Matrix Games

The only effective defense against such a surge by Perfidious Albion, seemed to be the creation of heavy mobile “floating batteries” that could be moved to any threatened location and would mount guns powerful enough to catch the invading fleet in a crossfire between the coastal forts and themselves. Properly implemented, such harbor-defense flotillas might cause the English to think twice about another amphibious attack on the United States, for each floating battery could be built much faster and cheaper than the ocean-going men-of-war it would conceivably be dueling with. Once more, the Stevens Brothers were invited to display their ideas along these lines, and once more the designs and specifications they showed were impressive enough to warrant a new contract (awarded in February, 1843), providing ample funds for the construction of a prototype incorporating every advanced feature the Stevens’ had laid on the table. If the prototype performed as predicted, a crash program would be launched to produce them in quantity.

Let’s pause long enough to clarify the terminology here: a true “floating battery” was just that, a waterborne heavy-gun platform and not a self-propelled vessel; it had to be towed into place, then anchored, before it could open fire. It was in no sense a “warship”, although under the right conditions, it could add a lot to the firepower of one side or the other, especially in siege or siege-like situations, and considerable use was in fact made of these ponderous weapons’ platforms during the coming war.

But what the Stevens brothers came up with was a genuine mobile warship, and a damned formidable one, too. It would be 250 feet long, with a 40-foot beam, and a draft of 28 feet amidships. Its armored skin would consist of oak-reinforced 4.5-inch iron plates, overlapping rather like chain mail and sheathing the entire contraption from smokestack to waterline. Sloped at a 45-degree angle, its armored carapace would deflect the majority of projectiles fired against it, and it could shrug off 64-pounder shot like so many hailstones.

Moreover, it was fully maneuverable, for it was designed to contain four boilers, mounted safely below the waterline and generating 900 horsepower. As of yet, there was no steam-powered warship that could out-pace it, at least not in calm water. The boilers were designed to burn prime anthracite coal, which would greatly reduce smoke and stack-gases, and ingenious ventilation system would secure reasonable comfort for the crew, even in battle. Armament would not be large in numbers, probably 4-6 of the largest new wrought-iron guns available, but it would need only a few hits from such weapons to disable or wreck a British frigate and any transport that wandered into range was dead meat.

It was, in every way, a very advanced warship design, and admirably suited for its intended purpose. But not every aspect of the design was readily available with existing technology and techniques; the Stevens brothers had to solve one bottleneck problem at a time, and although they worked furiously hard at it, the project inevitably fell behind schedule. And a sudden new development threw the brothers into self-doubt: in 1844, the excellent American inventor John Ericsson, introduced a new and very powerful 12-inch wrought-iron gun, which could, in fact, smash and probably even penetrate the armor of the ship the brothers had designed. It would of course be years before the Royal Navy acquired and mounted comparable weapons, but the brothers were caught off balance, and instead of hurrying to complete their prototype, they tried, with considerable difficulty, to upgrade its structural integrity so it could also withstand the new Ericsson gun’s fire. This proved to be more than they could handle, and whether it was through impetuosity or dogged arrogance, they altered their construction plans in mid-project without bothering to inform or ask permission of the Navy Department, a serious breach of contract and a display of rogue spirit that brought down upon them considerable wrath. Delays and excuses stacked up, and the redesigned vessel was no closer to completion in 1848 than it had been five years earlier. By 1850, the Navy had had a belly-full of the Stevens’s prima-dona behavior, and the financial plug was pulled, leaving the project 3/4ths finished but dead in the water, abandoned by the very authorities who had green-lighted it so generously in its original configuration. It was a very real pity that the Navy didn’t keep the faith a while longer; had the “revised” version of the Stevens battery been completed, it would have been far more seaworthy and far more versatile in its military utility than the design which took its place: i.e. the fabled Monitor-class, which had an unpleasant proclivity for sinking in rough weather, where as the Stevens boat could easily have ridden out gale-force conditions and still arrived at its assigned battle-station dry and whole and ready-to-engage.

It is likely that the British demonstrations around the United States were merely saber-rattling for some ephemeral political purpose, because there’s little evidence that Great Britain had any serious plans to invade her annoying upstart former colony. But in England, too, strenuous efforts were underway to design and build formidable, practical, ironclads, but with one major difference – the Brits concentrated first on small and medium craft, more suited for policing the reaches of their vast empire than for dueling with a large conventional fleet. The first three purpose-built ironclads, in fact, were relatively small river gunboats destined to patrol the restive heathen lands along the River Niger. In skirmishes with native levies, whose supply of artillery was both limited and mostly superannuated, these patrol boats proved very successful, but efforts by progressive Royal Navy officers to launch a construction program of large-scale ironclad vessels encountered persistent and somewhat mysterious problems.

When news of the Stevens’s experiments reached England, the Admiralty decided to hold its own series of test-firings, at Portsmouth, in 1842. Whether the test-shots were fired at one-piece iron castings, or laminated layers of thinner plate, the results were disheartening. While it was true that no four-inch plates were actually holed by the shots fired into them, the rear-facings of those plates, and the oaken layers reinforcing them, always shattered badly – an effect that would have been even more murderous to crewmen sheltering behind them than a clean penetration, since each solid hit flung out a wicked cloud of metal shards and oaken splinters, often for a radius of twenty feet behind the point of impact. Compared to the measured and, to a certain extent, self-repairing damage done to existing wooden ships of the line, this was NOT an improvement. The reasons why the Brits were unable to duplicate the Stevens’s results are unclear. It could have been the quality of the iron ore, the admixtures of chemicals that went into smelting it down, or some minor discrepancy in the rolling mills that fashioned the molten iron into plates – most likely, it was some arcane combination of factors beyond the powers of contemporary chemists to detect. But the net result was to deflate the progressive officers’ advocacy of ironclads and reinforce the reactionary doctrines of those who held that “if it was good enough for Lord Nelson, it’s good enough for us!”

 

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