Warships and Their Story
9781465686244
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
When or where the first warship was built is unknown, so also is the campaign in which it was employed. A war with naval usages of any sort cannot have been fought until the aggressor had some means of transporting the spoil across the water. From the raft to the fire-hollowed canoe was but a step, and having accomplished so much, the ingenuity of the naval architects of the period found scope in making improvements, gropingly, slowly, but none the less surely. The development of ships used for warlike purposes, as well as of ships designed as implements for fighting, forms a most attractive branch of study in its relation to the evolution of empires, no less than that of civilisation. Nor is the interest any the less if the attention be confined simply to the consideration of the development of the ships as ships of war. In this book I am endeavouring to describe, clearly and briefly, the main features of the progress in warship building among the different peoples of the world, from the earliest recorded times onward. The greater attention is paid to modern warships, and the story of their development is narrated with an avoidance of abstruse technicalities, so that any reader of average intelligence and education may be able to obtain a clear understanding of the steps by which that wonderful creation, the modern navy, and especially the British Navy, has come into being. Whether my readers belong to the bluest of the “blue water” school; whether they advocate two British keels to one possessed by any possible combination of foreign powers as the irreducible minimum below which the British fleet shall not go; whether they take a more moderate view, founded, as they believe, on the power of the nation to pay for its fleet, and the ability of other nations to pay for their fleets, in which case the ability of some other nations to borrow money to have their best vessels built in British yards must not be lost sight of; or whether my readers belong to the other extreme and believe that any and every British fleet is too powerful and that the time is coming when the Imperial cheek shall be turned to the envious smiter: whatever be their political and social faiths, the fact remains that the fleet in being is the sole guarantee of this nation’s safety, and that the payments for the several warships and the personnel of the Navy are but so many premiums for insuring the defence of the country and the maintenance of the inviolate integrity of these islands. Whether the money has always been spent to the best advantage is a point upon which experts differ, and is outside my intention to consider. But I hope to show something of the types of vessels provided, and, incidentally, to indicate how engineering skill and profound science have been devoted to the evolution of the modern ship of war.
