This unusual vessel had only a single day of glory. On the morning of March 8, 1862, the Merrimack/Virginia steamed out of Norfolk into Hampton Roads, her single smokestack belching black smoke. With Union shells bouncing off her armor, she made straight for the Union sloop Cumberland, her own bow gun mowing down the men on the Cumberland’s deck. Merrimack rammed Cumberland in her starboard bow, wrenching off her own ram but opening a giant hole in the Union ship. Cumberland listed and, as she began to fill, the angle permitted her to fire three broadsides at point-blank range at her oddly shaped assailant. Merrimack was unharmed. As the Cumberland sank, Merrimack turned and made for the steam frigate Congress. Her guns set the Union ship ablaze. Two other Union frigates, maneuvering to engage the Confederate vessel, went aground. At the end of the day, the Merrimack withdrew, preparing to return and complete the slaughter the following day.
That evening, another, equally strange vessel appeared in Hampton Roads. The U.S.S. Monitor had been built in response to the Merrimack; over the winter, the North, aware of the work on the Merrimack, had created a smaller ironclad to engage her. Monitor was 987 tons and had only two guns, but they were eleven-inch cannon set in a revolving turret on the middle of her deck. Laid down in New York City in October 1861, she was launched at the end of January and towed to Chesapeake Bay. Few had much faith in her. When she was launched, her officers refused to stand on her deck, believing that she might go straight to the bottom. Only her designer, John Ericsson, remained on board, waving his hat triumphantly as she floated on the New York tide.
On the morning of March 9, when Merrimack reappeared, Monitor was waiting. The ships fought for two hours, Monitor enjoying the advantage of her revolving turret, not needing to maneuver to bring her guns to bear. Neither ship seriously damaged the other, but after two hours Monitor ran out of ammunition and withdrew to replenish. Merrimack then turned her attention to the wooden Union frigate Minnesota. In desperation, the Minnesota loosed a broadside from two ten-inch guns, fourteen nine-inch, and seven eight-inch. The shells hit Merrimack and bounced off. Merrimack then set Minnesota on fire. At this point, the Monitor returned. The Merrimack aimed at her opponent’s armored pilot house, hit the small shelter with a shell, and wounded Monitor’s captain by driving iron splinters into his eyes. Both ships retreated and the engagement was not renewed. The battle was a draw: Merrimack had routed the Union squadron off Norfolk but she could not steam up the bay to the Potomac to bombard Washington as long as Monitor was there. Neither was she sufficiently seaworthy to go out and attack other blockading Union flotillas in the open ocean.
In fact, both ships were of limited use. Neither had the ability to go to sea or remain there for weeks. In the rough waters of the open sea, Monitor would have become a floating coffin. She had come close to sinking twice under tow from New York to Hampton Roads; she did eventually sink under tow off Cape Hatteras. But the battle between these two awkward ships did have one far-reaching result: it proved beyond doubt the advantage of an iron hull over a wooden one.
The Royal Navy’s response was measured. More ironclads were ordered, but until 1866 wooden hulls were laid down as well. In 1861 and 1862, the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet was the old three-decker wooden line-of-battle ship Marlborough, carrying 121 guns. A decade later, Midshipman John Jellicoe joined Newcastle, a full-rigged, four-thousand-ton wooden-hulled frigate. As part of the Royal Navy’s Flying Squadron, available for rapid deployment to troubled areas, she sailed in company with four similar wooden frigates and one frigate whose wooden hull was covered with iron plates. A number of older wooden ships underwent conversions: they were brought into the yard to have armor plates bolted to their sides. The older ships often took less than kindly to this tampering; the hull of the converted wooden battleship Orion was so abused that her seams often cracked open and squirted jets of water in heavy weather.
The trend was to iron, and with it from sail to steam. As wooden hulls were sheathed in iron plates, vessels became heavier and the ratio of sail area to the weight of the ship declined. At first, in an effort to push these ponderous hulls through the water, designers added more and taller masts; the ten-thousand-ton ironclads Agincourt, Minotaur, and Northumberland, laid down in 1861, each had five towering masts. This design had limits; one was tragically exceeded in September 1870 when H.M.S. Captain, a full-rigged armored ship with colossal masts and clouds of sail, heeled over in a Channel storm. Unable to right herself because of her top-heavy construction, she capsized and went down, taking with her all but eighteen of her five-hundred-man crew.
