A Visit to the Iron-clad Ship.

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THE birth-place of the Warrior is in the same land, or amphibious region, where the Great Eastern was reared in its mighty hulk. It is a strange country, where mud and water seem to be of much more value and importance than solid land; and the houses are all not only mere brick cabins, but they are dwarfed by the tall masts of ships that tower above every thing, and in the most impossible-looking situations. Here and there you see a ship, perfect as a model,-perhaps a Yankee barque,-with her slender sticks tapering high into the air and all her rigging as fine and neat as spider's work, mounted up far above the houses. She is in a dry-dock, to be made all tight and smooth for her next run across the Atlantic. Whichever way you look the falls eye forests of masts, with here and there a tall chimney sending out a curling line of dark smoke or white clouds of steam; and if you stop to listen when you land from the Blackwall railway, you hear on every side the sharp quick hammering of the riveters, the heavy thump of steam-hammers, with a general hum of hoarse voices, that tell at once of a very different occupation from those of the busy crowds who throng the Strand and Fleet Street. The people, too, are all of another kind; those that are not unmistakable sailors have the peculiar cut of men who deal with iron and steam and machinery. Their dress, from head to foot, is made for service; close fitting head-gear, short handy jackets, and no unnecessary outriggings,—nothing to hinder their passing between awful fly-wheels, the slightest brush from which would be certain death,-and generally of material that both repels the sparks from heated masses of metal and protects the wearer from the tremendous heat. There is something singularly attractive and interesting in these sons of Vulcan. They follow a perilous trade, and their familiarity with the great powers generally confers a kind of nobleness and independence of spirit, which, beyond their constant superiority of intelligence in their class, gives them the manners of an aristocracy of their own. It is impossible not to feel a great admiration for the engineer who drives an express train, with the lives of hundreds depending on his keen eye, his clear head, and steady arm; or for the sailor, cool, strong, and dauntless against the raging gale and merciless ocean. In these extreme emergencies we feel the value of such men. And these are the men who make and work our Warriors and Black Princes.

But we must hasten past the docks behind the railway-station,-where a magnificent old Indiaman lay alongside, sending his great bowsprit right over the roadway, and a tight little Dover mail-boat, looking wonderfully yacht-like, and fragile as a nautilus, yet a gallant and daring little vessel in any weather, till we arrive at the office of the Thames Iron

Ship-building Company. Here, while waiting in the ante-room, we had the opportunity of examining one of the armour-plates which had been fired at by 68-pounder round shot. It was a piece about two feet square, which had been struck by several shot, and broken completely into fragments; though none of the shot had actually pierced it, yet some had very nearly done so, and it was clear that had a second shot ever struck in the dent made, it must have gone quite through the plate. This, indeed, has occurred in practice at the targets.

Our party was now standing on the bank of what may be called Lea Creek, waiting to be ferried across in the workmen's boat. The Warrior was before us, lying in a side cut on the opposite bank, and her huge hull of iron, all painted red and covered with scaffoldings, rose up as high as a five or six storied house. Landed on the mud-banks, we passed through the timber-yard, where the men were squaring up the large ribs, or rather pectoral muscles, of teak, each nine inches thick, which are placed in two ranges, one across the other, to support the armour-plates; thus making eighteen inches of the strongest timber outside the iron skin of the ship. This wood cushioning, it is thought by some, will act as the man-at-arms' suit of buff did in deadening the blow upon the skin; but, on the other hand, it has been suggested that, according to the experiments made on wooden targets, a yielding material like wood has been the cause of more injury being effected by shot than if the armourplates had been bolted on in immediate contact with the iron supports which would represent the ribs of a ship. Approaching the side of the ship, workmen are seen clinging on to her in almost every spot; some are carpenters at the ports, finishing the wood-work and fitting the ribs, but most are iron-workers; and the din of hammers is so loud that we are obliged to shout as if in a gale of wind. We creep along under the scaffoldings, over the mud every now and then, scared by a shout of "Below there!" when down comes a heavy rivet or bit of plate; so that it is not without certain casualties that this sort of work can be looked at even. But the men go on quite unconcerned, many of them seated all day on a wet plank close to the mud, pulling at the handle of a drill with the same kind of action that a rower uses: in this way the iron is pierced for the bolts when in its proper position. The immense stern-post is fastened on to the keel-plate by long arms of iron, extending about twelve feet on each side the keel, and then drilled and bolted on. But she has no regular keel as ordinary ships have; the ribs are fastened to a keel-plate which is 14 inches thick; and to compensate for the want of a keel, and counteract rolling when afloat, long projecting flanges, called bilge-pieces, about a foot deep, are fixed along the bottom midway between her waterline and keel-piece. This is according to the design of the ship by the Surveyor of the Navy; and it should be understood that the Warrior is entirely built upon plans and drawings and calculations furnished by the Admiralty; although I believe, on very many points, it has been found necessary to correct these, and we must not be too hard upon Sir Baldwin

