rsatile in capacity. Among the officers, however, there was an open
vision towards the future. I well remember "Joe" Smith enlarging to me
on the merits of Cowper Coles's projected turret ship, much talked
about in the British press in 1860; a full year or more before
Ericsson, under the exigency of existing war, obtained from us a
hearing for the _Monitor_. Coles's turrets, being then a novel
project, were likened, explanatorily, to a railway turn-table, a very
illustrative definition; and Smith was already convinced of the value
of the design, which was proved in Hampton Roads the day after he
himself fell gloriously on the deck of the _Congress_. There is a
double tragedy in his missing by this brief space the clear
demonstration of a system to which he so early gave his adherence; and
it is another tragedy, which most Americans except naval officers will
have forgotten, that Coles himself found his grave in the ship--the
_Captain_--ultimately built through his urgency upon this turret
principle. This happened in 1870. The tradition of masts and sails, as
economical, still surviving, she was equipped with them, which we from
the beginning had discarded in monitors. The _Captain_ was a large
vessel with low freeboard, her deck only six feet above water. Lying
to under sail in a moderate gale, in the Bay of Biscay, she heeled
over in a squall, bringing the lee side of the deck under water; and
the force of the wind increasing, without meeting the resistance
offered ordinarily by the pressure of the water against the lee side
of a ship, she went clean over and sank. The incident made the deeper
impression upon me because two months before I had visited her, when
she was lying at Spithead in company with another iron-clad, the
_Monarch_, which soon after was assigned by the British government to
bring George Peabody's remains to their final resting-place in
America. I then met and was courteously received by the captain of the
_Captain_, Burgoyne, of the same family as the general known to our
War of Independence. Coles had gone merely as a passenger, to observe
the practical working of his designs. I do not know how far the
masting was consonant to his wishes. It may have been forced upon him
as a concession, necessary to obtain his main end; but nothing could
be more incongruous than to embarrass the all-round fire of turrets by
masts and rigging.

In 1859 the United States government was coquetting with the title
"Ad