Neither Cruiser nor Gunboat: The USS Monterey

She is a double-elliptical, high-uffen-buffen, double turreted, back acting, submarine War junk. . . . She is about the shape of a sweet potato that has burst in the boiling. She draws fourteen feet of mud forward, 16’-6” of slime aft, and has three feet of discolored water over the main deck in fair weather.” That is how Lieutenant William S. Sims, with his usual sarcastic wit, described the ship he called the “U.S.S. Terror-of-the Far-East”—the monitor USS Monterey (BM-6), in which he served in 1901 while on the China Station. Although less than ten years old, the Monterey was an obsolete embarrassment in Sims’ opinion.

The ship was conceived in 1886 as a revolutionary coastal-defense ship at a time when the Navy and Congress were often at loggerheads about the type and number of warships the nation required for its defense. Many in the service and Congress believed a combination of cruisers for guerre de course and powerful gunships for harbor defense was best; others, such as Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, argued for a blue-water navy composed of battleships that could meet an enemy on the high seas.

The genesis for the Monterey lay in the 1885 creation of the Endicott Board, composed of high-ranking Army and Navy officers—including Captain William T. Sampson—tasked with making recommendations to update the country’s obsolete harbor defenses. Complacency had given way to fear when, in 1884, the Chilean Navy took delivery of the protected cruiser Esmeralda. Her 10-inch rifled guns were said to be able to lob shells into San Francisco from a distance well outside the range of existing shore batteries, and there was no ship in the U.S. Navy at that time to match her. 

The Civil War had demonstrated the fragility of forts built from brick and mortar. To defend against the powerful new breech-loading rifled cannon, the board recommended an entirely new system of modern batteries built of reinforced concrete and equipped with large-caliber guns. These would be augmented by heavily armored “floating batteries”—that is, monitors fitted with the largest guns possible. The Endicott Board recommended $127 million for the new fortification system, with a mere $2 million set aside annually for the monitors.

Sampson envisioned four “floating batteries” of varying displacement, armed with a single 16-inch breech-loading main gun in an open barbette aft, a 15-inch dynamite gun in a turret forward, and two 4-inch secondary guns. For the defense of San Francisco Bay, he recommended a 4,000-ton vessel, which was duly authorized for construction in 1889.

The design was reviewed and modified by the Board of Construction. The 16-inch gun did not yet exist, but its projected weight was so great that an armored shield was not feasible and the gun crew would have been exposed to small arms fire. The Board decided to replace it with twin 12-inch guns, of the same type as those going into the USS Texas (“Old Hoodoo”), then under construction. The so-called dynamite gun, a pneumatic weapon, proved to be unsatisfactory in testing (see “With a Cough, Not a Roar,” Naval History, June 2015, pp. 10–11) and was replaced by a pair of 10-inch guns, also in a revolving turret. The mixed-caliber batteries were unusual, but their weights roughly matched those of the guns they were replacing.

The Monterey was laid down at Union Iron Works in San Francisco on 20 December 1889, with a length 1 inch shy of 261 feet and a beam of 59 feet. Sims did not exaggerate when he described her hull shape as “double elliptical.” Amidships she had a rectangular box, 33 feet by 59 feet, where her boilers and smoke pipe were located, and, on either end of this box, the hull followed perfect elliptical curves except at the extreme ends where her lines came to a sharp point, with her stem incorporating a substantial ram. Her sides were nearly perpendicular from her main deck down to her double bottom, with 2 feet, 3 inches, above the waterline protected by a 13-inch-thick belt of armor. This extremely low freeboard would make her a difficult target to hit and placed all her machinery below the waterline, but it also left her main deck awash in any sea state above mill-pond calm.

The cylindrical forward turret had 8 inches of armor and was set in a 13-inch barbette. The aft turret had 7.5 inches of armor and was protected by a barbette 11 inches thick. A conning tower with 10 inches of armor was located immediately behind the forward turret. Each turret had a 260-degree arc of fire. The ship also had a 3-inch armored deck protecting the magazines and the machinery. The main deck, however, was not armored, and in combat shell splinters or ricochets could have easily penetrated the berth deck below.

Between the turrets was an unarmored superstructure on the main deck, housing offices, the galley, and the heads. Its roof formed the “fighting top,” where six six-pounder rapid-firing guns were located. Above this was the boat deck, with searchlights and the pilothouse. There was a single mast with a sighting platform located 80 feet above the waterline. The main weather deck had scuttles for coal and ammunition as well as a most unusual feature: dozens of round glass “lights”—fixed horizontal portholes protected by flush metal grilles to provide natural light to the berth deck below.

The Monterey’s machinery consisted of two triple-expansion steam engines, each producing 5,200 horsepower and driving a 10-foot, 2-inch propeller, giving her a maximum speed of 13.6 knots. Three dynamos provided electric power. Her bunkers had a coal capacity of 211 tons and a freshwater capacity of 5,130 gallons. She had a complement of 212 men and 19 officers.

The ship was launched in 1891 and commissioned on 13 February 1893. She would spend the next five years with the Pacific Squadron, making trips up and down the West Coast and as far south as Callao, Peru. When the Spanish-American War broke out in spring 1898, she was sent to Manila to reinforce Commodore George Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron. Accompanied by the collier Brutus, the Monterey departed San Diego on 11 June 1898, setting out for an 8,000-mile transoceanic journey for which she was never designed, with stops in Hawaii and Guam. She arrived without mishap at Cavite, Philippines, on 13 August, the same day the Spanish commander in Manila capitulated. She spent the next 18 months providing shore bombardment in support of the U.S. Army’s operations during the Philippine-American War, the only time her guns were fired in anger.

In April 1900, the Monterey was sent to Hong Kong to have her boilers replaced, and in July she was sent to Shanghai for service on the China Station and in support of Allied forces during the Boxer Rebellion. While she was laid up in Hong Kong, Sims arrived in Shanghai. Without a ship, he spent his time ashore, befriending Royal Navy Captain Percy Scott, commander of HMS Terrible. From Scott, Sims learned the techniques of continuous aim, an art he would be unable to practice on the Monterey because of the slowness of her gun mounts and the lack of telescopic sights. With little else to do, Sims spent his time writing a scathing critique of U.S. battleship design and his ideas on improving American gunnery. (See “Continuous Aim: Learning How to Shoot,” Naval History, April 2015, pp. 10–11).

The Monterey stayed on the China Station until 1903, when she was called back to Cavite and decommissioned in December 1904. She was placed in and out of reserve for the next several years for training and target practice. In November 1911 the Monterey returned to the China Station to protect U.S. interests during the Chinese Revolution of 1911; she remained there for the next two years. Again returning to Cavite in 1913, she spent the next several years on training and recruitment cruises in the Philippine archipelago. In November 1917, the old monitor suffered the indignity of being towed to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by a collier. She would remain there as a receiving ship at the submarine base until 1921, when she was removed from the Navy List and sold for scrap.

The USS Monterey embodied both the nation’s lack of a firm naval policy and a misunderstanding of sea power in the late 19th century. Costing more than $1.8 million at the time of her construction, she provided the sort of service that could have been done with a much smaller vessel. It is reasonable to ask if she was good value for the money spent.