Walker in his first experiment. Whether it was wise to follow the model of a floating battery in setting out the lines of a ship intended to be a fast frigate, capable of taking the sea in all weather, is a question. In my opinion, the bilge-pieces can never give that steadiness in a sea-way and handiness in steering that a keel does; they appear to have been an after-thought, as the best thing that could be done when it was too late to build the ship with a keel. This little mistake is much to be regretted, however, and not the less so as we know that the Emperor Napoleon's naval architect, M. Dupuy de Lôme, has adapted armour-plates to wooden ships which have a regular keel; and of these La Gloire is reported to possess very good qualities both in speed and sea-worthiness. This, however, as will presently be shown, there are some reasons for questioning.

But now let us stand under the stern of the ship, just where, when she's afloat and moving through the waves, her huge tail-fin will work like the flukes of a great whale, and force-on the vast leviathan of 9000 tons. Looking upwards at this stupendous piece of forge-work the stern-post, which goes right away to the upper deck, more than forty feet high, one is struck with the same kind of wonder as in viewing any of the grand effects of natural forces,-the upheaving of a mountain of slate or the twisting off of the largest forest-oaks as if they were green withies. How the hand of man could have been brought to bear upon such an enormous mass of the toughest iron! Steam and machinery have done it of course; but how to get these obedient forces to shape and model that enormous ring of metal near two feet thick, and to weld it on with the immense iron post that has its strong roots in the keel, and its branches above in the framing of the ship! Yet there it is, as neatly formed as the most delicate frame for a pair of spectacles. It took thirteen months of ceaseless forging to get this gigantic limb of the Warrior into shape. Night and day it was kept glowing in the furnace, and anxiously watched as it was lifted out slowly by steam-power and brought under the Nasmyth hammer, again to be returned to the fire, and so on until the Vulcanides completed their triumph. Some idea of the powerful mechanical appliances employed may be got when we learn that the weight of this piece of wrought iron is forty-three tons; and the success of the work is a capital instance of bold English enterprise, for it is the largest forging ever made. The stem is an almost equally fine piece of forge-work; it is more than twenty tons weight, and well shaped for cutting through the water. The forging of the enormous screw-shaft, which will have to work through the ring in the stern-post is another undertaking of scarcely less difficulty; though, as to this, at these works they seem to think no more of these huge screw-shafts than a poor turner does of his broom-handles; they lie about waiting to be shaved by the planing-machine, under the care of one man, who whistles and sings at his easy task, not at all like one who is wielding the power of some hundreds of horses.

It should be borne in mind that these iron stern-posts are a most important feature in the new men-of-war. The strain upon the wooden stern

posts in some of our fastest and finest ships, like the Orlando frigate, for example, is so enormous, especially whenever the speed is forced at all, that the whole fabric of the ship trembles and shakes to such a degree, that the vessel would soon be rendered unfit for service; even the topmost spars feel the shake in these vessels of very great steam-power. Therefore, in modern naval warfare, as great steam-power-grande vitesse, as our neighbours have it-will be indispensable, we must have iron stern-posts, and no doubt also iron ships. Nothing else will stand the tremendous strain of the screw; and if ships-of-war are to be made shot-proof, the whole skeleton of the ship must be of iron as well as the muscles and skin. The Emperor Napoleon, it will be found, has a little over-reached himself, and perhaps hurried his able architect M. de Lôme, in converting his ten good wooden ships into cuirassed frigates à grande vitesse. Shot-proof they may be, but they can never stand the shake of the screw and remain weather-proof for any thing like the time that iron ships can. In my view of the matter, we shall see these frégates blindées, about which so much fuss has been made, laid up at Toulon and Cherbourg like our Gog and Magog at Guildhall, while M. de Lôme tries his hand at an iron ship on an improved model, after our Warrior. It is known, indeed, that extensive preparations have been started for constructing iron ships like the Warrior, so that our French friends are now the copyists.

