NAVAL WARFARE OF THE FUTURE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 8986, 17 September 1892, Page 2 (Supplement)

NAVAL WARFARE OF THE FUTURE.

Tnis French ironclad Le Hoche has just given the world an object-lesson in the use of the ram. On the 7th July the French squadron at Marseilles was exercising, and the ironclad was crossing the roadstead at full speed, when it struck the mail-steamer Marechal Canrobert (1200 tons), then coming in from Italy, hitting her fair and full. The shock was tremendous, and the captain of the ironclad, foreseeing the consequences, ordered the steamer to be secured to his own vessel, and the passengers transferred. The fastening hawsers were then cut, twelve minutes after the collision, and the steamer instantly sank, the blow having cut her nearly in two. The ironclad remained uninjured. No weight of fire could have secured such rapidity or such completeness of destruction ; nor would any strength in the steamer have preserved her from the consequences of the shock. It is by ramming that the first battles of the future will be decided, with this consequence, among others, that the mortality in a sea-fight will exceed all precedent. In the old sea-fights a ship rarely lost a third of her crew, including killed and wounded ; bub the iron ship which goes down under tho blow of a modern man-of-war will drown everybody on board.