“Iron-built ships will be the ships of the future,” he used to say, and he was quite right.

But the experiments we had been making at Lorient upon iron plates had been disastrous.  The damage done by oblique firing on them was terrible.  Experiments were indeed being made at the same time, with a view to armour-plating the hulls of ships, but all that was still in the dimmest and mistiest future.  How were we ever to induce naval committees, as timid as they were, undoubtedly, all powerful, to assent to the building of a steam frigate every single detail about which was to be new and improved?

“The very utmost we shall get,” said I to Dupuy, “will be leave to build your wooden ship.  The introduction of the submerged steam propeller will be their concession to the innovators, and the old-fashioned wooden hull and spars and gundecks will satisfy the supporters of the old traditions.”

“Very well,” he replied, “I’ll go and propose my wooden ship.”

He did, and he failed.  They gave him plenty of smooth words and compliments, but refused to order his ship to be put on the stocks.  The poor fellow came back to me in despair, and we were mingling our sorrows, and casting about as to how we had better return to the charge, when a lucky ministerial crisis threw the Ministry for Naval Affairs, ad interim, into the hands of M. Guizot.  There we saw our chance.

I want to see him and told him all our story—­explaining to him how a real and material step in naval progress was being adjourned on mere questions of form; and how the outgoing minister had not dared, in spite of his own good-will, to shake himself free of administrative procrastination in this particular.

M. Guizot heard me out, and then asked me what had better be done.

“Why, simply take your own line, and the whole navy will applaud you.  You have full right to do it, so pray sign an order to put a steamship after M. Dupuy de Lome’s designs on the stocks.”

He did it, forthwith, and that step gained, our first war steamer was at once begun.  Though Dupuy had a right to all the honours of paternity, I might have claimed those of the ship’s godfather.  But she was still unnamed when the Revolution of 1848 broke out, and christened her le 24 Fevner, which name was swiftly exchanged for that of Napoleon—­a notion that makes me laugh even yet.

I must now return to my personal recollections of my command, which began, as usual, with a sojourn at the Salins d’Hyeres, to knock the crews into shape a bit.  Thence I was expected to take the squadron to Tunis, thus following the usual custom.

These two anchorages, Hyeres and Tunis, had been for a considerable period the only ports in which the squadron was allowed to lie.  It oscillated between the two; a most tiresome bit of navigation it was.  In the open roads at Tunis, too, we could only lie and roll, a long way from shore, with no possibility of giving our crews any relaxation whatsoever.  I do not hesitate to say that I objected to being tied to this rigorously circumscribed field of operations, beyond which it looked as if we dared not go.