Instead of the variety of length, form, and calibre still used in other navies, and almost equal to the Great Michael with her “bassils, mynards, hagters, culverings, flings, falcons, double dogs, and pestilent serpenters,” our ships offer flush and uniform decks, sheers free from hills, hollows, and excrescences, and complete, unbroken batteries of thirty-two or forty-two pounders.  Thus has been realized an important desideratum—­the greatest possible power to do execution coupled with the greatest simplification of the means.

    [6] Philadelphia, Carey and Lea, 1832.

But, while we have thus improved upon the hitherto practised means of naval warfare, we are threatened with a total change.  This is by the introduction of bombs, discharged horizontally, instead of shot from common cannon.  So certain are those who have turned their attention to this subject that the change must take place, that, in France, they are already speculating on the means of excluding these destructive missiles from a ship’s sides, by casing them in a cuirass of iron.  Nor are these ideas the mere offspring of idle speculation.  Experiments have been tried on hulks, by bombs projected horizontally, with terrible effect.  If the projectile lodged in a mast, in exploding it overturned it, with all its yards and rigging; if in the side, the ports were opened into each other; or, when near the water, an immense chasm was opened, causing the vessel to sink immediately.  If it should not explode until it fell spent upon deck, besides doing the injury of an ordinary ball, it would then burst, scattering smoke, fire, and death, on every side.  When this comes to pass, it would seem that the naval profession would cease to be very desirable.  Nevertheless, experience has, in all ages, shown that, the more destructive are the engines used in war, and the more it is improved and systematized, the less is the loss of life.  Salamis and Lepanto can either of them alone count many times the added victims of the Nile, Trafalgar, and Navarino.

One effect of the predicted change in naval war, it is said, will be the substitution of small vessels for the larger ones now in use.  The three decker presents many times the surface of the schooner, while her superior number of cannon does not confer a commensurate advantage; for ten bombs, projected into the side of a ship, would be almost as efficacious to her destruction as a hundred.  As forming part of a system of defence for our coast, the bomb-cannon, mounted on steamers, which can take their position at will, would be terribly formidable.  With them—­to say nothing of torpedoes and submarine navigation—­we need never more be blockaded and annoyed as formerly.  Hence peaceful nations will be most gainers by this change of system; but it is not enough that we should be capable of raising a blockade:  we are a commercial people:  our merchant ships visit every sea, and our men-of-war must follow and protect them there.