time in which ships of war were so ruinously vulnerable as to-day. The ' Vanguard ' and the ' Cam/perdown ' were sent to the bottom of the sea just because each was gently scraped below its armored belt by the big metal nose, or ram, of one of its consorts. And the battles of Port Arthur and Tsushima tend to show that the torpedo is the real ruler of the waves, 'and that it laughs at water-tight compartments as lovjq is said to laugh at locks and locksmiths all. With torpedoer and destroyer and submarine, it menaces your big war-ships by day and night, i' striking below the belt ' of armor and sending seven or eig-ht hundred human 'beings a.nd over a million sterling to the bottom in less time lhan it takes to write tnis paragraph. I%^

has ended, for the present, the "days of the close blookafle, and in closed waters and narrow seas leaves battleships and cruisers very little real defence except their extreme mobility. The events of the present war seem, to the lay mind at least, to give a colorable foundation to the t)elief of those who believe in what is called ' the apdtheosis of the torpedo.'