In America, also, the objections to steam war vessels were as acute as in this country. One United States secretary of the navy declared that he would never consent to see the beautiful sailing warships displaced by hideous and smoky steamers, but the advocates of the new method of ship propulsion were not of his opinion, and so worried the worthy man that in despair he wrote to a sympathetic friend, “I am steamed to death.” Another and earlier American administrator was so opposed to warships of any kind, or at least to spending much money on their construction, that he conceived the brilliant idea of having some small gunboats built which could be taken overland from port to port and launched afresh, when necessary, to oppose the British warships. It is a pity he could not have derived some inspiration from the invention of Oliver Evans, an American, who in 1804-5 designed a dredger which bore the terrible name of _Orakier Amphibolos_; it had a steam engine of some sort, and propelled itself on wheels from the shed where it was built, to the Schuylkill, a distance of a mile and a half, and being fitted with a paddle wheel in the stern, navigated the river to its junction with the Delaware.[27] France, like England, was disposed at first to look upon the steam engine as useless for naval purposes, and until well towards the middle of the nineteenth century she was a long way behind England in the application of steam power to the navy. Many of the smaller nations, however, having but a few insignificant sailing ships for war, were not trammelled, as were England and France, by the possession of a large fleet of wooden sailing vessels of types which had helped to build up the national renown, nor had they to contend against the energy of a powerful section of the community which, conscious of what had been accomplished with the sailing warships, despised anything else and hated innovations. The smaller nations were the better able, therefore, to experiment with warships of the new type than were the great maritime powers, and one or two of them ordered small steamers carrying a few small guns. These were mostly converted merchant steamers, it not being until after England and France had definitely adopted steamers that the other nations ventured to possess steamships specially built for purposes of war.