In a Conning Tower

New Zealand Mail, Issue 889, 15 March 1889, Page 9

In a Conning Tower

HOW I TOOK H.M.S. MAJESTIC INTO ACTION. Have you ever stood within a Conning Tower ? No ; then you have not set foot in a spot where the spirit of man has borne the fiercest and direst stress to which the fell ingenuity of the modern world has learnt to subject it. You have not seen the plaoe where the individual wages a twofold contest with the power of the tempest and the violence of the enemy, where, controlling with a touch and guiding with his will the gigantic forces of Nature, he Btands alone in the presence of death, and asserts amid the awful crash of the mental and physical battle, the splendid majesty of the spirit of man. For indeed there is nothing grander, more consoling to humanity, than the power of man to hold his own unshaken and unshakable in the face of unknown and incalculable dangers, upborne by the high inspiration of personal courage, by devotion to duty, or by the power of faith. ‘Such a gift is vouchsafed to man ;’ but it is often bought at a great price, and often though life be spared to him who wins it, and though the human protagonist come out a victor in tho contest, he survives with the scars of the terrible conflict burnt in for ever upon his inmost soul. I have known a man, a giant in mind and body, emerge from the ordeal with hair blanched in an hour by the dread and strain of the conflict. Another I could tell you of, he who writes these linos, to whom the struggle between fear and duty, between terror and pride, brought the keenest suffer, ing and the hardest trial which a man can bear.

Yes, I use the words fear and terror. I who have fought not without honour and success for my sovereign and my country, who bear on my breast the cross for valour, and whose name is not unknown among my countrymen and my comrades. But let me come to the story I have to tell you. You have never set foot inside a conning tower. Let me -do the honours of my old ship, and let me ask you to go with me on board H.M.S. 4 Majestic,’ as she lies at anchor at Spithead. There she floats, a heavy mass upon the water, ugly enough no doubt to an artist’s eye, but with a certain combination of trimne3s and strength very grateful to a sailor, and especially to a sailor who knows every inch of her within and without, and whose duty it has been to make use of her terrible powers in war. It is but a little way from the gig alongside on to the deck, and ths ship in a bit of a sea is all awash where we stand. But we can take many a green sea on board the ‘Majestic’ without being any the worse, and it takes a good deal to upset tho equanimity of twelve thousand tons. Step through the door there. Stoop and raise your feet, for it is a strait gate. Now turn and look at the door you have passed. Talk of a banker's strong-room, what banker in the world has a door like that; twelve inches of iron and steel, with a fsoe that will turn all the 4 villainous centre-bits’ that ever were forged ? But the door must needs be strong, for the treasure it has to keep behind it is the honour of the flag, and those who knock will come with a rat tat equal to 50,000 tons on the square foot. Now climb again : here we have more space, and things look more like the old man-of-war of the story books. Six guns on a broadside and over a hundred men in tho battery. Ah, when I think of that gun-deck as I saw it once ! You mark the racer of this after guu ; come forward to No. 3 on the port side. All that is new work, a single shell ripped the battery side away for fifty feet from this point where you stand. Carriages, bulkheads, girders, beams, crumpled and torn like a tangle of bunch grass by an autumn gale. This is the spot to which I wish to lead you. This is the conning tower of H.M.S. ‘Majestic.’ A chamber scarce Bix foot across, encumbered as you see with a score of applinnoes which diminish the scanty space which it affords. Touch the wall in front of you, a formidable partition is it not ?

