The Wampanoag Goes on Trial

In February 1868, the USS Wampanoag sped across rough water at a record-breaking speed of 17 knots. That feat made her the fastest steam screw-driven warship afloat. Moreover, the record would stand for some 17 years, when the U.S. cruiser Chicago eclipsed it by a quarter of a knot.¹ Not only a fast ship, the Wampanoag was the consummate seaworthy warship, a fact attested to during her sea trial by her captain, J. W. A. Nicholson. Given her positive attributes of speed and seaworthiness, one might expect she would have been a favorite among the Navy leadership. This was not the case. Moreover, the Wampanoag became an object of controversy—one that centered on conflicting visions of the post- Civil War U.S. Navy. She became a lighting rod in the debate over the primacy of steam engines versus sails in oceangoing warships.

Within months of her sea trial, the Wampanoag’s critics would win the debate over her fate. As a result, she was radically reconfigured into more of a sailing ship, a move that signaled the Navy’s retreat from the development of a force of blue-water steamships. To her advocates, the Wampanoag remained the prototypical modern vessel, an estimate later vindicated by her strong resemblance, at least in profile, to the Navy’s sleek warships of the early 20th century.

The $1.5-Million Ship

The story of the Wampanoag began with a compelling reason to build such an engine of war. In this case, that need grew out of a strategic threat in the Civil War—the possibility of Great Britain intervening on the side of the Confederacy. In anticipation of this, Union naval leaders envisioned a class of warship capable of conducting commerce raiding against a naval force relatively stronger than their own. The concept was simple. By avoiding the strength of Britain’s Royal Navy and attacking its unarmed (or lightly armed) merchant shipping, the price for intervention might be raised to an unacceptable level.² Within this strategic context, the Wampanoag was to be one of several fast cruisers, but in the end Britain opted to remain out of the fight. The underlying reason for the Wampanoag, and her class of warships, was stillborn.

Designed to carry a crew of 375, the Wampanoag was largely the brainchild of Benjamin Franklin Isherwood, the Navy’s engineer-in-chief from 1861 to 1869. Of all the ships Isherwood was involved in designing or developing, the Wampanoag was his personal masterpiece. It was more than just another steam-driven ship in which he was interested; he was emotionally wedded to it. In addition, the project became so interwoven with his professional credibility that it sometimes seemed as if he conflated his own honor with the ship’s reputation.³

The Wampanoag would cost $1,575,644 to complete at a time when the average Kearsarge-class vessel typically cost more in the $300,000 price range.⁴ The Wampanoag’s big engines were especially costly. Built by the New York- based Novelty Iron Works at a price of $700,000, they represented nearly half the ship’s total construction cost. Delays in the construction schedule further hurt the ship’s image. Initially, construction had gone well. Her keel was laid in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on 3 August 1863, and she was launched on 15 December 1864- The configuration of her unique engines and related hardware, however, kept construction behind schedule. The war’s end also significantly undercut the position of the ship’s advocates. Military downsizing soon took its toll as naval budgets shrank. As it was, the Wampanoag was not commissioned until 17 September 1867, and her completion did little to ameliorate the ship’s critics’ dim view of the project.⁵

The ship’s cost and schedule difficulties made her a questionable project, but her physical architecture suited her well. Greyhound-sleek in appearance, her hull was 335 feet long and 44-5 feet in breadth. She was designed to displace 4,216 tons. She drew an average of 18 feet 6 inches forward, 19 feet 2 inches amidships, and 19 feet 10 inches aft.⁶ Although her masts, sails, and rigging were fully functional, such features were secondary in importance to her steam engines. A unique aspect of the Wampanoag’s construction was a hull designed to fit the engines—most contemporary vessels were designed the other way around. At a time when naval architecture was more art than science and only archaic modeling was available, fitting the hull to the engines was a significant engineering feat. Clipper ship architect B. F. Delano was responsible for its successful accomplishment. Delano’s design gave the Wampanoag a modern look, one that foreshadowed the long and lean four-stack and flush-deck destroyers of World War I.

The heart and soul of the Wampanoag was her engines and propulsion gear. It was the design of these technological giants that made the ship dramatically different in terms of size, weight, and configuration from other oceangoing U.S. warships of the era. Everything about this component of the ship was large. The boilers and engines took up slightly more than 166 of the ship’s total length of 335 feet. The total weight of the power plant (with water in the boilers) was 1,267 tons. There were eight coal-burning fire-tube Martin boilers, four of them with super heaters. The steam pressure generated drove the two pairs of horizontal-geared expansion engines. Each engine had 100-inch pistons and the length of their stroke was four feet. The massive engines alone occupied 46 feet fore and aft and 26 feet athwartships.

