Find the CAPTAIN

[Johnnie Lyle]

Drach has a great video about the CAPTAIN out today: https://youtu.be/KuRkPJ8yj-8

They’re financing to go look at what might be the wreck hopefully this summer.

[OSCSSW]

Drach has a great video about the CAPTAIN out today: https://youtu.be/KuRkPJ8yj-8

They’re financing to go look at what might be the wreck hopefully this summer.

Johnny The CrackW0re press is nothing new and certainly not limited to the USA.


THE LOSS OF THE CAPTAIN.
SHORT version: "for the Captain was faulty because she had that feature of low freeboard in combination with a great spread of canvas, against which he and others had vainly protested during the past ten years. We can have another turret-ship constructed that shall be perfectly safe, as the Monarch shows; but the Captain was lost because she was the Captain, possessing the dangerous combination just mentioned. But if we valued the lives of the people, or the property of the country, or our national security, we should learn the lesson from the loss of the Captain, that it did not matter whether a man was a Minister, an admiral, or a captain, he must not indulge in idle dreams and delusions upon scientific questions, but must bring his proud head down to the altar of science and pay proper homage there."


FULL Version, IMO well worth your time to read.
The following is a full report of the remarks already briefly noticed by us as made by Mr. E.J. Reed, C.B., late Chief Constructor of the Navy, at the British Association, on Tuesday last, on the loss of the Captain.

"Mr. Reed explained that he had been invited by the committee to make some remarks upon this question. No one could possibly undertake out of mere choice to discuss such a question as the loss of the Captain. His own inclination would lead him to defer any explanation he might have to make to a future time, and to leave even the discussion upon the scientific principles involved in the question also to a future occasion. The only inducement, therefore, for him to make any remark was that all through the Press of this country there existed a manifest tendency to account for the loss of that ship by the accidents of the moment rather than by any inherent weaknesses of its structure; and if any mistake was made upon that point there could be but one consequence — the sacrifice of other valuable lives in the future, and the greatest possible disasters to ourselves. It was only because he knew that men highly placed in authority had the greatest possible faith in the most dangerous vessels which could be designed that he felt bound to express his conviction that the loss of the Captain resulted from a preventable cause; and he for one hoped that no other such loss from a similar cause would ever happen in our navy. He would like to say what was fairly but not fully known — namely, that the very existence of the Captain arose out of the refusal of the advocates generally of the turret system to accept a high side in combination with turrets in a seagoing ship. Indeed, that was the old feud which had been before the country for ten years past. The pressure of the public Press, and to some extent of Parliament, had been urged in favour of the other view, and when the time came for the designing of a seagoing turret-ship the determination of the height of her sides became a most serious and much-disputed question. He believed he was right in saying that every sea Lord of the Admiralty perfectly concurred with himself in the belief that a side of 12ft. or 14ft. in height for a frigate of large size was absolutely essential to her seaworthiness. That was not a prejudice, but a conviction, and from that conviction they were prohibited by their official duty from departing. The consequence was that when the Monarch was designed they gave her a height of side of 14ft Unhappily that ship was not accepted by the proposers of the system of low freeboards. Captain Coles, to whose skill and zeal and unfaltering determination he wished to bear public testimony, differed from him in opinion upon this point, and considered that the sides were unnecessarily high, and that a ship with much lower sides would answer the purpose better. The result was that there being a difference of opinion, the ship was ordered under other responsibility and upon other plans than those which he had recommended as to the height of the sides; and he thought it was only fair it should be known that the ship which had been lost was the one ship in the ironclad navy of this country which had been built unfettered and uncontrolled by the advisers of the Admiralty. After the Captain was ordered other efforts were made to force upon the Government a system of converting the line-of-battle ships into rigged monitors with low sides; and he then saw that by unwisely yielding to irresponsible pressure the Government was sliding into a system of construction full of peril to our navy and to our men. Therefore he took upon himself the unenviable task of going down to the Institution of Naval Architects and reading a paper in which he set forth the extreme perils of such vessels. This paper he republished in a book on Our Ironclad Ships, which had been before the public for two years, and from which the following extracts were taken:—