Twelve inches of solid steel and iroli, iStul carried down far into the framework of the ship. Note too above your head a solid roof of steel. This is the fighting position of the 4 Majestic.’ ‘ The fighting position,’ you will say, 4 but how can an action be conducted from a spot from which nd enemy is visible i’ Stand here and bring your eye to tho level of the armour-plating, and mark the narrow slit between the arched cupola above us, and the steel Walls of the chamber ; Sweep your eye round, and the whole horizon will come within your view. Look down, and in front of you is the sharp bow of the ship, aad the tWo long white muzzles of the guns protruding many feet from the forward turret. Now look inside at the fittings of the conning tower, and read the inscriptions on the brass tablets which surround it. Over that group of Bpeaklng-tubes on your right you see the words, 4 bow torpedo tube’ and ‘above water torpedo tube.’ On the left is the voice tube to the engine-room, That key completes the circuit which discharges the great guns. Here in the centre is the steam steeringwheel, binnacle and coinpas-. 4 All very trim and ship-shape,’ you will say, 4 aud an immense convenience to the commanding officer to have all the arrangements of the ship brought under his hand.’ Convenient, yes ! but let your imagination come to the aid of your observation. Hero lies the great ironclad, 4 a painted ship upon a painted ocean but see her as 1 have seen her ; think, if you can, of what is meant by the accumulation of forces within this little space, and try to realise, as clearly as any man who has Dot passed through the ordeal can realise, the strain upon the human mind which is placed in absolute control of thlß mighty engine in the day of battle, . Every Englishman who is worth his sa't knows something of the glorious naval annals of his country. The names of Rodney, Howe and Nelson are happily and rightly household words among us ; we honour and revere those splendid masters of their art. Courage, skill, and a magnificent patriotism were theirs. All that their country demanded of them they did. But compare for a moment the position of any one of those great officers in the action, and that which the fearful ingenuity of modern science has imposed on their successors. On the one hand we had the Admiral standing on his quarterdeck, his star upon his breast, the central figure of his crew, animating them by hi 3 presence, and inspiring the group of officers who stand around him with the spirit which his great example in previous victories had set them. By his side stands the Master ; it is his business to sail and navigate the ship. The first lieutenant, charged with the discipline of the crew and the fighting of the guns, will see that there is no slack&e3°, no want of skill in workiug the long tiers of the broadside carronades ; an easy task, for it does not require either his vigilance or the example of his subordinates to strengthen the fierce rivalry between each gun’s crew. Already the. order has been passed that it is the duty of each ship to lay itself alongside of the enemy and to remain there till she has struck. The Master will lay the ship alongside, and the grimy gunners will continue to discharge their pieces at point-blank iange until the wcoden wall of the opposing ship is battered into a shapeless mass of smoking timber, and until the joyful news comes from the deck that the enemy’s ensign has sunk from the peak in token of snOmission. That was in the olden time. What are the conditions of modern war ?

Here in .this spot is concentrated the whole power of the tremendous machine which we call an ironclad ship. Such power wa9 never till the world began concentrated under the direction of man, and all that power, the judgment to direct it, the will to apply it, the knowledge to utilize it, is placed in the hands of one man, and one only. What is this power ? Talk of Jove with his thunderbolts, of Nasmyth with his hammer ! the fables of mythology and the facts of latter-day science ! where has there ever been anything to compare to it ? Here in the conning tower stands the captain of the ship, and beneath his feet lie hidden powers which the mind can scarcely grasp, but which one and all are made subservient to his will, and his will alone. Picture him as he stands at his post before the battle begins ; all is quiet enough, there is scarcely a sound save the lapping of the water against the smooth white sides of the ironclad, and no outward sign of force save the ripple of the parted waters falling off on either side of the ram aB it sheerß through tho water. But mark that white thread escaping from the steampipe astern, a fleecy vapour rising into the air and nothing more ! But what does it mean ? It means that far down below some thirty glowing furnaces are roaring under tb.e blast of steam ; that in the great cylindrical boilers the water is bubbling, surging, struggling, as the fierce burning gas passes through the flues ; and that the prisoned steam, tearing and thrusting at the tough sides of the boilers, is already raising the valves and blowing off at a pressure of 100 pounds. It means that the captain in his conning tower has but fo press the button by his aide, and in a moment the four great engines will be driving the twin screws through the water with the force of 12,000 horse power, and that the great ship with the dead weight of 12,000 tons will be rushing onwards at a speed of over twenty miles an hour. In her turret and in her broadside batteries there is a deep hush of expectation ; but there too, waiting to respond to the ‘ flash of the will that can,’ lie forces of destruction which appal the imagination. Far down below our feet in the chambers of the great guns lie the dark masses of the powder charges. A touch, a spark, and in a sheet of flame and with the orash of thunder the steel shot will rush from their muzzles, speeding on their way 2000 feet in a second, and dealing their blow with the impact of 60,000 foottons —5000 pounds weight of metal discharged by one touch of the captain’s hand. Nor is this all ; another touch and another signal will liberate the little clips which detain the four Whitehead torpedoes in their tubes. A puff bf powder, a click, as the machinery is started and the two screws are eet off whirling, and with a straight

