HOW GOOD WAS “THE BLACK SNAKE AMONGST THE RABBITS?
Steven Den Beste emailed me the other day to ask his opinion of a correspondent’s letter. The letter was in reference to Den Beste’s post, here, on revolutions in naval architecture. The open question was whether the USS Monitor was the starting point of the 19th century naval architecture revolution culminating in dreadnoughts. James Rummel wondered if HMS Warrior, which Napoleon III called “the black snake amongst the rabbits” did not have prior title. Boy, did he ask the wrong person… so now, once again, you all get to be bored by a whole lot of information I collected once in my travels that, until this question comes up in discussion, has no practical use whatever. First off, there were at least three armoured steam frigates in the world before the Monitor’s famous day on Hampton Roads: the British Warrior (launched 1860), HMS Black Prince (1861), and the French Gloire, which predated them both, having first sailed in 1860. Several other French and British ironclads were on the