The lesson of the Captain—that iron ships required steam propulsion—was one that most British captains were reluctant to grasp. Sailing ships had been fitted with steam engines since well before the Crimean War. The majestic Marlborough and the more modern Victoria both had steam engines tucked away on a lower gundeck; when the engines were put in use, slender funnels were raised between the masts. To their captains, however, the use of an engine for entering and leaving harbor or even in an emergency seemed disgraceful. Marlborough was famous throughout the fleet for her elegance and efficiency; this meant the smartness and precision with which her seamen could manage her sails. In 1859, when the ironclad Warrior was being constructed, Captain Alston’s Manual of Seamanship, published for midshipmen, assigned steam propulsion its proper subordinate place: “Although we are living18 in what may be termed the steam era and our Navy is a steam navy, I have in this work wholly excluded the consideration of steam power, as, owing to the great cost of coal and the impossibility of providing stowage for it except to a limited extent, the application of steam power for ordinary purposes must be strictly auxiliary and subordinate and its employment on general service the exception rather than the rule.”
It was not, of course, the price of coal that kept the engines silent. In those days a man-of-war under sail looked like a gigantic yacht, scrupulously clean, with no sounds other than the creak of timbers, the sighing of the wind in the rigging, and the shouts of the boatswain’s mates. The eye caught the curve of the sails against the blue sky.
In 1865 young Lord Charles Beresford went aboard the frigate Tribune, commanded by Captain Lord Gillford. Lord Gillford prided himself on the speed of his ship under sail, and nothing could persuade him to employ his steam engine. Indeed, Lord Gillford refused to shorten sail in heavy weather and ordered that no sail should ever be taken in without his personal permission. One night in a storm, Beresford went down to the captain’s cabin to ask permission to take in one topsail. The ship was heeling over at an alarming angle. The captain stuck one bare foot out of his bed and put it against the side of the ship. “I don’t feel any water19 here yet,” he declared and sent Beresford back on deck. The next minute the sail blew away.
Lord Gillford’s passion was shared by most of his colleagues. As late as 1874, the Royal Navy Flying Squadron proceeded everywhere under sail. Newcastle, Jellicoe’s ship, was fitted with an engine, but the whole emphasis of training on the ship was placed on sail drill. Occasionally, an elderly captain simply forgot about his ship’s engine. One such veteran, entering a harbor under sail and steam, ordered the sails struck and the anchor dropped. To his amazement, the ship continued forward, snapping the anchor cable. Moments before the ship ran aground, the captain was reminded that he had forgotten to order the engines stopped. “Bless me, I forgot20 we had engines,” he replied.
Well into the 1880s, British warships continued to be rigged with masts and sails. Inflexible, Captain John Fisher’s first command, had many features of a modern warship. She was made of solid iron and she carried massive eighty-ton guns in twin turrets. But she also boasted tall masts, yards, and sails. Officially, the reason was that steam engines might break down and that ships of war must always have an alternative means of locomotion. But the real reason was that officers and men alike hated engines and loved sails. “I did not like the Defence.21 I thought her a dreadful ship. After the immaculate decks, the glittering per
fection, the spirit and fire and pride of the Marlborough, I was condemned to a slovenly, unhandy tin kettle.” Thus did Lord Charles Beresford react to his transfer from the proud three-decker to a new steam-driven ironclad. Everyone hated the black smoke pouring out of the funnels, dirtying the masts and yards and sooting the white, holystoned decks. Even worse was the process of coaling. As sacks of coal were brought on board and stowed below, a fine black dust spread everywhere, covering sails and decks, officers and men.
