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Updated: May 11, 2025
The design of these two ships, meant for speed, involves this lack of facility for recoaling. There is, therefore, in them a grave failure in that unity of conception which should dominate all designs. The movements, actual and projected, of the cruisers at this moment have purposely been dwelt upon at some length.
Their tonnage was fixed at 7,500, and their maximum speed at twenty-two knots. They were to be given coal capacity that would enable them to cruise for great distances without recoaling. This, it will be seen, is an important advantage to a navy so destitute of coaling-stations abroad as that of the United States.
The cruiser requirements offer a concrete illustration of the application of this thought. Rapidity of action is the primary object. In it is involved both coal endurance and facility for recoaling; for each economizes time, as speed does.
When to the need of constant and sustained ability to move at high speed is added the necessity of frequent recoaling, allowing the hostile navy time to come up, it is evident that the active use of a "fleet in being," however perplexing to the enemy, must be both anxious and precarious to its own commander.
Piling a portion of it on the fire, the blaze soon lighted up the camp, throwing shafts of light far into the recesses of the woods around us. "In another hour," said Uncle Lance, recoaling the oven lids, "that smaller pie will be all ready to serve, but we'll keep the big one for breakfast.
The length of its passage across the Atlantic, however increased by the embarrassment of frequently recoaling the torpedo destroyers, so far over-passed the extreme calculations of our naval authorities, that ready credence was given to an apparently authentic report that it had returned to Spain; the more so that such concentration was strategically correct, and it was incorrect to adventure an important detachment so far from home, without the reinforcement it might have received in Cadiz.
The recoaling of ships is a difficulty which must be met by improving the methods of that operation, not by sacrificing the military considerations which should control the size and other qualities of the vessel. It is the belief of the writer that ten thousand tons represent very nearly the minimum, and twelve thousand the maximum, of size for the battleship.
This was especially the case at the moment when the army was being convoyed from Tampa, as well as immediately before, and for some days after that occasion: before, because it was necessary then to detach from the blockade and to assemble elsewhere the numerous small vessels needed to check the possible harmful activity of the Spanish gunboats along the northern coast, and afterwards, because the preliminary operations about Santiago, concurring with dark nights favorable to Cervera's escape, made it expedient to retain there many of the lighter cruisers, which, moreover, needed recoaling, a slow business when so many ships were involved.
The second requisite to be fulfilled in the battleship is known technically as coal endurance, ability to steam a certain distance without recoaling, allowing in the calculation a reasonable margin of safety, as in all designs.
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