THE HARBOR OF RIO JANEIRO, SHOWING THE FRIGATE _SAVANNAH_ STRUCK BY A SQUALL, JULY 5, 1856. (From a lithograph), 549 THE STERN AND PROPELLER OF THE _NIPSIC_ AFTER THE SAMOAN HURRICANE. (From a photograph), 551 THE HARBOR AFTER THE SAMOAN HURRICANE. (From a photograph), 553 [Illustration: A Thirty-two-pound Carronade from the _Constitution_.] THE HISTORY OF OUR NAVY CHAPTER I THE STATE OF THE NAVY IN 1859 A BRIEF STORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WARSHIP THAT WAS PROPELLED BY BOTH SAILS AND STEAM--THE REMARKABLE FLOATING BATTERY OF 1814--BARRON’S IDEA OF A RAM--THE STEVENS FLOATING BATTERY--ERICSSON’S SCREW PROPELLER--STOCKTON AND THE FIRST SCREW WARSHIP--EXPERIMENTS WITH GREAT GUNS--DISCOVERIES OF BOMFORD AND RODMAN--PRACTICAL WORK BY DAHLGREN--A COMPARISON OF YANKEE FRIGATES WITH A CLASS OF BRITISH SHIPS “AVOWEDLY BUILT TO COPE” WITH THEM--THE CONDITION OF THE _PERSONNEL_. From the point of view of a naval seaman it was a far cry from the first war in defence of the nation’s life to the last one--so far, indeed, that all the progress made in the construction of ships of war from the time when men first went afloat to fight, down to the war of the Revolution, had not equalled that made in the eighty odd years that elapsed between, say, the battle of Lake Champlain, which was the most important battle afloat in the Revolution, and that of Hampton Roads, which was first in the Civil War. Consider the forces that Arnold mustered against the whelming odds under the ambitious Carleton. Though two of the vessels were dignified with the name of schooner and one was called a sloop, the flagship of the squadron was a galley managed by means of oars, and the fleet as a whole, including the _Royal Savage_, was inferior to an equal number of the galleys with which the Romans, in the days of Carthage, held sway over the Mediterranean. And then consider the ships that in 1860 graced the register of the American navy--ships that with the aid of steam could hold their own against wind and tide, and that carried guns of so large a calibre that any but the largest from Arnold’s fleet might have been shoved down their throats after the trunnions were knocked off. Arnold in his flagship, the galley _Congress_, had eight guns of which the bore was about three and a half inches in diameter, and the shot weighed six pounds. But when the Civil War came, the _Minnesota_ was armed with forty-two guns of a nine-inch calibre and one of eleven inches, besides four rifles that threw elongated projectiles weighing 100 pounds and one rifle with a projectile weighing 150. Arnold’s _Congress_ could throw at a broadside twenty-four pounds of metal over an effective range of perhaps 300 yards; the _Minnesota_ could throw 1,861 pounds over an effective range of 1,600 yards.