played a very conspicuous part, more
so certainly than in the war of 1653, though at both periods they
formed an appendage to the fleet. There is on the surface an evident
resemblance between the role of the fire-ship and the part assigned in
modern warfare to the torpedo-cruiser. The terrible character of the
attack, the comparative smallness of the vessel making it, and the
large demands upon the nerve of the assailant, are the chief points of
resemblance; the great points of difference are the comparative
certainty with which the modern vessel can be handled, which is
partly met by the same advantage in the iron-clad over the old
ship-of-the-line, and the instantaneousness of the injury by torpedo,
whose attack fails or succeeds at once, whereas that of the fire-ship
required time for effecting the object, which in both cases is total
destruction of the hostile ship, instead of crippling or otherwise
reducing it. An appreciation of the character of fire-ships, of the
circumstances under which they attained their greatest usefulness, and
of the causes which led to their disappearance, may perhaps help in
the decision to which nations must come as to whether the
torpedo-cruiser, pure and simple, is a type of weapon destined to
survive in fleets.

A French officer, who has been examining the records of the French
navy, states that the fire-ship first appears, incorporated as an arm
of the fleet, in 1636.

"Whether specially built for the purpose, or whether altered
from other purposes to be fitted for their particular end, they
received a special equipment. The command was given to officers
not noble, with the grade of captain of fire-ship. Five
subordinate officers and twenty-five seamen made up the crew.
Easily known by grappling-irons which were always fitted to
their yards, the fire-ship saw its role growing less in the
early years of the eighteenth century. It was finally to
disappear from the fleets _whose speed it delayed and whose
evolutions were by it complicated_. As the ships-of-war grew
larger, their action in concert with fire-ships became daily
more difficult. On the other hand, there had already been
abandoned the idea of combining them with the fighting-ships to
form a few _groups_, _each_ provided with all the means of
attack and defence. The formation of the close-hauled
line-of-battle, by assigning the fire-ships a place in a second