Nevertheless, by the end of the eighties, sails were mostly gone. In 1887, Captain Penrose Fitzgerald, himself a splendid sailing-ship captain, called on his colleagues to face facts: “The retention of masts and sails22 in men of war diverts so much attention and energy and resources of both officers and men from the real work of their profession and from the study of modern naval warfare.... Evolutions aloft are so attractive and so showy and there is so much swagger about them... that we seem to have lost sight of the fact that... [they] have nothing to do with the fighting efficiency of a ship in the present day.” In 1886, Colossus, the first battleship built of steel instead of iron, was commissioned at Portsmouth. Colossus was also the first British battleship to have electric lights throughout. Soon the hybrid battleships with their eccentric distributions of modern guns, their low freeboard, side-by-side funnels, and bulky, pagodalike structure were gone. When the Naval Defence Act of 1889 passed Parliament, the navy was authorized to build eight modern steel battleships, weighing over fourteen thousand tons and capable of more than sixteen knots. With these ships of the Royal Sovereign class came the announcement of the Two Power Standard. The “cardinal... policy of this country23 is that our Fleet should be equal to the combination of the next two strongest navies in Europe,” declared the First Lord in March 1889. The transformation was extraordinarily rapid. Every captain commanding a great steel battleship at the beginning of the twentieth century had trained in the Old Navy of masts and sails. None would dispute the retired sailor who looked back on those days and said, “No doubt the present fleet24 far excels the old wooden walls, but those old wooden walls made sailors.”
In spite of its traditions of gallantry and seamanship, the nineteenth-century Royal Navy was unready for war. Responsibility for this lay at the top. Weapons and tactics in naval warfare were changing rapidly, but many senior officers preferred not to notice. They were assigned to ships, they served in them, eventually they commanded them, without ever giving a serious thought to the design of their vessels, their fighting efficiency, or their tactical employment in battle. Anything new was suspicious and potentially dangerous. By getting out of step, one might make a mistake; by remaining in step, one eventually reached the top. Midshipmen became lieutenants, lieutenants became commanders, then captains, then admirals, all in stately procession, no one making a fuss, each waiting placidly in line for his seniors to retire so that he could succeed.
One problem was the Nelsonian tradition. Nelson had achieved absolute victory, Nelson was a naval legend. Therefore, Nelson’s way was the only way. Nelson had ordered his captains to lay alongside the enemy; therefore, even though modern guns could reach out to far greater distances, British captains still dreamed of closing to point-blank range. No matter that Nelson throughout his career had been a practitioner of boldness and innovation. His words had been graven in stone, his tactics hardened into glorious tradition. To make matters worse, officers who had fought under Nelson were still around. Any junior innovator thinking of proposing change had to deal not simply with hoary tradition, but with the bleak eye of the old admiral pacing the quarterdeck.
Another problem was the human material. The brightest boys in England did not instinctively become navy midshipmen. Nepotism was the rule as fathers steered their sons, and uncles their nephews, into the navy; the result was a “self-perpetuating...25 semi-aristocratic yacht club.” This tradition ensured good breeding and solid courage, but not necessarily vision. As noted, even among the aristocracy and the gentry, the Royal Navy did not often attract the most intellectually gifted; there were many ways to spend one’s life more appealing than months on a rolling deck. As the peacetime years stretched on, there was little incentive to weed out dullards and incompetents, most of whom had friends at the Admiralty, or in Parliament, or even at Court.
When bright young men did come into the navy, they had few opportunities to learn and nowhere to take their ideas. There was neither a naval college to instruct and stimulate nor a naval staff to filter and promote new suggestions and theories. The only school was the sea. Once in a while, a cry of protest was heard from the ranks. In 1878, Macmillan’s magazine published an accusing article by a serving junior officer: “I call the whole system26 of our naval education utterly faulty.... I say that we, the Navy’s youth, are in some professional matters most deplorably ignorant, and the day will come when we, and England, will wake up to the fact with a start. It sounds impossible, inconceivable, that it is only a privileged few who are allowed to make a study of gunnery... only a privileged few who are initiated into the mysteries of torpedos; only a privileged few who are taught... surveying and navigation; not even a privileged few who are taught the science of steam; and yet all this is so!”
The article was signed “A Naval Nobody.” Had it not been published under a cloak of anonymity, it might have ruined the career of its author, Lieutenant John Jellicoe, future Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet in the First World War.