sij-nt plunge the long steel torpedoes will dlVo rntot'-e water, nod at their appointed depth will .-•■peed mi their way thirty miles an hour on their awful errand of destruction. Move that switch, and t hrongh the dark wall of the night a long etraigtit beam will shoot forth with the radiance of 40,000 candles, turning the night into day. • A Word spoken through that tube wiil let loose the hailstorm of steel and lead from the quick-tiring and machine guns on the upper deck and in ilie tops. A discharge of shot and shell, not to ho counted by tens or scores but by hundreds and thousands, a storm before which no living thing can stand, and under which all but the strongest defences will wither and melt away like a snow bank under an April shower. And last apd most terrible of all, there is one other force ready to the captain’s hand : a force, the sum of all the others, and which, if rightly utilized, is as irresistable as tho swelling of the ocean tide, or the hand of Death. By your side and under your hand are tho spokes of the steam steering-wheel ; far forward under tho swirling ware, which rises round the ship's cut-water, lies the ram, the most terrible, the most fatal of all the engines of maritime warfare. It is the task of the hand which turns that little wheel to guide and to direct the fearful impact of the ram. Think what the power confided to one man’s hand must be ; 12,000 tons of dead weight driven forward by the frantic energy of. 12,000 horse-power, plunging and surging along through the yielding waves, at a speed of tea feet in every second, and with a momentum so huge, that the mathematical expression which purports to represent it to the miud conveys uo idea to an intelligence ineapal)ie''6f appreciating a conception so vast. To receive a blow from the ram is death, the irretrievable citastrophe of a shipV career. To deliver such atblow is certain victory. It ia With the captain, and with the captain alone, as he stands herein the conning tower, that the responsibility of inflicting or enouuutering this awful fate lies.

Now yon will understand what I mean when I say that never since the world began have such forces been placed in the hands of a single man, whose eye alone must see the opportunity, whose judgment alone must- enable him to utilize it, and whose hand alone must give effect to all that his eourage, his wisdom, and h»3 duty prompt. Perhaps you will ask what business have I, a naval officer, to allow such notions as these to run through my braiu ; what business have I to talk about anxiety or responsibility ? The sailor’s duty is plain ; he has got to find the enemy, to fight him, and to beat him. If he is either fearful or anxious, he is a man out of place. But unfortunately naval officers are after all made of much the same stuff as other people ; and there are certain circumstances in which their minds, however carefully tutored and prepared, are as much open to the strain of terror and anxisty as those of their comrades upon shore. Habit, personal courage, and a sense of duty may enable them to overcome these enemies, but they feel their assaults. Do not b Leve a man when he tells you that he does not know what fear is on going into action ; above all, do not believe it Of the captain of a modern ironclad when about to engage with an enemy of equal strength.. True, lie has nothing to do but to carry out tho duties which years of practice have taught him how to perform ; but the heart never beat in a human frame whose pulsation was not quickened by the presence of danger, tdit at home and study the phenomena of electricity, codify the laws of the elements, and analyse the progress of the lightning with a Leyden jar and an electrometer, aud you will doubtless learn to contemplate the prospect of a thunderstorm with a puroly scientific interest. But stand alone in the night on tho mountain side, amid the roar and of a tropical storm, and you must be either more or less than human if your imagination and your spirit are uot moved and awed by the fierce play of Nature. And so it is with those who in the time of battle have to command a ship of war.

