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Updated: June 23, 2025
A low, black, mastless, raft-like, cruel-looking machine, without the faintest pretension to form or comeliness, a turret-ship is simply a fighting-engine, a floating battery an ingenious and formidable instrument of death and destruction, no doubt, but nothing more.
Such are the Hygieia at Old Point Comfort, with its Southern guests in summer and its Northern guests in winter; looking out from its carefully enclosed and glazed piazzas over the waste of Hampton Roads, where the "Merrimac" wrought devastation to the vessels of the Union until itself vanquished by the turret-ship "Monitor;" the enormous caravansaries of Saratoga, one of which alone accommodates two thousand visitors, or the population of a small town, while the three largest have together room for five thousand people; the hotel at the White Sulphur Springs of Virginia, for nearly a century the typical resort of the wealth and aristocracy of the South, and still furnishing the eligible stranger with a most attractive picture of Southern beauty, grace, warm-heartedness, and manners; the Stockbridge Inn in the Berkshire Hills, long a striking exception to the statement that no country inns of the best English type can be found in the United States, but unfortunately burned down a year or two ago; the Catskill Mountain House, situated on an escarpment rising so abruptly from the plain of the Hudson that the view from it has almost the same effect as if we were leaning out of the car of a balloon or over the battlements of a castle two thousand feet high; the colossal Auditorium of Chicago, with its banquet hall and kitchen on the tenth floor; and the Palace Hotel of San Francisco, with its twelve hundred beds and its covered and resonant central court.
It has been said that all the romance of the road died out with the old coaching days; and certainly a locomotive engine, with its long black train of practical-looking cars, makes hardly so picturesque a feature in the landscape as one of the old stage-coaches with its red-coated driver, horn-blowing guard, and team of mettled greys; but a railway train is an embodiment of poetry compared with a turret-ship.
The noblest form of turret-ship may prove useless because the strength of some material will not correspond to the ideal, or some curve of stability has been miscalculated.
The steam-ram is armed with a strong steel beak, with which it charges an enemy in much the same way as the war-galleys of ancient times charged a foe, or as a sword-fish attacks its adversary. The turret-ship carries one or more shot-proof circular turrets, in which one or more guns are worked by the crew, the guns being capable of being turned and pointed in any direction.
Admiral Horsey sent an officer on board the Huascar to demand her surrender. Pierola refused, and upon the return of the officer to the Shah, the battle at once commenced. The Huascar was built for the Peruvian Government by Messrs. Samuda, and was a turret-ship mounting two 300-pounder guns in her turret. She had also two 40-pound pivot-guns.
A large open boat follows, mounted on a car; it is filled with sailor-boys in blue and white. This boat is a model of the 'Cerberus, the turret-ship that Mr. Reed is building in England for the defence of Port Phillip. A genuine old salt, with long white hair, plays the part of admiral.
Here the captain took his stand in time of action, communicating with the engines, turrets, and other parts of the ship, by speaking tubes. In more recent ships the vessel is also steered from the conning-tower in time of action. Such was our first converted ironclad turret-ship.
Did you see much of the Hyla when you were out there?" "No such name on the list," answered the seaman, with decision. "There's the Hydra, a harbor defense turret-ship, but she never leaves the home waters." The Doctor laughed. "We live in two separate worlds," said he.
The American ironclad turret-ship Monitor has given her name to a whole class of vessels built within recent years for the English navy; but in many respects our vessels are superior to their American prototype. All these ships which are characterised by low free-boards and absence of masts and sails fight their guns from turrets.
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