"'In an appendix at the end of this volume I have considered theoretically the question of "the stability of monitors under canvas," and have pointed out some of the dangers to which such vessels are liable. I need only say here, therefore, that the chief of these dangers consists in the risk of overturning or upsetting, which results from the fact that in a monitor a moderate inclination puts a portion of the lee side of the deck under water, and that the stability Is thus diminished, especially in other than breastwork monitors. This is at its greatest when the ship is at sea, when the actual amount of heel is often virtually increased by the slope of the wave surface. That this is no phantom danger will, I think, be seen by all my readers from the preceding brief statement, but the reality of the danger will, perhaps, be best understood by naval officers and naval architects.' At pages 308 and 309 he said, 'The first condition to be fulfilled to enable a ship of this class to carry sail will evidently be that the moment of sails at any time shall not be greater than the maximum statical stability of the ship. Now, suppose this condition fulfilled, and the ship heeled over, under the influence of the wind, to some finite angle less than that of greatest stability, it will he seen that, if by any disturbing cause, such as the alteration of the wave slope, the ship were inclined beyond her position of maximum stability, the resistance to heeling would become less the farther she went, until she reached a position at which her moment of stability would be the same as before the disturbing force began to act. And in this position she would remain in unstable equilibrium if the disturbing forces were removed. But if she should pass this position before the disturbing forces, and the angular velocity caused by them cease, the ordinary moment of the sails will then be greater than the resistance offered by the stability in any position through which she will pass, and she will be turned over. General considerations led us of course, to foresee that the above critical state would be likely to occur in low-decked turret-ships, with great weights concentrated upon and above their decks.' At page 313 he said, 'It must be obvious from this that the danger to be apprehended to these monitors, when under canvas, is very great. And when we think that they are liable at any moment to be overtaken by sudden gusts of wind, and that, if they are heeled over beyond 8 deg. or 9 deg., the farther they go the less resistance they offer to being capsized, their unfitness to carry sail must be quite evident.'"

