CHAPTER XVI.

REVOLUTIONS IN NAVAL ARCHITECTURE.

ON his return from Europe, in 1839, Captain Perry purchased a plot of land near Tarrytown, New York. He built a stone cottage, to which he gave the appropriate name of “The Moorings.” The farm comprised about 120 acres; and, needing much improvement, he set about utilizing his few leisure hours with a view to its transformation. Revelling in the exercise of tireless energy, he set out trees and planted a garden.

To get time for his beloved tasks he rose early in the morning, and long before breakfast had accomplished yeoman’s toil. If no nobler work presented itself, this man of steam and ordnance weeded strawberry beds. In due time this Jason sowing his pecks, not of dragon’s teeth, but of approved peas and beans, rejoiced in a golden fleece and real horn of plenty in the darling garden which produced twelve manner of vegetables.

At “Moorings” Perry was surrounded by most pleasant neighbors and a literary atmosphere which stimulated his own pen to activity during the winter, when long evenings allured to fireside enjoyments or studious labor.

About this time, Lieutenant Alexander Slidell MacKenzie, impelled by a request of the dead hero’s son, and irritated at the criticisms of J. Fenimore Cooper, began his life of Oliver Hazard Perry. In this he was assisted somewhat by Captain Perry, who corresponded with General Harrison and other eye-witnesses of the Lake Erie campaign of 1814. Among Perry’s papers, are several autograph letters in the cramped handwriting of the hero of Tippecanoe. Although admiring Harrison as a military man, and highly amused at the popularity and oddities of his hard cider and log cabin campaign, Perry voted, as was his wont, the Democratic ticket.

Another neighbor was Washington Irving, the great caricaturist of the Hollanders in America, who dwelt in the many gabled and weather-vaned Woolfert’s Roost. This quaint old domicile which Woolfert the Dutchman built to find _lust in rust_ (pleasure in rest), crowned a hill over-looking the Tappan Zee, in the south of Tarrytown, while the “Moorings” was in the northern part towards Sing Sing. Perry maintained with Irving a warm friendship to the last. He was an ardent admirer of the genial bachelor author of Sunnyside, and like him was a devoted reader of Addison. A humbler but highly appreciated neighbor was Captain Jacob Storm, who owned the sloop _William A. Hart_, on which both Irving and Perry often sailed up from New York. Storm was a genial and unique character, famous until his death in 1883, alike for his mother-wit and devotional spirit.

James Watson Webb, then the Hotspur, and afterwards the Nestor, of the press was a genial neighbor and life-long friend.

The changes in naval construction required by the necessities of war, have been many. The history of ship building is literally one of ups and downs. Three great revolutions, of the oar, the sail, and the boiler, have compelled the changes. The ancient sea-boats grew into high decked triremes with many banks of oars, and these again to the low galleys of the Vikings and Berbers. The sides of these, in turn, were elevated until cumbersome vessels with lofty prow, many-storied and tower-like stern, and enormous top-hamper sailed the seas. Again, the ship of the Tudor era was only, by slow processes, cut down to the trim hulls of Nelson’s line-of-battle ships.

In the clean lines of the American frigate, the naval men of our century saw, as they believed, the acme of perfection. They considered that no revolution in the science of war could seriously affect their shape. Down to 1862, this was the unshakable creed of the average sailor. Naval orthodoxy is as tough in its conservatism, as is that of ecclesiastical or legal strain.

Yet both Redfield and Perry as early as 1835, clearly foresaw that the old models were doomed; the many-banked ships must be razed, and the target surface be reduced. Steam and shells had wrought a revolution that was to bring the upper deck not far from the water, and ultimately rob the war-ship of sails and prow. The next problem, between resistance and penetration, was to make the top and bottom of ships much alike, and to put the greater portion of a war vessel under water. It is scarcely probable, however, that either of them believed that the reduction of steam battery should proceed so near the vanishing point, as in the Monitor, to be described as “a cheese-box on a raft” or “a tomato-can on a shingle.”

The first idea concerning “steam batteries” as they were called, was that they were not to have an individuality of their own as battle ships, but were to be subordinate to the stately old sailing frigates. They were expected to be tenders to tow the heavy battering ships into action, or to act as despatch boats and light cruisers. They were conceived to be the cavalry of the navy; ships mounted, as it were. Redfield and Perry, on the other hand, laid claim for them to the higher characteristics of cavalry and artillery united in a single arm of the service.