Coupling this powerhouse to the screw propeller was a gearing arrangement that was dimensionally and com- positionally innovative. Except for the pinion teeth, which were made of iron, the gears were largely made of lignum vitae, a dense South American wood. That arrangement served to dampen sound and vibration in the engine room. Moreover, the resulting low vibration was a key contributor to the ship’s safe performance, because substantial vibrations might have shaken the Wampanoag’s long and narrow hull to pieces. Through the large gears (10 feet in diameter), the power of the engines was transmitted by way of center pinions on the propeller shaft to the propeller itself, a bronze 4-bladed screw 18 feet in diameter with a 28- foot constant pitch. One turn of the large gear rotated the propeller 2.05 revolutions.⁷

The storage of fuel and the process of fueling the ship were major challenges, given the Wampanoag's dimensional constraints and the fact that she needed massive amounts of coal to operate at moderate or high speeds. It took the labor-intensive efforts of 180 firemen and coal heavers to feed the 58 furnaces that kept the ship’s 12 boilers fired. When her bunkers were filled with coal, the ship’s cruising range, as Isherwood estimated it, was 5.5 days at a rate of 16.75 miles per hour, or 2,200 miles. The economy of the ship was better than other cruisers of her type. On an amount of coal consumed per hour (per indicated horsepower) basis, the Wampanoag was rated at 3.129 pounds per hour. The bunkers in which the coal was stored included 4 on the berth deck, which held 200 tons of coal and occupied 8,400 cubic feet. Bunkers in the hold carried some 550 tons of coal. There also was the need to provide draught for the engines and boilers. This feat was accomplished by way of the ship’s four smokestacks, two of which were behind the foremast and the other two behind the mainmast.⁸

As revolutionary as the Wampanoag was in hull and engine combination, she nonetheless was a very traditional warship in at least two important ways: she was unarmored and possessed rudimentary armament. She had no iron protection on her live oak hull, little different from a War of 1812 warship. Similarly, the type and arrangement of her guns were old fashioned. In a era in which turrets, case-mates, and barbettes were beginning to provide ships with extended angle broadsides as well as fore and aft fire that was much easier than previously had been the case, the Wampanoag’s configuration was that of a classic battery ship. Her guns were located in gun ports along the side of the vessel, delimiting all but fire that was perpendicular to the long axis of the ship. Direct fire ahead, other than with the pivot gun, would have proved difficult if not impossible.

The battery consisted of ten 8-inch cast-iron smoothbore guns, two 100-pounders, two 24-pounders, two 12- pounder howitzers, and a 60-pounder rifled pivot gun. The ammunition storage was designed to hold 106,700 pounds of ammunition, or 150 rounds for the pivot gun and 100 rounds for the other guns. While the armament was minimal, superior speed was to be the Wampanoag’s primary mode of protection, and heavy guns would have adversely altered her weight-to-power ratio. Had there been any fighting, it is likely her opponents would have been unarmed or only slightly armed.⁹

The Sea Trials

The Wampanoag had been metaphorically on trial long before she began her formal sea trial in February 1868. During her construction and following her commissioning, the ship had been assailed by her many critics, both in and out of uniform. Many were officers who had been commissioned directly from the merchant marine, and their training was largely practical and nontechnical. The embodiment of this established order was Admiral David Dixon Porter, who ironically later became a strong advocate of efforts to modernize the Navy. In any case, in 1868 Porter positioned himself as a strident critic of both the Wampanoag and her chief proponent, Benjamin Isherwood. Somewhat surprisingly, the other major group of critics were the builders of the Wampanoags competitors, the most vocal of whom was the designer of the cruiser Idaho’s engines, E. N. Dickerson.¹⁰ The surprise was that Dickerson never seemed to let the common cause of steam power transcend his taste for fratricide. And so he in particular, and the others in general, helped create disunity in the pro-steam power faction that aided and abetted the critics of steam power.

