Note 124 — Chapter II

Captain (now Admiral Sir) W. H. Hall, R.N., in his evidence before Lord Seymour’s (now the Duke of Somerset) Committee on Navy Estimates which sat in 1848, stated (p. 648) that, when he commanded the Nemesis, an iron vessel engaged in the Chinese war, she was in one action struck fourteen times by the shot of the enemy; “one shot went in at one side and came out at the other, it went right through the vessel;” there were “no splinters;” “it went through just as if you put your finger through a piece of paper.” “I had,” he added, “a favourable opinion of it” (iron). “Several wooden steamers,” he continues, “were employed upon the same service, and they were invariably obliged to lie up for repairs, whilst I could repair the Nemesis in twenty-four hours and have her always ready for service; indeed, many steamers were obliged to leave the coast of China and go to Bombay for repairs. Repairs which would have taken in a wooden ship several days, would take in ours as many hours only.”

Captain E. F. Charlwood, who had served in iron vessels “about four or five years,” stated, in his evidence before the same Committee, that the Guadaloupe, which he commanded, had been repeatedly struck by shot, and that “the damage was considerably less than is usually suffered by a wooden vessel,” and that “there was nothing like the number of splinters which are generally forced out by shot sent through a wooden vessel’s side.” He added that the shot went clean through (the holes being plugged by the engineer at the time), and did not otherwise injure the plates or leave a rent or displace any of the rivets.