Blackwood´s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 101
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Excerpt from Blackwood´s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 101: January June, 1867 Standing where we do to-day, seeing the mistakes already made, and those threatening us for the future, it would be wrong not to make the errors and prejudices of the past a warning to the reactionaries we have to deal with. Let them remember that whilst the progressionists of 1861 were pointing at France and using the Gloire as a mere lever with which to cross-lift Berkeleys and Greys into iron and armoured structures, the old-school men pointed to America, and that navy which must ever claim a high position in the opinion of British naval officers, and they speciously urged that so practical a people, unhampered by hereditary Whig or Tory Lords of the Admiralty, and with no caste of Brahmins from which their Secretaries of the Navy were especially drawn, had not as yet considered it necessary to construct a single armour-clad war-ship, and asked, "Why should we do so?" How silent such critics were when within a year a terrible and unexpected conflict thrust itself on that wooden navy, and in the heat of battle, with the knife at her very heart, the American Republic had, at a ruinous cost, to improvise the very structures they had neglected in time of peace! Then we saw Confederate and Federal sailors frantically plastering on their ships scraps of iron picked up in their dockyards, bolting on rails torn from their roads, or, faute de mieux, festooning chain cables to cover their wooden sides, yet with pardonable sailor vanity still calling them wooden frigates. So went to the winds American apathy in the iron war-ship question; yet, with their proverbial tendency to rush into extremes where novelty is concerned, charmed with the success of Captain Cowper Coles´s invention of a central battery in the clever piracy of Mr Ericcson in what are called monitors, they again hamper progress by forgetting that an essential condition for a war-ship is that perfect "habitability" which few of their monitors possess. On the other hand, the pattern set us by Napoleon III. in his Gloire, and the ironclad ships he pushed so rapidly afloat in 1861-6263, was only good and valuable up to a certain point. The stroke of genius which sent out ironclad batteries to Kinburn in 1855 to be tested, ready to bring down Cronstadt in 1856 - as they would assuredly have done had the war been prolonged - was worthy of the Man and of France, but it did not at all follow that, because he from his stand-point saw over the heads of so many sailors, soldiers, and shipbuilders, they, when they appreciated the soundness of his views, should be capable of carrying the details into execution. We sulkily followed his idea out to the letter in 1854-55, and anything more monstrous, more unseaworthy, more Chinese-like than those floating batteries we would defy even Pekin to produce. Our only excuse was, that we copied the French designs - and a very bad excuse too. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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