The first English steamers were exceedingly cumbrous and unnecessarily heavy. It was, with their ships, as with their wagons, or axe-handles. The British, ignorant of the virtues of American hickory, knew not how to combine lightness with strength. Redfield proposed to apply the Yankee jack-knife and whittle away all superfluous timber. Denying that the British type was the fastest or the best, he pled earnestly that our naval men should discard transatlantic models, and create an American type. Regretting that our government and naval men held aloof from the use of steam as a motor in war, he yet demonstrated that even a clumsy steamer, like the _Nemesis_, had proved herself equal to two line-of-battle ships. He prophesied the speedy disappearance from the seas of the old double and trebled-banked vessels then so proudly floating their pennants. Redfield writing to Perry as a man of liberal ideas, said “Opinions will be received with that spirit of candor and kindness which has so uniformly been manifested in your personal intercourse with your fellow-citizens.” The confidence of this eminent man of science and practical skill in the naval officer was fully justified.

One thing which occupied Perry’s thoughts for a number of years was the question of defending our Atlantic harbors from sudden attacks of a foreign enemy. Steam had altered the old time relations of belligerents. He saw the modern system of carrying on war was to make it sudden, sharp and decisive, and then compel the beaten party to pay the expenses. A few hostile steamers from England could devastate our ports almost before we knew of a declaration of war. While England was always in readiness to do this, there was not one American sea-going war steamer with heavy ordnance ready to meet her swift and heavily armed cruisers, while river boats would be useless before the heavy shell of the enemy. He did not share the ideas of security possessed by the average fresh-water congressman. The spirit of 1812 was not dead, in him, but he knew that the brilliant naval duels of Hull and Decatur’s time decided rather the spirit of our sailors than the naval ability of the United States.

He proposed a method for extemporizing steam batteries by mounting heavy guns on hulks of dismantled merchant vessels. These were to be moved by a steamer in the center of the gang, holding by chains, and able to make ten knots an hour. If one hulk were disabled, it could be easily separated from the others. Such a battery could be made ready in ten days and fought without sailors. The engines could be covered with bales of cotton or hay made fire-proof with soap-stone paint.

With the aid of his friend W. C. Redfield, he collected statistics of all the privately-owned steamers in the United States with their cost, dimensions and consumption of fuel, showing their possible power of conversion for war purposes. Encouraged by Perry, Mr. Redfield treated the whole question of naval offence and defence in a series of letters on “_The Means of National Defence._” These were printed in the New York _Journal of Commerce_ during the summer of 1841, and afterwards reprinted in the _Journal of the Franklin Institute_ in Philadelphia. His note-books with illustrations, diagrams and pen-sketches show that his coming ideal war-ship was like the _Lackawanna_ of our civil war days which, while but five feet narrower, is sixty-two feet longer than “Old Ironsides,” the _Constitution_ of 1812. His favorite type was a long narrow and comparatively low vessel like the _Kearsarge_ which is twenty-two feet less in breadth than an old “seventy-four.” Like Perry, he looked forward to the day when one eleven-inch shell gun would be able to discharge the metal once hurled by a twenty-gun broadside of the old _President_.

During July 1840, Perry conducted a series of experiments on the _Fulton_, to determine the effect on the ship’s timbers of the firing of heavy ordnance across the deck of a vessel. The introduction of pivot guns on board men-of-war, rendered these experiments of great value. The bowsprit and bulwarks removed, and the eight-inch Paixhans placed in the middle part of the forward cross bulwarks, thirty feet of the _Fulton’s_ deck was exposed to concussion. Thirty-four rounds fired at a target on shore, showed that every discharge produced an upheaval of the deck. Empty buckets reversed and placed at various distance and positions on the deck approaching the gun, were upset, kicked into the air, destroyed, or shaken overboard. The ease with which men could be killed by the windage of the balls, was demonstrated. A stout cask twelve feet forward of the gun but out of line of fire was knocked overboard. A glass phial which was hung three feet above the cannon’s muzzle withstood the shock, but three feet forward at the same elevation was shattered. Tarpaulin of two thicknesses fastened over a scuttle was rent, and pine boards securely nailed withstood only two or three firings.

Perry at once gave the natural explanation that the expansion, pressure, and sudden contraction of the gases generated by the gunpowder, caused the air of the hold to rush up to fill the vacuum, and thus pressed upon the planking of the deck. The heavily built _Fulton_ could resist, where a weaker vessel would start her planks, just as a fish brought up in a trawl from deep-sea beds, bursts when coming to the air. He suggested that any slightly built vessel could be rendered safe, simply by flooding the decks with three inches of water. This he demonstrated after many curious and interesting experiments, thus adding to the sum of knowledge which every naval officer, in the changed conditions of warfare, ought to obtain.

Perhaps no finer illustration of the value and power of pivot guns was ever given than upon the _Kearsarge_ when sinking the _Alabama_. Yet of that very ship, the British newspapers had said, “Her decks cannot withstand the concussion and recoil of her heavy guns.” They were evidently unaware of the knowledge obtained by Perry on the _Fulton_, and applied by American builders of our men-of-war.