Before going on board the ship, it should be noticed that her sides are as upright as the side of a house, and the line of port-holes not unlike eighteen square windows, about ten feet from the water-level. Thus she will, if she ever meets an antagonist, make a splendid target; every shot will be received in the best possible manner for penetration, and there will be no glancing off. This point in her form has been much and very justly objected to, partly because the sides are unnecessarily exposed, but chiefly because the great weight of the armour-plates, being thus carried at a disadvantage, will sway the ship from side to side in any thing like rough weather, and thus render her, not only very difficult to manage, but, in case of coming to blows, very inefficient in gunnery. Captain Ford, the superintending naval architect at this yard, has constructed a model for an iron ship in which the sides slope inwards from the water line, and thus the weight of the armour is brought to a nicer balance upon the centre of gravity of the ship. This appears to be a most important consideration in the building of these iron ships carrying armour on their sides. The Admiralty, with worthy Sir John Pakington at their head, went to work a little too much in hand-over-head style; there would have been nothing infra dig. in asking the advice of professed iron ship-builders before the Warrior was commenced; indeed, if two years ago they had only done as the Russian Emperor has, given a carte-blanche to two or three of our great iron ship-builders, we should by this time have floated two iron frigates that could fight in any weather.

You may step through a port without much stooping, and so on to the main-deck. If a battle were raging, the scene could hardly be one of

more strife and noise; heavy blows resound on every side, and it requires rather a sharp look-out to avoid getting hit as you pass by some stalwart hammerer fighting with all his might against an obstinate bolt. Hoarse and angry shouts from the men are answered by shrill cries from the boys, who, armed with long pincers, rush madly past you with red-hot bolts, and take flying leaps over dark bottomless-looking abysses, like so many young imps. You look down these deep chasms, and the ship appears to be on fire in fifty places, and this gives the whole scene a strange character of wild and imposing fierceness and power; one feels that nothing but the terrible exigencies of war could call up such tremendous efforts, half demoniac in their energy.

Every thing on the fighting-deck of the Warrior is iron except a thin layer of wood laid over the iron, which forms the flooring; overhead are the great girders, made of Butterby's beam-iron, which span across the ship, and at the sides are the strong ribs. The space between decks is high enough to allow the tallest man to walk with his hat on without lowering his head, and a marine of the standard height might shoulder arms with fixed bayonets. This deck is completely shut off from the bows and stern of the ship by immensely strong iron bulkheads, and the parts beyond these are filled up with compartments formed like the tubular bridges. The object of these is to meet any injuries that may be done to this part of the ship, which is not invulnerable, the armourplates being placed only as far as the fighting-deck extends. One naturally asks what is to become of the Warrior if the enemy should be so malicious as to give what, in pugilistic science, is called a foul hit— a blow below the belt. Achilles was conquered at last by a sly blow at his heel; if our Warrior were to be well peppered with round shot and shell in the tender parts,-if the vulnerable part of the stern were to be made the point for breaching,-the question is, whether the heavy stern-post would not tear itself away, and thus effectually cripple the ship. The reason given by the naval architects for not continuing the armour-plates all over the ship is, that if that were done, she would not sail; she would be like a horse weighted with his load on his head and his tail, and so, instead of mounting over the waves, she would probably prefer to duck under them. The defect is again an awkward one, and it will have to be mastered if iron ships-of-war are to form the navy. The protected part of the Warrior, then, is very little more than half the exposed surface of the sides, the total length being 420 feet; 214 feet of this space in length, and twenty-seven in depth, extending five feet below the water, represents the armour-covered part. The upper deck, which is fifty-eight feet broad, and substantially formed of iron plate three-eighths of an inch thick, covered with planking, is not consequently shot-proof.

The making of the armour-plates they look, as the framing of the ship. been decided, answers better than any

is quite as wonderful, simple as Iron of the best kind, it has now kind of steel. It has often been