"He then proceeded to illustrate by extemporized diagrams those principles in naval architecture which could only be departed from with disastrous results. The chief danger in monitors, he said, consisted in their liability to overturning, because of the great weights concentrated upon and above their decks, and of the absence of sides to give buoyancy on the lee side of the hull; and the danger to this class of ships when under canvas must be obvious, because of their tendency to heel over in sudden gusts. 'Grief should be the instructor of the wise,' he said, 'and from this calamity we should not fail to learn the plain lesson which it indicated. As a ship was forced by the wind into an inclined position the centre of buoyancy was necessarily moved over towards the side of immersion, and the ability of the ship to right herself was due to that cause. But supposing that instead of a ship with ordinary sides the sides were cut away, the deck would enter the sea sooner than before, and after the sea had encroached a short distance upon the deck the stability of the ship had attained its maximum, and began to decrease as the inclination went on, say to an angle of 40 degrees, when, there being no power of restoration, the ship must go over. Up to a certain point the stability of the Captain and the Monarch might very well be about equal, and persons even of great experience, judging of their sailing capacities up to this given point, might very properly report of them as equally good; and it was in this manner that captains and admirals, judging of their respective sailing qualities up to the point only to which they had seen them tested, made their reports in favour of the low freeboard ship as being as good in point of sailing as that of the high freeboard. But it was when the low freeboard ship got beyond a certain point in heeling that the danger of the principle began to operate. The Monarch, with her lofty sides, had a very large measure of reserve stability; but what measure of reserve stability had the Captain in comparison with her when they both reached the same relative point of inclination under a strong wind? Take the case of a gust which would heel over the Monarch to 30 deg., she would necessarily heel over to say 35 deg. by the impetus, and the reserve stability would restore her to 30 deg. The Captain, lacking that measure of reserve stability, and having the sea encroached on her deck, would not have the same capacity to restore herself. What must be the consequence? In the case of a ship circumstanced as the Captain was it not obvious that a squall which would heel over the Monarch to 30 deg., even presuming their measure of stability to be the same in the early stages of the inclination, would affect the Captain to a still greater extent, and not having the buoyancy to withstand the squall, she could do nothing but capsize. Of course the two vessels were of different sizes and of different conditions of construction, but he maintained that these facts were a sufficient explanation for the Captain, or any other similar vessel, capsizing; and if by any adverse or fatal influence the Government of this country should yield to public pressure, and should have their eyes blinded by the present attempts to impute the loss of the Captain to minor causes, the only consequence would be further fatal losses. This capsizing tendency could not properly be said to arise from too low position of the centre of gravity. Many persons were persuading themselves that if the centre of gravity in the case of the Captain had been a little lower that ship would not have capsized. It was perfectly true that if the centre of gravity had been so low as to give that ship the same leverage at large inclinations as the Monarch she would not have capsized; but the very principle of that class of ships was that they should carry great weights aloft, and it was perfectly idle to dream of introducing into ships of that kind a position for the centre of gravity which should counteract the tendency to heel over consequent upon the great weights carried aloft. If there had been two ships exactly alike, with the centres of gravity exactly in the same position, and if the one had had high sides and the other low sides, the one with low sides would have been lost and the other not, under the same conditions of weather. Although he had ceased to be responsible in any degree for the vessels in Her Majesty's Navy, he had not ceased to feel that measure of interest in it which one having occupied a responsible position ought to feel. Mr. Childers was unhappily a great believer in ships constructed on the same principle as the Captain, and it was in the public interest that he now stated that he had been more than once in very severe collision with Mr. Childers, because of his anxiety to induce the speaker to build ships of that class, and to put into responsible positions persons who were ignorant of the essential principles of naval architecture. What he said was that the true lesson from this loss ought to be learnt; hut he was afraid it would not be learnt. One of Her Majesty's Ministers, Mr. Robert LoweExternal link, speaking at Elgin, had referred to the loss of the Captain, and had drawn inferences from it which he must characterize as being of a fatal character for one in his position to draw from this calamity. Mr. Lowe seemed to look upon the catastrophe as the price to be paid for some great improvement which would hereafter take its place in science and confer great benefits on the country; and he had referred to Mr. HuskissonExternal link's death as a similar sacrifice in the case of railways. But these lives had not been sacrificed in the Captain to any improvement which should hereafter take its place in our navy; nor was it, as Mr. Lowe had implied by his quotation from Childe HaroldExternal link, that the ship had been sacrificed to the uncontrollable powers of the elements. That would have been a proper inference to draw if the whole of the ironclad squadron had been driven on to the coast of Spain or Portugal by an irresistible gale. But this was the case of one ship, out of a fleet of a dozen, going down in a not very extreme gale, and one of the lessons to be learnt from it was, not that it was useless to contend with the powers of the ocean, but that it was most necessary to take every reasonable precaution which experience and science dictated. And to show that he was not drawing too large inferences from the Chancellor of the Exchequer's speech, he would mention that Mr. Lowe had stated as a matter for congratulation that a Captain without the faults of that unhappy vessel could be reconstructed. Now, he would maintain that it was simply impossible to construct another Captain without the faults of that unhappy vessel, for the Captain was faulty because she had that feature of low freeboard in combination with a great spread of canvas, against which he and others had vainly protested during the past ten years. We can have another turret-ship constructed that shall be perfectly safe, as the Monarch shows; but the Captain was lost because she was the Captain, possessing the dangerous combination just mentioned. But if we valued the lives of the people, or the property of the country, or our national security, we should learn the lesson from the loss of the Captain, that it did not matter whether a man was a Minister, an admiral, or a captain, he must not indulge in idle dreams and delusions upon scientific questions, but must bring his proud head down to the altar of science and pay proper homage there."

[Johnnie Lyle]

Yeah. I just ordered Turret vs Broadside, which covers CAPTAIN in greater detail, and it’s a crazy story.

The interesting bit is not just MONARCH (which is a beautiful turret ship), but Laird had experience with turret ships previously, and they still screwed up the design and construction.

It would be very interesting to see what kind of performance SCORPION and WYVERN had in a storm.

