CHAPTER XIV.

PERRY DISCOVERS THE RAM.

AN accident which happened to the _Fulton_ belongs to the history of modern warfare. It revealed to Perry’s alert mind a valuable principle destined to work a revolution in the tactics of naval battles. Like the mountaineer of Potosi who when his bush failed as a support, found something better in the silver beneath, so Perry discovered at the roots of a chance accident a new element of power in war.

The _Fulton_ was rather a massive floating battery than a sea-steamer. Once started, her speed for those days was respectable, but to turn her was no easy matter. To stop her quickly was an impossibility.

On the 28th of August, the _Fulton_, while making her way to Sandy Hook amid the dense crowd of sloops, schooners, ships and ferry-boats of the East river, came into partial collision with the _Montevideo_. The brig lay at anchor, and Lieutenant Lynch in charge of the _Fulton_, wished to pass her stern, and ahead of her starboard quarter. When nearly up with the brig, the flood tide running strongly caused her to sheer suddenly to the full length of her cable and thus brought her directly in line of the contemplated route. Lynch, to save life, was obliged to destroy property and strike the brig.

The steamer’s cutter and gig were stove in and her bulwarks, in paint and nails, somewhat injured. With the brig the case was different. Though only a glancing stroke, the smitten vessel was all but sunk.

Captain Perry was not on board the _Fulton_, having remained on shore owing to indisposition. On hearing the story of Lieutenant Lynch, there was at once revealed to him the addition that steam had made to the number and variety of implements of destruction. The old trireme’s beak was to reappear on the modern steam war vessel and create a double revolution in naval warfare. The boiler, paddle and screw had more than replaced the war galley’s banks of oars, by furnishing a motive power that hereafter should not only sink the enemy by ramming, but should change the naval order of battle. The broadside to broadside lines of evolution must give way to fighting “prow on.” In a word, he saw the ram.

Perry required written reports of the affair from his lieutenants, and wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy suggesting the possibilities of the rostral prow.

To think of the new weapon was to wish to demonstrate its power. He proposed to try the _Fulton_ again, purposely, upon a hulk, to satisfy himself as to the sinking power of the steamer. He arranged to do this by special staying of the boiler pipes and chimneys, so that no damage from the shock would result. He was also prepared, by exact mathematical computation of mass, velocity and friction, with careful observations of wind and tide, to express the results with scientific accuracy.

The report duly was received at Washington and, instead of being acted upon, was pigeon-holed. Perry was unable, at private expense, to follow up the idea, but thought much of it at the time, and the subject, though not officially noticed, remained in his mind.

After the Mexican War, having leisure, he wrote the following letter:—

WASHINGTON, D. C., Nov. 11, 1850.

_Sir_,—Since the introduction of steamers of war into the navies of the world, I have frequently thought that a most effectual mode of attack might be brought into operation by using a steamer as a striking body, and precipitating her with all her power of motion and weight upon some weak point of a vessel of the enemy moved only by sails, and, seizing upon a moment of calm, or when the sail vessel is motionless or moving slowly through the water.

I had always determined to try this experiment, should opportunity afford, and actually made preparations for securing the boilers and steam pipes of the _Fulton_ at New York, when I thought it probable I might be sent in her to our eastern border ports at the time of the expected rupture with Great Britain upon the North Eastern Boundary question.

Experience has shown that a vessel moving rapidly through the water, and striking with her stem another motionless, or passing in a transverse direction, invariably destroys or seriously injures the vessel stricken without material damage to the assailant. Imagine for example the steamer _Mississippi_ under full steam and moving at the moderate rate of 12 statute miles per hour, her weight considered as a projectile being estimated as 2,500 tons, the minimum calculation, and multiplying this weight by her velocity, say 17½ feet per second, the power and weight of momentum would be a little short of 44,000 tons, and the effect of collision upon the vessel attacked, whatever may be her size, inevitably overwhelming.

It may be urged that the momentum estimated by the above figures may not be as effective as the rule indicates, yet it cannot be maintained that there would not be sufficient force for all the purposes desired.

I have looked well into the practicability of this mode of attack, and am fully satisfied that if managed with decision and coolness, it will unquestionably succeed and without immediate injury to the attacking vessel. Much would of course depend on the determination and skill of the commander, and the self-possession of the engineers at the starting bars, in reversing the motion of the engines at the moment of collision; but coolness under dangers of accident from the engines or boilers, is considered, by well trained engineers, a point of honor, and I feel well assured there would be no want of conduct or bearing in either those or the other officers of the ship.

The preparations for guarding the attacking steamer against material damage would be to secure the boilers more firmly in their beds, to prepare the steam pipes and connections so as to prevent the separation of their joints, to render firm the smoke-stack by additional guys and braces, to strip off the lower masts and to remove the bowsprit. All these arrangements could be made in little time and without much inconvenience.

