Typical warships of the most improved design just prior to the Crimean War were not greatly dissimilar from the line-of-battle ships and frigates of the War of 1812 except that they used steam as well as sails. They were larger, it is true. Such a ship was the British _Duke of Wellington_. She was 240 feet long, 60 feet wide, and displaced 5,830 tons. Her engines were of 2,000 horse power, and her speed under power was a trifle less than ten knots (nautical miles per hour). She carried 131 guns on four decks. This arrangement of guns was similar to that formerly used on line-of-battle ships, which sometimes carried guns on the upper deck as well as on the three gun-decks below. She was, then, one of the line-of-battle ships of her day, although this term was changed about this time to “ships-of-the-line.” Other somewhat smaller ships, propelled by steam and sails and with guns placed similarly to those of the earlier frigates, had come to be called “steam frigates,” or sometimes still were called frigates. The _Hartford_, Admiral Farragut’s flagship at the Battle of Mobile Bay in the American Civil War, was of this type. [Illustration: A MODERN DESTROYER _This type of ship was originally designed to protect the larger ships from torpedo boats, but now that duty has been eliminated by the elimination of torpedo boats, and destroyers have many uses with the fleets to which they belong._ ] At about this time, too, explosive shells were introduced, and as these were far more formidable than the solid shot of earlier times, naval men set about protecting ships in order to reduce the effectiveness of this new form of attack. Iron had been introduced a few years earlier as a ship-building material, and so iron, naturally enough, was used as armour on some of the ships sent to Crimea, for wooden ships of the line had been badly battered by the guns of the Russians when a combined naval force of British and French ships had attacked a fort near Sebastopol. Both the British and the French instantly began to build armoured ships for use in the Crimean War. The British ships were not completed in time, but three of the French ships went very successfully through an engagement with a Russian fort in 1855. These ships were, of course, awkward, heavy, and slow, but they did prove the value of armour, and so both the French and the British went to work placing armour on wooden ships and building ships of new design. In 1859 an iron frigate called the _Warrior_, a ship 380 feet long, displacing 8,800 tons, was begun by the British. A wide strip of armour 4½ inches thick was placed on each side. This armour strip was 213 feet long and was wide enough to extend from a little below the water line to the upper deck. Both bow and stern were unprotected. This ship was, in appearance, merely an enlargement of the wooden steam frigates that had preceded her, but she made the surprising speed, under power, of 14 knots an hour.