[Allen Hazen]

OSCSSW--
Thanks for giving us some Victorian prose to practice reading (grin!). (I tend to find English written between the early 1800s and, say, 1910, more difficult to understand than either more recent or slightly older prose. But this passage was certainly worth the effort to decode!)
The problem with turret ships with low freeboard is fairly obvious, and the geometry explaining it is very clear. It's sort of an extreme version of the problem with excessive tumblehome that's been discussed (most notably by Stuart) here in connection with the Zumwalt class "destroyer." A monitor with a flat deck close to the waterline is in effect a ship with 90 degree tumblehome!
Question. The original USS Monitor didn't have sails, but it did have very low freeboard, and it was famously lost in a storm. Do you know it it capsized, or was simply swamped?

[Belushi TD]

WIki says capsized and sunk.

Take that for what its worth.

Belushi TD

[Johnnie Lyle]

OSCSSW--
Thanks for giving us some Victorian prose to practice reading (grin!). (I tend to find English written between the early 1800s and, say, 1910, more difficult to understand than either more recent or slightly older prose. But this passage was certainly worth the effort to decode!)
The problem with turret ships with low freeboard is fairly obvious, and the geometry explaining it is very clear. It's sort of an extreme version of the problem with excessive tumblehome that's been discussed (most notably by Stuart) here in connection with the Zumwalt class "destroyer." A monitor with a flat deck close to the waterline is in effect a ship with 90 degree tumblehome!
Question. The original USS Monitor didn't have sails, but it did have very low freeboard, and it was famously lost in a storm. Do you know it it capsized, or was simply swamped?

Progressive flooding doomed MONITOR. She was taking on considerable water in that storm, which overwhelmed her pumps. She didn’t capsize the way CAPTAIN did because she didn’t have CAPTAIN’s large top hamper.

[Allen Hazen]

Thanks for replies!

[David Newton]

Progressive flooding? I didn't know that Californians coming somewhere in large numbers were involved!

[Johnnie Lyle]

Thanks for replies!

There’s an interesting notation in the Wikipedia entry for WEEHAWKEN (take for what it’s worth) that changes to the hull form for the PASSIAC-class, reducing the raft overhang and a more traditional keel, improved their sea boat performance. On the flip side, there’s notations by John Rodgers (CO WEEHAWKEN and then DICTATOR) and John Worden (CO MONITOR and MONTAUK) to the Navy’s 1864 report to Congress seriously criticizing their performance in a storm:

In relation to the qualities of the vessels, we would remark that they have been exaggerated into vessels capable of keeping the seas and making long voyages alone. Some of us have been in heavy gales in them, and, indeed, from the amount of water in them, have had grave apprehensions of their loss.

RADM Daniel Ammen (CO PATAPSCO at Fort Sumter) noted in his chapter on monitors in his history of the Navy in the Civil War that

It is apparent to the reader that it would require only a, foot or so of water in the hold to sink this vessel, and this danger was augmented by the insufficient water-way, which was the trough within the keel, having a chord of 16 inches, and a depth of 31 inches, in the form of a lunette. When the vessel was nearly on an even keel this was a very insuffi­cient conduit from the fore body of the vessel to the power­ful centrifugal pumps placed in the after body, as we shall presently see in the sinking of the Weehawken.

In a heavy sea the monitors were surprisingly easy in their movements. This was obtained at the cost of great strain on the fastenings of the "overhang." When the engines were stopped the vessel, quite unlike ordinary ones, would sheer one way or the other, and no amount of watching could pre­vent this.

It makes you wonder if it’s not just being swamped, but leaks forward where the raft overhang the hull, that doomed MONITOR

Progressive flooding? I didn't know that Californians coming somewhere in large numbers were involved!

Amusingly, WEEHAWKEN was lost in a gale off Charleston to “regressive flooding.” She had just taken on a lot of ammunition that was stored forwards, putting her out of trim. As a result, when she took on water forward through (IIRC, a poorly secured hatch), it couldn’t flow aft to the pumps (a design failure described above by Ammen), and she foundered.