His ships, made of American live oak, were to have an unusual array of interior transverse bracing, below the waterline, to make the lower hull rigid. Once in the water they lumbered inefficiently. They could never keep a smooth hydrodynamic form. But big ships of the line, loaded with cannons, bent under their own weight. He proposed a very ambitious ship design - large as ships of the line and fast as frigates.Ī larger ship can generally move faster than a smaller one with the same shape. But Humphreys wanted to have his cake and eat it too. We could never hope to slug it out with British ships of the line. It seemed fairly obvious that our new navy should be made of hit-and-run frigates. Then there were a variety of sloops, brigs, and smaller service vessels. The navy workhorse was the frigate, with thirty or forty guns and a speed of eight to ten knots. That left the question, "What form should a six-ship navy take?" Conventional navies had huge floating gun platforms, called ships of the line, that carried seventy-four guns and plodded along at five knots. They'd robbed us and kidnapped our sailors.īy 1812 England was only vaguely aware that, in 1794, our leading shipbuilder, Joshua Humphreys, had convinced George Washington that we should build a navy of six warships. She has no navy to do it with." In the years after the American Revolution, France, England, and pirates from the Barbary Coast had all harassed our merchant vessels. ![]() Writer Roger Archibald quotes an 1812 London newspaper: "America certainly can not pretend to wage war with us. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. Today, a secret American navy for the War of 1812.
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