Armour-plated batteries found their chief representatives in the batteries of the time of the Crimean War, of which the Glatton and Terror may be regarded as types, and the double-turret principle was developed in such vessels as the Cerberus. The Terror was built by Palmer’s for the destruction of the Cronstadt forts. She had three masts carrying square sails on the fore-mast, and excessively sloping sides and bluff ends, and would form a remarkable contrast to the graceful lines of the modern battleship. The Terror was built, armour-plated, and launched in about three months, thanks to Sir Charles Palmer’s invention of rolling instead of forging the armour plates.

The battle of Tsushima afforded naval architects some valuable lessons, and the Dreadnought and the Lord Nelson may be regarded as the first results. The Japanese-built Satsuma is virtually on the same lines, there being little to choose between the Satsuma and the Lord Nelson.

The Dreadnought’s turbine machinery drives four shafts, and immediately aft of the inner shafts are twin rudders to give the ship greater steering facilities. The Admiralty adopted turbines, according to an official statement, because “of the saving in weight and reduction in number of working parts, and reduced liability to breakdown; its smooth working, ease of manipulation, saving of coal consumption at high powers, and hence boiler-room space and saving of engine-room complement; and also because of the increased protection which is provided for with this system, due to the engines being lower in the ship: advantages which more than counterbalance the disadvantages. There was no difficulty in arriving at a decision to adopt turbine propulsion from the point of view of seagoing speed only. The point that chiefly occupied the committee was the question of providing sufficient stopping and turning power for purposes of easy and quick manœuvring. Trials were carried out between the sister vessels Eden and Waveney, and the Amethyst and Sapphire, one of each class fitted with reciprocating and the other with turbine engines.... The necessary stopping and astern power will be provided by astern turbines on each of the four shafts.

“These astern turbines will be arranged in series, one high- and one low-pressure astern turbine on each side of the ship, and in this way the steam will be more economically used when going astern, and a proportionally greater astern power obtained than in the Eden and Amethyst.”

Messrs. John I. Thorneycroft and Co.’s first torpedo-boat for the British Navy was the Lightning, of 18 knots, but the firm’s Tartar, launched in 1907, broke all records by travelling at 35·67 knots.

The latest destroyers have a speed of 33 knots, though the coastal destroyers have a speed of only 26 knots. Another remarkable feature in the Navy of late years has been the number of vessels to be fitted with oil-burning apparatus instead of coal.

The destroyer Mohawk, built by J. Samuel White at Cowes, is 270 feet in length, 25 feet beam, and 765 tons displacement, and contains water-tube boilers and turbines of 14,000 horse-power, and attained a speed of forty miles an hour. She carries no coal, oil fuel being used, of which her bunkers can take seventy-three tons. The Tartar’s record was broken by the destroyer Swift, 345 feet in length with a displacement of 1800 tons, and having quadruple turbine engines giving her a speed of 36 knots.

The cruiser Invincible, launched by Armstrongs at Elswick in April 1907, is a first-class armoured cruiser 530 feet in length and of 17,250 tons displacement, and has turbine engines of an equivalent horse-power of 40,000 and a speed of 25 knots.

The construction of warships has resolved itself into a struggle to attain an ever-increasing speed combined with offensive power and great range of action, and warships of varying types have been produced with startling rapidity, so that one powerful vessel after another has been evolved, each superseding its predecessor in some degree, until there are “Dreadnoughts” and “Super-Dreadnoughts” carrying guns and armour and possessing a speed undreamt of a few years ago. Among smaller vessels, torpedo-boats, destroyers, scouts, cruisers of various classes, commerce destroyers, cruiser-battleships, and submarines now take their places in the nation’s fleet. There is no telling in what direction the next development will be. The battle of the boilers has played an important part in the development of the warship, and it is safe to say that had this struggle not taken place to produce a boiler which should give a great pressure of steam quickly, the speed of the warship as now known would not have been attainable. Twin screws are succeeded by triple screws, and these are to be followed by quadruple screws.

The second-class protected cruiser Bristol, launched at Messrs. John Brown and Co.’s Clydebank establishment in February last, is of special interest as she embodies the introduction of yet another method of propulsion. When it became known that an experiment was to be made there was some speculation as to whether the gas system was to be tried, as the experiments in the gunboat Rattler are understood to have been successful, and it is well known that more than one engineering firm has been giving attention to the subject. The Rattler experiments did not prove that the requisite power could be developed by the method, and the Bristol experiment is an installation of the “Brown-Curtis” turbine, this vessel being the first of recent years for the British Navy in which Parsons turbines have not been placed. She is of 4850 tons displacement and is to have a speed of 25 knots. Four sister ships, also building, are fitted with Parsons turbines. The Bristol will have twelve Yarrow water-tube boilers, and the furnaces will use either coal or oil. Two other British warships, one an improved Bristol, are to be fitted with Curtis turbines, besides vessels for other Powers, and another experiment which will be watched with considerable interest is the combination of Parsons and Curtis turbines proposed to be placed in the 32-knot destroyers under construction for the Argentine Government by Cammell, Laird and Co.