The Admiralty and most senior officers looked upon any expression of ideas from junior officers as impertinence. On one occasion when a good idea had been forwarded to the Admiralty, a Sea Lord scribbled across the paper: “On what authority27 does this lieutenant put forward such a proposal?” This, as many young officers saw it, was the crux: the old sea dogs saw any questioning of the old ways as a challenge to authority. It flew in the face of the oldest law of the sea: absolute obedience to orders. From a boy’s first day on the Britannia the first principle had been obedience. This was true not only in the 1860s but in the 1890s. “As a midshipman,28 I was often told that it was not my duty to think but only to obey,” wrote Vice Admiral K.G.B. Dewar of his years as a cadet and midshipman in the middle nineties. No matter that Nelson himself had repeatedly disobeyed orders, that one of the most glorious moments in British naval history had been when Nelson put his telescope to his blind eye at Copenhagen and claimed that he did not see the signal to withdraw. Rigid obedience stifled initiative and even obliterated common sense. When in the spring of 1893, junior officers were compelled blindly to obey a superior even though it was clear that disaster would follow, H.M.S. Camperdown rammed H.M.S. Victoria.
Vice Admiral Sir George Tyron, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, was regarded as a man who one day would be First Sea Lord. A brilliant officer and an outstanding seaman, Tyron also possessed a mathematical mind which he applied in devising ever more intricate and daring maneuvers for his ships to perform. He delighted in changing formations from column in line to column abreast and back again, setting his ships on seemingly irretrievable courses, then saving them from collision with a signal from his flagship at the last possible minute. If these novel and spectacular maneuvers, intricate as a quadrille, astonished and frightened his captains, so much the better. It was Tyron’s worry that Royal Navy captains would lose their edge in peacetime; his complicated naval ballets were designed to keep them on their mettle. Nor did Tyron’s officers dare to question his orders. The Admiral was an overbearing man and an iron disciplinarian; besides, he had always been right. No matter how baffled his captains were by Tyron’s mysterious orders, everything always seemed to come out splendidly. Even Tyron’s second in command, Rear Admiral A. H. Markham, admitted that he rarely comprehended Tyron’s ingenious evolutions.
In June 1893, Tyron took the fleet, consisting of eight battleships and five cruisers, to the eastern Mediterranean. Tyron flew his flag in H.M.S. Victoria and Markham flew his in H.M.S. Camper-down. On June 23 the fleet, which
was anchored off Beirut, weighed anchor and went to sea for exercises. It was a bright sunny day, with clear visibility and a calm sea. By mid-afternoon, the ships were steaming in two columns, 1,200 yards apart. At two-twenty P.M. Tyron hoisted a signal for the next maneuver: the vessels were to change formation, passing through each other’s columns by turning inward towards each other. Immediately, there were questions throughout the fleet. With the ships steaming at nine knots only 1,200 yards apart and the turning radius of some of the ships at that speed as much as 1,600 yards, the margin of safety seemed nonexistent. Captain Gerard Noel of the battleship Nile, immediately astern of Tyron, said: “I thought we had taken it29 [the signal] wrong.” He asked for a repeat, which was given. “I still thought there was something wrong,” he said later.
At three thirty-seven P.M., Tyron signaled that his command was to be executed: “Second division alter course30 in succession 16 points to starboard” and “First division alter course in succession 16 points to port.” Captain Arthur Moore of the battleship Dreadnought, immediately behind Victoria and Nile, told his officers: “Now we shall see something31 interesting.” He meant that although the situation seemed perilous and he couldn’t understand it, he assumed that the audacious Tyron had some trick up his sleeve. On board the flagship Victoria her captain, Maurice Bourke, standing next to the Admiral, was uneasy. He knew that the maneuver would take his ship very close to Camperdown. To indicate his fears, he had already loudly asked a midshipman on the bridge to sing out the distance to the Camperdown. But when his own second in command, Victoria’s commander, urged him to speak to the Admiral, Bourke angrily told him to be silent. To question Tyron, one needed a braver man than Bourke.
On Camperdown, Admiral Markham could have issued orders which would have saved the situation. Markham was a competent officer and later behaved heroically on an expedition to the Arctic. But he was outweighed not only in rank, but in experience of seamanship. His first reaction when Tyron’s original signal was reported to him was “It’s impossible. It’s an impossible maneuver.” He asked the admiral to confirm the order. Instead, Victoria signaled impatiently, “What are you waiting for?” This was a public rebuke, witnessed by the entire fleet, which Markham could not ignore. Along with Victoria, Camperdown put her helm over and the two ships headed for each other, their heavy rams gliding beneath the water like giant knife blades.
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