OF THE Royal United Service Institution. VOL. V. 1861. Evening Meeting. Monday, March 4th, 1861. Captain E. G. FISHBOURNE, R.N. C.B. in the Chair. IRON-CASED SHIPS. No. XVII. EXPERIMENTS AT WOOLWICH, 1845, AND ON "RUBY" AT PORTSMOUTH, 1856. SPHERICAL SHOT ONLY. By CAPTAIN E. PELLEW HALSTED, R.N. [It being inconsistent with the objects of the Institution that political matter should be introduced into the Journal, certain portions of Captain Halsted's Lectures have been omitted. It is however right, in justice to Captain Halsted, to state, that the various remarks excised are deemed by him to be essential to a clear understanding of the position in which the subject of Iron-cased Ships now stands, and of the causes which have led to it, and also for the purpose of enabling him to avoid the appearance of casting blame, where no such intention existed.-ED.] BEFORE proceeding with the Lecture which you now do me the honour to attend, I have to acquit myself of a pledge, by stating that whatever views and opinions I may therein put forth are entirely independent of all connection, or known coincidence, with those of any Authority whatever, and that all responsibility for them rests upon myself alone. This statement will, however, at once suggest to you that these Lectures have not been undertaken without a previous intimation to the heads of my profession; a fact which I acknowledge the more readily, because the entire assent with which the announcement of my intention to deliver them was met may, I trust, be taken as an acknowledgement of the public advantage of affording both a freer access to special points of official information, and of promoting a more general discussion on important changes and improvements in the two Services, than has hitherto been possible under a system of almost mysterious Exclusiveness, the evils of which will, as I believe, receive strong illustration in the facts I am about to lay before you. But, in order to reconcile my disclaimer with the very nature of the drawings and specimens ranged before you, I feel it necessary to add, that my own official share in the trials on the "Trusty" off Shoeburyness, ceased entirely so soon as I had fulfilled my instructions to prepare the vessels to be employed in them; and it was quite a matter of choice with me whether I then left the harbour of Sheerness to witness them or not. I did so choose, however, and moreover made every pre-arrangement for recording with exactitude whatever I might witness, providing myself for this purpose with a correct drawing, "to scale," of the ship to be fired at, on which to lay off the exact position and effects of each shot as it was fired; all of which was done as is now presented in the illustration B, plate I. But it was never intended by me to do this for my own professional information alone; and accordingly, when the trials ceased, the Committee, who alone has conducted them throughout, were pleased to accept my offer to furnish them with a fair copy of the drawing thus produced, on which the facts, as indisputably agreed to at the time, had all been duly noted. To what use the copy thus furnished to the Committee may have been employed, I have ever since felt it a duty not even to inquire; but it is my own intention, through the medium of these Lectures, to furnish, as generally as I can to all my countrymen, a correct copy of the drawing then made for myself, as a first proof of the desirableness that, at every important National experiment, more than one set of views and opinions should be represented. At that time, however, it never crossed my mind that a series of plain facts, deliberately impressing themselves for two consecutive days on every sense but that of taste, of some 150 gentlemen, officers, men, and boys, could be made a subject for such directly opposite conclusions, as to require that detailed explanation, which, by aid of these drawings, I shall be enabled to give. Of the "specimens" displayed, some I may describe as derelicts, being fragments of different sorts, left on the deck, or in the sides of the "Trusty," after the action, and taken possession of by me, as their most natural curator, to be held in deposit until claimed publicly or privately, by some more lawful possessor. For the loan of the Whitworth 80-pounder bolt, I am indebted to the ready kindness of that gentleman, as I am to the Admiralty for the fragment of the plate on which it so remarkably displayed its power. To the same Authority I am also indebted for one of the fastening bolts which received punishment; and I hereby express my sincere thanks to the Ordnance Committee for the loan of the steel 80-pounder shot of Sir William Armstrong. But I must again appeal to your forbearance while I state, in as few words as possible, my reasons for not proceeding at once to the details and explanations on the trials of the "Trusty." The more I have sought, by careful investigation of all surrounding facts, to make my task satisfactory to others as well as myself, the more I have found it impossible with any regard to candour, or even truth, to treat this subject of "Iron-cased ships" as that of an isolated and recent invention; on the contrary, the closer I have examined, the more clearly have I seen that I had to deal with a complete chain of connected events, of which "Iron-cased ships" was but the latest link yet forged, and by no means likely to prove, in its present shape, the last one; and that forcibly to separate this link from those which had gone to produce it, as well as from those it was likely to produce, was an effort the futility of which must meet me at every step of my progress, even if I could have found it my duty to make it at all I therefore felt that I had no alternative but either to decline to the Council of this Institution the invitation to lecture which I had already accepted, or to take up the subject link by link, from what may be termed "the first flotation of iron," down to the great question of the present day. And if, in following this latter course, I may unwillingly inflict disappointment on any, I would entreat those who may so feel, to give weight to the following considerations, which, in truth, lie at the base of that deep and sudden interest so largely called forth throughout our entire community on this whole subject. Of all the material gifts bestowed on our Country, none has been so profusely and widely distributed, none