“She is a structure resting upon two boats, keels separated from end to end by a canal fifteen feet wide and sixty-six feet long. One boat contains the caldrons of copper to prepare her steam. The vast cylinder of iron, with its piston, levers, and wheels, occupies a part of its fellow; the great water-wheel revolves in the space between them; the main or gun-deck supporting her armament is protected by a bulwark four feet ten inches thick, of solid timber. This is pierced by thirty portholes, to enable as many 32-pounders to fire red-hot balls; her upper or spar deck, upon which several thousand men might parade, is encompassed by a bulwark which affords safe quarters. She is rigged with two short masts, each of which supports a large lateen yard and sails. She has two bowsprits and jibs and four rudders, two at each extremity of the boat; so that she can be steered with either end foremost. Her machinery is calculated for the addition of an engine which will discharge an immense column of water, which it is intended to throw upon the decks and all through the ports of an enemy. If, in addition to all this, we suppose her to be furnished, according to Mr. Fulton’s intention, with 100-pounder columbiads, two suspended from each bow, so as to discharge a ball of that size into an enemy’s ship ten or twelve feet below the water-line, it must be allowed that she has the appearance at least of being the most formidable engine of warfare that human ingenuity has contrived.” [Illustration: A Thirty-two-pounder from the Captured _Macedonian_.] Formidable she certainly was, but no war came to demonstrate her powers, and she lay in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a receiving-ship until the 4th of June, 1829, when her magazine was fired, presumably by a drunken member of the crew, and she was blown to pieces. [Illustration: Old Cast-iron Thirty-two-pounder (Believed to be Spanish).] Robert L. Stevens, of Hoboken, in 1832, conceived the idea of an ironclad ship that was to be 250 feet long and twenty-eight wide--something lean and eager in pursuit and yet shot-proof. It was an idea that cost him and his family nearly $2,000,000 before he was done with it; but nothing came of it, save as it kept the restless inventors of the world thinking on the subject of swift, impregnable ships of war. Mr. Clinton Roosevelt, of New York, proposed to build a steamer that should be sharp at both ends, “plating them with polished iron armor, with high bulwarks, and a sharp roof plated in like manner, with the design of glancing the balls. The means of offense are a torpedo, made to lower on nearing an enemy, and driven by a mortar into the enemy’s side under water, where, by a fusee, it will explode.” The idea of polishing the armor to make it slippery seems amusing now; but the fact is that even as late as 1862 the armor of vessels in the Civil War was greased to make the projectiles glance off. Of course, the grease was of no use.