By a pieoe of good fortune which had not fallen to the lot of my colleagues, I had been two years in command of my ship when the late war came upon us. I knew her, as I have said, from stem to stern, from her armoured 4 top ’ to her iron keel, and by day and by night, in my waking hours, and in my dreams, I had been going through every conceivable form of engagement which my experience or my imagination could suggest as likely to fall to the lot of the ‘Majestic.’ But sleeping or waxing, by the light of experience or oy the light of fancy, I ever saw one supreme momeut when 1 should stand in this conning tower, aud should be called upon to take into my hand for good or for ill, for success or failure, the mighty power of the ship, aud to make inyself responsible for the honour of the flag, the safety of the ship, and the lives of the crew. And always one great fact remained prosent to my mind, that it was I, and I alone, who must do D.D tiling ; that on my judgment, on my skill, on my courage, must del peDd the issue of the day. I cannot de« scribe to you how deeply this feeling of responsibility weighed upon my spirit, and how earnestly I prayed that when the time of trial came I might be found worthy of the post I held. Well ! at last the time did come. Everybody knows how strangely things were dene at the outset of the war, and everybody remembers the merciful escapes from destruction, due not to forethought but to chance, which enabled the country to survive the blunders and the wanton carelessness of ths Administration, and to live through the first shock of the war. Luckily we all know too how after chance had given us this hanpy and undeserved respite, the successes of our seamen, backed by the energy of our constructors, enable! us to regain and to assert that mastery oi the sea which we had so nearly lost. It was in the earliest days of this happier period, when the need for organization and system had begun to dawn upon the official mind, but before much had been done to give effect to the newly-awakened conviction, that the ‘Majestic' was ordered to join the Mediterranean fleet. We steamed cut of Portsmouth Harbour

<alon«, It was a mad thing, and everybody iuZQVf it.