The Wampanoag began her sea trials with a cruise that took her from New York to Savannah, Georgia, to test the ship’s performance as an oceangoing vessel. Captain Nicholson took her out on the open seas on 7 February. Initially, he began by showing the ship’s capabilities under sail. There was a fresh wind abeam and smooth seas. Under sail the Wampanoag sliced through the water, reaching the respectable speed of 10.5- to 11-knots, a speed reached without sail on the mizzenmast. On 9 February, Nicholson brought his ship for the first time exclusively under steam power. The weather was intensely cold and the seas soon began to build. Although the weather was deteriorating, a speed of 11 knots was maintained for 25 hours while traveling a distance of 282.5 nautical miles. Fuel consumption was slightly less than 47 tons of coal. This phase of the trial was brought to a halt as gale-force winds blowing from the southeast churned the ocean into a topping sea. For the next 20 hours the Wampanoag was tossed about in the gale, the force of which slammed her hard enough to damage her spars and the foretopsail."

When the gale moderated, Nicholson decided to make for Sandy Hook and repair the damage to the ship. Anchoring there at midnight on 10 February, he had the work begun at dawn. At sunset the Wampanoag returned to sea. At 2100 on the evening of 11 February, Nicholson resumed the trial at full steaming power. For the next 38 hours the ship sped through heavy seas, rolling 6° each way. The next day her average speed for a 6-hour period was 17 knots and her coal consumption 5.75 tons per hour. During this phase of the test, her greatest speed of 17.75 knots (or 20.47 statute miles per hour) was reached. She did so while traveling a little more than 630 nautical miles from Barnegat Light to Typee Light off Savannah.¹²

In Nicholson’s report written shortly after the trial, his observations were a mixture of praise and criticism. “Under sail, with a fresh breeze,” he wrote, “she steers well and sails fast, but in light breezes not well, as she needs to move four or five knots through the water to turn the propeller. Under steam she ‘lies to’ well, shipping no seas. Under all circumstances she steers perfectly easy.” Mindful of the ship’s cramped quarters and limited storage space, and not sharing her maker’s passion for speed, Nicholson added, “her forward boilers could be dispensed with, giving her increased room for storage, and then she would be a 12-knot steamship.” He then went on to recommend the construction of a light spar deck, again as a means whereby the ship’s sparse crew quarters might be expanded. The practicality of the engines and propulsion under sail were an issue for Nicholson. In his report he spoke of the drag caused by the ship’s large propeller while under sail power. He added more caustically that the dimensions of the machinery encroached on storage and living space for the crew. Nicholson emphasized that “the ship is at present cramped.”¹³

In the majority report to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Commodores Melancton Smith and Thornton Jenkins (both on the Wampanoag evaluation board) wrote favorably about the ship and her performance and capabilities. They stated that the Wampanoag was remarkably fast as well as “steady, easy, and manageable by the helm.” She also possessed “sufficient armament for destroying the enemy’s commerce and for self-defense.” They added, however, that “inasmuch as the main and special purpose for which [the Wampanoag] was built no longer exists for a navy in times of peace . . . tests can be made to determine whether any of the boilers and smoke-stacks can be dispensed with and still retain sufficient steam power for all practical purposes.”¹⁴

Decommissioning and Postscript

In the end, the Wampanoag's critics won the day. The speed she demonstrated was mostly written off as pure novelty, and she was perceived as little more than a wasteful racing machine. The formal verdict came in the findings and recommendations of a board of inquiry known as “The Board on Steam Machinery Afloat.” In the summary of his report, Rear Admiral L. M. Goldsborough wrote that the Wampanaog was “nothing less than an expensive failure.” More than a few in Congress were of a similar mind. Elihu B. Washburne, Republican Representative from Illinois, commented that: “[the Wampanoag is] the most extravagant ship to keep in commission in the entire navy.”¹⁵

As a result of the negatives associated with the Wampanoag, the ship was decommissioned some three months after successfully completing her sea trials, her main fault being that her extraordinary speed suited her as a countermeasure to a nonexistent threat. A year later, with much of her machinery removed and her name changed to the Florida, the ship sailed to New London, Connecticut. There she served rather ignominiously as a receiving ship for the naval station there. In February 1885, she was sold to a civilian contractor—and there her story ends.¹⁶

Navy leaders bowed to the realities of the times in which they found themselves. When faced with shrinking congressional support, as well as an increasingly isolationist outlook among the general populace, they opted for a return to the Navy’s prewar mission of distant station cruising by way of sail power. All of which suggests that the Wampanoag was a ship out of time and place.