It would be desirable that the bowsprit should be so fitted as to be easily reefed or removed, but in times of emergency, this spar should not for a moment be considered as interposing an obstacle to the contemplated collision.

It will be said, and I am free to admit, that much risk would be encountered by the steamer from the guns of the vessel assailed, say of a line-of-battle ship or frigate, but considering the short time she would be under fire, her facilities for advance and retreat, of choice of position and of the effect of her own heavy guns upon the least defensible point of the enemy’s ship on which she would of course advance, the disparity of armaments should not be taken into view.

I claim no credit for the originality of this suggestion, well knowing that the ancients in their sea fights dashed their sea-galleys with great force one upon the other, nor am I ignorant of the plan of a steam prow suggested some years ago by Commodore Barron.[9] My proposition is simply the renewal of an ancient practice by the application of the power unknown in early times, and, as many believe, in the beginning of its usefulness.

With great respect, I have the honor to be, Your most obedient servant, M. C. PERRY.

THE HON. WM. A. GRAHAM,

Secretary of the Navy, Washington, D. C.

Twenty years later in the river of her own name, the war steamer _Mississippi_ became a formidable ram, though before this time in 1859, the French iron-clad, _La Gloire_ had been launched. It had been said of the British Admiral, Sir George Sartorius, that “He was one of the first to form, in 1855, the revolution in naval warfare, by the renewal of the ancient mode of striking an adversary with the prow.” It will be seen that Perry anticipated the Europeans and taught the Americans.

Other points in this letter of Perry’s are of interest at this time. First, last, and always, Perry honored the engineer and believed in his equal possession, with the line officers, of all the soldierly virtues, notwithstanding that the man at the lever, out of sight of the enemy, must needs lack the thrilling excitement of the officers on deck. He felt that courage in the engine-room had even a finer moral strain than the more physically exciting passions of the deck.

We may here note that Perry really had part in the naval victories of our civil war. The method of ramming action, as used by Farragut in his brilliant victories of wooden steamers over Confederate iron-clads, was that out-lined by Perry years before.

Perry also made a thorough study, so far as it was then possible, of the problems of resistance and penetration, of rifled cannon and of iron-clad armor.

He was for years on the board of officers appointed to report upon the Stevens floating battery at Hoboken. Until his death, he was familiar with the whole question, and believed in the early adoption of both rifles and armor on ships. Prior to the Mexican War he thought the right course was to develop to the highest stage of efficiency the ram and the smooth-bore shell-gun. It turned out that in the war for the Union in 1861, most of the naval officers associated with him and who shared his ideas were on the Confederate side. Hence the Southerners were in a much better state of advanced naval science than the Northerners. Even the _Monitor_ was the fruit of a private inventor, and not of a naval officer. The first appearance of an iron coat on an American war vessel, and the first ram effectively used in war were upon the Confederate steamer _Virginia_ (the old _Merrimac_) which was the idea and application of T. ap. Catesby Jones; while the _Tennessee_ in Mobile Bay was wholly the creation of Franklin Buchanan. Both of these gentlemen were life-long friends, and subordinate officers, who were also familiar with the problem of ramming, and enjoyed Perry’s confidence and ideas. For the methods of the _Merrimac_ in her devastation of the Federal fleet at Hampton Roads, the epistle of Perry might seem almost a letter of instruction.

Had good machinists and founderies existed in the South, in number proportionate to that of Confederate naval officers, the story of Mobile Bay and the Mississippi river might have been different. With no lack of courage or skill in the northern sailors and their leaders, their greatest ally lay in the poor machinery of the Confederate iron-clads. These were true testudos in armor, but fortunately for the Union cause they were tortoises in speed also. Or, to change the metaphor, though meant to act as swordfish, they behaved as sluggishly as whales. They fell a prey even to wooden vessels able to obey their helms but moving rapidly with sinking force.

With the old system of tactics under sail, no ramming was possible, as the vessel under propulsion would expose herself to a raking fire while slowly working up to position. Gunpowder rendered obsolete the trireme ram. Steam, by its gigantic propelling force, had now in turn overcome gunpowder.

The model of the machine-ram, made by Captain Samuel Barron in 1827, and referred to by Captain Perry is now at Annapolis Naval Academy. So far as we can gather, Perry had not seen this at the time of his first writing of the ram in 1839. His valuable paper was duly read, laid aside and bound up with other “Captain’s Letters” in 1839 and forgotten. When in 1861, the _Merrimac_, steaming out from Norfolk, by one thrust of her iron snout turned the grand old wooden frigate, _Cumberland_, into a sunken hulk, she revealed the powers of the ram to the whole world. The curtain then fell on the age of wood and ushered in the age of iron.

[9] Commodore James Barron’s model of his “prow-ship” was exhibited in the rotunda of the capitol in Washington in 1836. As described by him in the Patent Office reports, it was a mere mass of logs, white pine, poplar, or gum-tree wood. Perry meant to use a real ship always available for ramming.