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The English navy has no armored cruisers as fast or as powerful as the "New York" and "Brooklyn;" and the commerce-destroyers, "Columbia" and "Minneapolis," are the fastest vessels, either of war or peace, that have gone to sea. That this new navy of ours will ever have to meet so stern an ordeal as that through which the sailors of '61 went is wholly improbable.
But the reason was that the French having little commerce and a comparatively large number of seamen, mainly employed in the fleet, were able, when this lay by, to release them to cruisers. As the pressure of the war became greater, and Louis continued to reduce the number of his ships in commission, another increase was given to the commerce-destroyers.
Would you kindly mind turnin' to the precise page indicated an' givin' me a resume of 'is tattics?" said Mr. Pyecroft, drinking deeply. "I'd like to know 'ow it looked from 'is side o' the deck." "How will this do?" I said. "'Once clear of the land, like Voltaire's Habakkuk " "One o' their new commerce-destroyers, I suppose," Mr. Pyecroft interjected.
The North destroyed southern commerce by capturing or blockading southern ports, while the South retaliated by fitting out a large number of commerce-destroyers, to range the seas and take what prizes they could a plan which had been adopted by America in both wars with England, and which is the only resource of a power whose navy is greatly inferior to that of its antagonist.
There was much idle talk, in Spain and elsewhere, about the injury that could be done to United States commerce by scattered cruisers, commerce-destroyers. It was overlooked that our commerce under our own flag is inconsiderable: there were very few American ships abroad to be captured.
"Coast defense" means defense against invasion; "colonial defense" means the safeguarding of distant possessions against enemy forces; the "defense of commerce" means such supremacy on the seas as will insure absolute safety of the mercantile marine from enemy commerce-destroyers. To-day every great nation is waging a trade war.
It need not be repeated that this demanded predominance at sea over both the enemy's fleets and single cruisers, "commerce-destroyers," as the latter are now styled.
The Iroquois and her sisters, built in the fifties, were vessels of the kind to which I have applied the term corvette, then very common in all navies; cruisers only; scouts, or commerce-destroyers. Not of the line of battle, although good fighting-ships.
We have heard much, from many sources, of the exploits of the Confederate commerce-destroyers, privateers, or, as the Union authorities and the historians of the war period loved to call them, the "Rebel pirates." In the course of this narrative we have already dealt with the career of the "Sumter," one of the earliest of these vessels.
As a result of this reawakening on the part of Congress to the necessity of a respectable navy, and the manifestations of enlightenment in the form of substantial appropriations, Secretary Whitney was able to state in his report of 1888 that upon the completion of the ships under construction, the United States would rank second among the nations in the possession of unarmored cruisers or commerce-destroyers possessing the highest characteristics namely, size of three thousand tons and upward and a speed of nineteen knots, and more.
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