and which could move in any direction, and with great swiftness, according to the will and fancy of their captains, without allowing them to collide, was in its earliest infancy.
My duty then was to make experiments, so as to begin to regulate this new form of navigation. At once I set about making numerous test manoeuvres, drawing on the tactics of the ancient galleys, and also on cavalry movements, at the slow march and at the gallop, for my inspiration. Then we tried towing in every form. First of all we harnessed a steamboat to every two warships. In the second year of my command each floating citadel had her own "spare horse." From that time out calms and light breezes were vanquished, and the celerity of naval operations correspondingly increased. Yet, the more we tried it, the more obviously did the dangers and difficulties caused, especially at night, by fastening two ships together, one of whom is necessarily a passive agent, stare us in the face. The union of the tug and the "towed" was not far distant. The advent of the war steamer, the swift battleship, independent alike of wind and sea, was close at hand.
The creation of such a ship had preoccupied M. Dupuy de Lome for a long time past. He had gone to England to see and study everything there--both in the State dockyards and the building yards at Liverpool and on the Clyde. We had often talked the whole thing over together, and our views on the subject were in perfect agreement. At last, during an interval of leave from my command, he came to me one morning with a great roll containing two complete designs under his arm. The first for an armed frigate, BUILT ENTIRELY OF IRON, the second for a wooden line of battle ship--both to be exceedingly swift. The first design, for the iron frigate, was Dupuy de Lome's pet scheme.
"Iron-built ships will be the ships of the future," he used to say, and he was quite right.
But the experiments we had been making at Lorient upon iron plates had been disastrous. The damage done by oblique firing on them was terrible. Experiments were indeed being made at the same time, with a view to armour-plating the hulls of ships, but all that was still in the dimmest and mistiest future. How were we ever to induce naval committees, as timid as they were, undoubtedly, all powerful, to assent to the building of a steam frigate every single detail about which was to be new and improved?
"The very utmost we shall get," said I to Dupuy, "will be leave to build your wooden ship. The introduction of the submerged steam propeller will be their concession to the innovators, and the old-fashioned wooden hull and spars and gundecks will satisfy the supporters of the old traditions."
"Very well," he replied, "I'll go and propose my wooden ship."
He did, and he failed. They gave him plenty of smooth words and compliments, but refused to order his ship to be put on the stocks. The poor fellow came back to me in despair, and we were mingling our sorrows, and casting about as to how we had better return to the charge, when a lucky ministerial crisis threw the Ministry for Naval Affairs, ad interim, into the hands of M. Guizot. There we saw our chance.
I want to see him and told him all our story--explaining to him how a real and material step in naval progress was being adjourned on mere questions of form; and how the outgoing minister had not dared, in spite of his own good-will, to shake himself free of administrative procrastination in this particular.
M. Guizot heard me out, and then asked me what had better be done.