has so directly and permanently conduced to our national greatness, as what, from their constant contiguity, may be termed our "combined" deposits of iron and coal; while to the great Country from which we are separated by so narrow a strait, these gifts have, in an equally remarkable manner, been so nearly denied altogether, as to make a freer access to our stores an undoubted and prominent object in the Treaty of intercourse which has lately been completed between us. How comes it then that, out of these materials, thus so unequally bestowed, France has been allowed to take an undisputed lead in the forging of a new and most formidable engine of Naval Force, so as to present the most serious threat ever yet made,-pacifically,against that Supremacy in Naval Power by the security of which, under Providence, this insular and commercial Empire alone exists? Is it that our People have been unaware that the materials, so rich in other blessings, could also be employed most largely to increase all international intercourse upon the ocean? Is it that it never occurred to our Rulers that the same material which could so largely be employed as a means to increase our commerce, might also be used in the construction of those ships by which that commerce must be defended? Or is it indeed that, after full and conclusive proofs, the anomaly in God's Providence has been clearly established, that the iron which may be used to construct whole fleets for the merchant, is entirely unfit for employment in any single vessel of war? These inquiries, and especially the latter, will, I am sure, be seen to be far from irrelevant to the subject which has called us together; and, if traced out with that clearness and conciseness which I can scarcely even hope to attain, they must, I feel, impart an increased usefulness and force to the remainder of our common task. May not the examination of them direct us to such errors as may have induced our present anxious position? and may not the discovery of these, ensure us a safer path of progress for the future? These are results, any realization of which must be left to the joint judgment of all to whom these Lectures may come, but in no degree can any such results be even hoped for, except by a faithful investigation, followed out into all those scenes and changes, wheresoever enacted, which have indeed so largely contributed to bring the whole subject to its present state. In following this course, however, I purpose laying myself under close interdict against the mention of all names, so far as is compatible with intelligible statements,-my object being, not to promote a renewal of past differences, but rather to invite to one common effort for regaining that position which those differences have lost for us; at the same time seeking for, and laying bare, what I may conscientiously feel to be necessary truth, as the treatment alone worthy of a matter so serious in itself, and in the consequences it has involved. --- More than thirty years have elapsed since the first discovery that "Ships built of iron float lighter, strength for strength, than ships built of wood;" and the merit of making this discovery,-and the practical prosecution of it, and all the consequences now flowing, and still destined to flow, from it, undoubtedly belong to the People of England. But, beyond this, I am far from pretending to fix either the locality or individual,—even if the merit can indeed be exclusively laid claim to, for any one person or place. Liverpool, however, would certainly rank high in any competition for the honour; and the name of her late citizen Mr. John Laird would be generally accepted as that of one, at least, of the Fathers of Iron shipbuilding: as will be his present successor, as one of its ablest sons. But I leave in more competent hands this question of priority, and proceed to observe that this discovery at once gave rise to a distinctly new Art and Profession amongst us; the great natural laws which rule the necessary conditions of all safe locomotion on the ocean being alone of common authority over ships of iron and ships of wood;-all other conditions, such as strength, form, size, &c. being governed in each case by the entirely different nature and properties of the materials used. Thus the practical studies, as well as the scientific research, of the Shipbuilder in iron and the Shipbuilder in wood are necessarily engaged in spheres quite as distinct and diverse as those which, in a less degree, separate the occupation of the Carpenter from that of the Blacksmith; but, as the labours of both compete for the production of the same article, and as the Carpenter, so to speak, had long possessed an exclusive supply of the market,-and as even the tree which he best liked to use had fixed its roots deep in the soil of our national pride, so it is no wonder if the progress of his more modern competitor should have been comparatively slow, though it has always been constant. This rate of progress will also appear the more inevitable, when it is considered to how large an extent the "plant " requisite in the two professions must entirely differ, not only in material and machinery, but in the skilled labour required to employ them, so that, except in the important items of " docks" and "slips,"-if suitable,the loss of capital in transforming a building establishment for ships of wood into one for ships of iron, must, in all but very special cases, have been such as seriously to deter from any such changes, and the rivalry would thus assume the conditions, commercially, of a life and death struggle: and, if we further take into account the large amount of very natural prejudice, and I may add natural ignorance too, among all the larger masses affected by the new introduction, we shall have gathered into the same scale such an amount of adverse circumstances, as could alone be outweighed at all, by very great and intrinsic advantages. But, before enumerating these advantages, I may be allowed to illustrate the great practical differences I have pointed to, by a brief analysis of those fundamental processes, with which the several parts of a ship of wood and a ship of iron are respectively bonded together, under the distinct operations of "bolting" in the one case, and "riveting" in the other. In the "bolting" of a ship of wood, it is not even proposed to bring contiguous, surfaces so closely together as to exclude the water; and |