it was an axiom which every one of the entlemen at Whitehall had long ago committed himself to on paper, that no heavy ironclad should go to sea in time of war without an attendant squadron of cruisers, despatch vessels, and torpedo-boats. But tbeggers must not be choosers; there was airgont need for my ship in the Mediterranean, and all our cruisers, despatch vessels sand torpedo-boats had too much to do in performing the immediate duties, which the stress of the situation and the want of any reasonable organisation had forced upon them, to allow of their attending the • Majestic’ on her southward journey.. It is not easy to describe my feelings when our sailing orders arrived ; the mingled sensations which passed through my brain would be hard to analyse. At last the moment had come when the supreme ambition of my life was to be realized, and I was to command one of Her Majesty’s ships in actual war. At the same time the total want of any experience to guide me in the enterprise which it was now my duty to undertake, and the feeling of uncertainty as to the correctness of the theories which my studies in peaoe time had led me to form, weighed upon my spirit to a painful degree. I must admit, however, that as we passed the Warner Light, and I tolegraphed ‘full speed ahead,’ my feeling was one. of extraordinary exhilaration. It is not easy to describe the mental atmosphere which seemed to pervade the ship ; but one characteristic struck me as being of good omen ; and that was the feeling of cheerfulnoss and good fellowship which seemed to animate all ranks of the ship’s company. One odd incident I remember as peculiar to myself. I had fully determined before I left port that I would dismantle my cabin of all the pretty knick-knacks and ornaments of which I was so proud, and which made it so charming and comfortable a retreat. When, however, the actual momentcame for carrying my intention into effect, I felt an indescribable reluctance to give the necessary orders, and in the end I went to sea with floarcely a visible alteration having been elfeoted in the arrangements of my cabin. The contrast between the pretty and homelike surroundings in' which 1 studied once more my plan of action, and the terrible realities of the situation with which I might at any moment find myself face to face, dwells with a singular distinctness in my memory. Our object being to reach Gibraltar unmolested and in good fighting trim, we naturally gave the shore a wide offing. We had passed the Lizard Light some two hours when we came in contact with the first evidences that the ocean had become the Beene of a bloody and fatal conflict. It was at this point that wo fell in with H.M.S. * Shannon ’ slowly making her way homeward, and bearing plain marks of the strife in which she had been engaged. We exchanged signals with her, but she reported that she had not seen an enemy’s ship for forty-eight hours. It was not till long afterwards that we learnt the particulars of the engagement from which she had just emerged. How, overtaken by a protected cruiser, she had lost no less than eighty men in the vain attempt to work her broadside guns ; how, preserved from destruction by her armoured belt, she had maintained herself until, by a lucky discharge of the new 9-inoh B.L. gun, which tho Admiralty, in a fit of unwonted prescience, had placed in the bows, she had succeeded in exploding a heavy shell in a vital part of the enemy's ship. How.. safe from pursuit, but with her crew decimated and her armour in splinters, she had made her way back to Plymouth ; a testimony to the gallnntry of her crew'and to the error of her designers. It was two o’clock on the following day that the look-out sighted a strange vessel hull down on the port bow. It was not long before the diminished distance between the two •Vessels revealed to us the three funnels and the raking masts of one oi the enemy’s fast cruisers. A good glass enabled us to detect two torpedo'boats steaming along under her quarter. 1 knew at once what our friend was about, aud I longed for a swift companion whom I might despatch in Earßuit; but snoh good fortune was not to e. After makimg a careful inspection of üb, the stranger went about, and steaming at full speed was soon beyond the horizon. To follow her was impossible, nor would it have been consistent with my instructions had I possessed the three extra knots which would have put me on an equality with her ; but I was pretty sure, and the event proved that I was right, that she had not paid us her visit of inspection for nothiag. During the whole of the following night we were steering west-south-west, and onr object in keeping so far from the land had been fulfilled, for we had sighted nothing but a homeward-bound British steamer from Valparaiso, which had made a clear run at an average rate of sixteen knots, and had not been molested by any enemy. It was just after seven bells in the morning watch that the look-out man on the top signalled a vessel hull down on the port bow. It was a fairly bright morning, and the distance, as far as we could calculate, between ourselveß and the vessel in question was about twelve miles. Whoever the stranger might prove to be, there was little necessity for any extra precaution on board the ‘Majestic/ Throughout the night the water-tight doors had been closed; all movable bulkheads and unnecessary fittings had long ago been removed and stowed. Every man knew his station, and there was not the slightest occasion to hurry the men over their breakfast ; the only difficulty was to 1 keep them from their fighting stations, or from any point from which a view of the stranger could be obtained. In a very few minutes it became apparent that, whether friend or foe, the newcomer was heading directly for us. Our orders were not to seek an engagement ; in this case it was evident that we should scarcely have an opportunity of refusing one, provided that we held our oourse, and that it was an enemy’s ship that was in sight. We were not long in doubt upon this head. In less than ten minutes not only the form but the colours of the stranger' became

clearly apparent, and the colours were those which it was our duty at any cost to lower.* The ship itself was as familiar to me as the flag which she bore. In these days, when photography and an elaborate professional literature have recorded the form and peculiarity of every important ship-of-war afloat, it would have been strange had I not recog. nized tho formidable lines of the antagonist with which we were so soon to be in conflict. But my acquaintance with my adversary was a more intimate one than any which the study of books could have conferred. It was not three months since I had been on board of her. Nor was this all ; not only did I know the ship, but I knew who was in command of her. Many a time had I met Captain C when he represented his country as Naval in London. A more gallant officer, a more accomplished gentleman, never wore the uniform of the honourable service to which he belonged. (To be continued.)