fficial conservatist obstruction.
For years the veteran officers who advised the Admiralty opposed and
ridiculed the invention. When at last it was fitted to a gunboat, the
"Rattler," it was obvious that it provided the best means of applying steam
propulsion to the purposes of naval war. The propeller was safe under
water, and the engines could be placed low down in the ship.

By 1854, when the Crimean War began, both the British and French navies
possessed a number of steam-propelled line-of-battle ships, frigates, and
gunboats, fitted with the screw. They had also some old paddle-ships. But
in the fleets dispatched to the Baltic and the Black Sea there were still a
considerable number of sailing-ships, and a fleet still did most of its
work under sail. Even the steamships had only what we should now describe
as auxiliary engines. The most powerful line-of-battle ships in the British
navy had engines of only 400 to 600 horsepower.[17] With such relatively
small power they still had to depend chiefly on their sails. Tug-boats were
attached to the fleets to tow the sailing-ships, when the steamships were
using their engines.

[17] Compare this with 23,000 horse-power of the "Dreadnought's"
turbine engines.

Another change was taking place in the armament of warships and coast
defences. The rifled cannon was still in the experimental stage, but
explosive shells, which in Nelson's days were only fired from mortars at
very short range, had now been adapted to guns mounted on the broadside
and the coast battery. Solid shot were still largely used, but the coming
of the shell meant that there would be terrible loss in action in the
crowded gun-decks, and inventors were already proposing that ships should
be armoured to keep these destructive missiles from penetrating their
sides.

The attack on the sea front of Sebastopol by the allied fleets on 17
October, 1854, was the event that brought home to the minds of even the
most conservative the necessity of a great change in warship construction.
It rang the knell of the old wooden walls, and led to the introduction of
armour-clad navies.

The idea of protecting ships from the fire of artillery and musketry by
iron plating was an old one, and the wonder is that it did not much earlier
receive practical application. The Dutch claim to have been the pioneers of
ironclad building more than three hundred years ago. During the famous
siege of Antwerp by the Spaniards in