Foreign Governments, the French especially, have made many experiments in warship building and designing, for the attempts to develop fixed types have failed in this country as elsewhere, as the type has been generally superseded almost before the specimen vessel has been completed. This was particularly the case with the turrets when first introduced. The barbette system has descended from it, and in turn has been subjected to numerous changes. The amount of sail carried by modern gunboats and cruisers, if any, is reduced to the smallest quantity, the masts being little else than signalling poles; while in the big battleships and cruisers the masts, which were at one time of the “military” pattern and were used as hoists for ammunition, being made hollow and of large diameter for the purpose, have in their turn given way to skeleton masts and tripods, and combinations of the two, of a strictly utilitarian character. The bringing down of a mast, fitted for wireless telegraphy, at the first round in some firing practice recently, showed that naval architects have not yet reached the last word in the development, or diminution, of the masts.

Some exceedingly powerful battleships have been built in this country for foreign nations, among the latest being the Minas Geraes, by Armstrongs on the Tyne, for Brazil, which represents all that is most modern in the construction of a warship, this vessel and her sister being two of the most powerful battleships ever designed. They show, too, what private yards can accomplish.

Many of the vessels which defeated the Russians at the battle of Tsushima were built in this country. Both Germany and Japan, which were among Britain’s best customers for warships, now depend, entirely in the case of Germany and almost entirely in that of Japan, upon their own shipbuilding yards. The Germans have been building warships of the “Dreadnought” class and making such improvements as they thought suited to their needs, and of late years have been producing a number of vessels equal in power and speed to the British ships, and, if some people are right, of even greater fighting capacity in every way. The rise of Germany to the position of a first-rate Naval Power has been rapid, and the sacrifices the country has made to obtain its magnificent Navy have been great.

The American Navy has developed in its own way. The naval architects of the United States have been unfettered by the traditions of the navies of other countries and their products have been remarkable for the number of vessels designed to meet special circumstances. This was particularly the case during the Civil War, when all sorts of steamers, from excursion boats to tugs, were pressed into service, and many gave an exceedingly good account of themselves. A remarkable vessel which was expected to revolutionise naval warfare was the Destroyer, in which a special make of dynamite gun was fixed, but it was hopelessly outranged by other guns. The opposition to steam in the Navy was as bitter in America as in this country when the innovation was first proposed. James Kirke Paulding, a member of Van Buren’s Cabinet in 1837, disliked steamers so much that he wrote that he would “never consent to see our grand old ships supplanted by these new and ugly sea-monsters”; and elsewhere he wrote “I am steamed to death.”

In 1858 the American naval architect, John Willis Griffiths, built to the order of the American Government the gunboat Pawnee, which was fitted with twin screws and a drop bilge to increase the stability at the least expenditure of engine-power. The Pawnee carried a frigate’s battery, but it is stated to have drawn only ten feet of water. He also, in 1866, designed and constructed triple screws for great speed.

The United States decided upon a very powerful Navy a few years ago, and sent a splendid fleet on a tour round the world as an object-lesson. As it is contended that the life of a battleship as a fighting unit of the first class is only fifteen years, an extensive modernising process has been going on. The sister ships Kentucky and Kearsarge were constructed with superimposed turrets, two fore and two aft, the lower turrets having two 13-inch guns and the upper turrets two 8-inch guns each, but this method of placing the turrets has not commended itself to naval architects of other countries, and has not been repeated in the American Navy.

The warships Wilmington, Kearsarge, Missouri, Arkansas, West Virginia, Charleston, Virginia, North Carolina, and Delaware are among those built by the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, and several have been constructed by Messrs. Cramp at Philadelphia and by the Union Iron Works at San Francisco.

The battleship of the future, in the opinion of one eminent shipbuilder at least, will be very different from existing types. Messrs. Vickers, Sons, and Maxim, who are no mean authorities on warship construction, were stated recently to have been engaged in elaborating plans for a mastless vessel, propelled by a system of gas machinery, without funnels or other deck obstructions, of a greater speed than any warship afloat, and able to fire ten 12-inch guns on either broadside and six of them either right ahead or astern, without counting a number of smaller guns. Such a vessel would be propelled by four screws.