The Project Gutenberg EBook of Harper's Round Table, May 14, 1895, by Various

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Title: Harper's Round Table, May 14, 1895

Author: Various

Release Date: June 24, 2010 [EBook #32961]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HARPER'S ROUND TABLE, MAY 14, 1895 ***

Produced by Annie McGuire

[Illustration: HARPERS

ROUND TABLE]

Copyright, 1895, by HARPER & BROTHERS. All Rights Reserved.

* * * * *

PUBLISHED WEEKLY. NEW YORK, TUESDAY, MAY 14, 1895. FIVE CENTS A COPY.

VOL. XVI.--NO. 811. TWO DOLLARS A YEAR.

* * * * *

[Illustration]

HEROES OF AMERICA.

THE FIGHT AT HAMPTON ROADS.

BY THE HONORABLE THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

[Illustration: Decorative N]

aval battles of the civil war have an immense importance, because they
mark the line of cleavage between naval warfare under the old and naval
warfare under the new conditions. From the days of the defeat of the
Spanish Armada, for two centuries and a half, the fighting at sea was
carried on in ships of substantially the same character--wooden sailing
ships, carrying many guns mounted in broadside. Howard, Drake, Blake,
Tromp, De Ruyter, Nelson, and all the other great admirals, and all the
famous single-ship fighters--whose skill reached its highest expression
in our own navy during the war of 1812--commanded craft built and armed
in a substantially similar manner, and fought with the same weapons and
under much the same conditions.

But in the civil war weapons and methods were introduced which caused a
revolution greater even than that which divided the sailing ship from
the galley. The use of steam, the casing of ships in iron armor, and the
employment of the torpedo, the ram, and the gun of huge calibre,
produced such radically new types that the old ships of the line became
at one stroke as antiquated as the galleys of Hamilcar or Alcibiades.
All of these new engines of war were for the first time tried in actual
combat, and some of them were for the first time invented, during our
own civil war, and the first occasion on which any of the new methods
wer