Talos

It's a bit sad to see these powerful and quite sleek ships not really fulfill their intended purpose. I mean yeah by the civil war large broadsides were effectively useless against shell cannons and maintaining such ships were costly but can't help but feel bummed seeing them as floating barges or worse solt at the stocks like the New Orleans (see pic) or New York.
 
On another note I did want to bring up this odd/interesting ship design from that weird era the USS Congress of 1868 which replaced the ill-fated 1841 ship. Originally named Pushmataha one of several Contoocook class steam sloops many of which were never launched and all of them built with unseasoned timber due to the war expending stock. She looks like a fairly attractive ship but had a fairly short life due to the oak being rotted after only a few years. Pity.

Extremely interesting drawings of the United States, Macedonian, Syren etc! I had no idea there were any such close up illustrations of the us frigates during the war of 1812-great addition to the knowledge base. I'd say the curvature of the United States rails looks very close to the original for the class(though also chapelle's NY & Philly) except the end of the middle rail is moved slightly forward-likely to accommodate a bridle port. It would also appear that the headrails of the Macedonian were altered after capture-appearing quite different(perhaps even closest to the rails of the President in 1815) from the lively class rails-which were much more standardized than the US ships necessarily were in the 1812 period.
 
I doubt the rails of Philadelphia and New York were reconstructed by Chapelle from the 1820s versions-those are much too small and angular. Chapelle likely worked from this plan for Philadelphia https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/USS_Philadelphia_builder%27s_sail_plan.jpgand he mentioned an extant inboard profile for New York, which could've shown an outline for the rails-though without seeing it, who knows for sure what conjecture process he used. It appears that unfortunately the Philadelphia figurehead plan uses the erroneous 1820s head, but also shows some nice gingerbread details, as do the others!

It's a good book yeah very informative and explains a lot about what the state of the navy was during that transitional time. That chart is also quite nice. I can see how much bigger Jamestown, Constellation, and the razed sloops were vs the other ships, also understanding why these sloops kept getting bigger since the small ones like Albany seemed to get lost at sea. I wonder if St Mary's design was related to her serving in the Pacific... hmmm

I don't dispute that Chapelle used the 1820s plans for the lines, but I was referring specifically to the headrails-as they are entirely different shapes. does he mention them specifically in relation to the 1820s draughts in HIstory of the American Sailing Navy? I admit I don't have my copy on hand. What large and powerful vessels those later sloops grew to be!

That makes sense. It seems much of the sailing navy's technological narrative was in the perfecting of the sloop of war. They tend to be overlooked by the big frigates but both the frigates and line of battleships seemed like they hit a niche and that was about it. But much of the US navy was comprised of smaller ships with only one gun deck and a lot of that over rigging seemed like ego compensation by commanders that wanted their ships to be bigger than they were which started all the way back with the brigs like Enterprize and Syren. And so began the quest of finding a design which was a decent fighter but also sturdy fast and useful considering much of the American coast is comprised of rivers and shallow waters. The sloop was really the ideal type of ship for civil war blockade duty, they were much cheaper and well suited for the new type of weaponry and seems that sloops kept on evolving and being useful long after most of the larger ships were no longer a priority for the navy.

Future Granite State, the last American 74. She lasted as a recieving ship until 1921.
 

It's taken in Norfolk, actually, in 1874. At least that's what the caption says. I think Vermont was in New York at the time though. Best way to figure it out is to look closely at the details in the full pic. Ohio and Vermont had detail differences in back that should help.

She still has guns twenty years later. Notice they lowered the yards and they're resting on the spar deck bulwarks.
 
Nah, these are big sloops! A whole class of them (albeit individual designs). The only bigger non-razee sailing sloop was Constellation, which was built to heavy frigate dimensions. The 1840s class of large sloops were a good 20+ feet longer than the previous classes, which were almost 10 feet longer than the Wasp/Frolick/Peacock of the War of 1812. St Marys there is exactly 150 feet between perpendiculars. Jamestown, the biggest, was about 7 inches shorter than the rebuild Macedonian. They're all the size range of conventional 18-pounder frigates.
 
EDIT: Oh yeah, the other end of St Marys from that drydock.

I'm just scratching the surface of what I've found so far.
 
In the higher-res view of the Sabine officer's picture from a couple pages ago, I realized I had never noticed the canvas cover over the Dahlgren boat howitzer. I thought the carriage was empty, with just the two ammo boxes on either side on the axle.

The first ones were Library of Congress. The recent ones I've been finding on the Naval History and Heritage Command website. http://www.history.navy.mil/A lot have been uploaded in the past year. All of these pictures I've been posting have been the small thumbnails, the full-size ones are incredible (you can really zoom in). I've been pouring over details on the Santee/Sabine, the various sloops, and steamers like the Hartford and Pensacola the last couple days. They even have one I knew of USS Dale in much higher resolution that makes me want to fix the spar deck I put on her, as well as work on the sloops to get them to this awesome late-19th century look.
 
Here's one of Cumberland in 1860, before the war started.
 

 
Here's one of Santee decked over. I think the aft window really shows the side pivot port for the Parrott.

 
And a great shot of Saratoga. Similar style stern to Portsmouth, but it has additional moldings. Harder to see in this thumbnail, you can zoom in and see it clearly in the fullsize TIFF on the website. In the Portsmouth picture above you can see the same mouldings on the tiny quarter galleries, but they don't extend across her transom. I can also tell in later photos of St Marys from the 1890s that she never got quarter galleries of her own.
 
 

The sloop was definitely centered as the main unit in those days. Even some of the frigates were stripped of their upper-deck armaments and treated like a sloop because sloops were so much cheaper. I'm pretty sure Constitution was at that time. Coupled with a rise in the main deck armament from 24-pounder cannons and such to the new standardized 32-pounders seen above in the 1840s, they were powerful little buggers and really the perfect balance as cruisers. The armaments established in 1845 (modified in 1853) were, for sloops, as follows:
 
 
1st class (which should include all the ships on that comparison page): 32-pounders of 42 cwt and 8" shell guns of 63 cwt.
2nd class (Boston, Cyane, etc): 32-pounders of 32 cwt and 8" shell guns of 55 cwt.
3rd class (should just be the Dales): 32-pounders of 27 cwt, replacing the light 24-pounder short guns that were designed for the class but didn't work that well.
 
Macedonian, Cumberland, and Constellation each carried those weak 10" shell guns fore and aft as pivots. 1 cwt also equals 112 pounds, fyi. Also I did those drawings the old-fashioned way, took the tabulated dimensional numbers for each gun (down to the hundredth of an inch) and drew them from that, so they should be about as accurate as it gets.
 
The frigates, meanwhile, were armed with 32-pounders of 57 cwt on the main deck, plus 4 x 8" shell guns of 63 cwt. On the spar deck they had 32-pounders of 32 cwt plus 4 x 8" shell guns of 55 cwt and two 32-pounders of 51 cwt for chase guns. Some of the biggest had 42cwt guns up top and smaller ones of inferior rate (which I take to mean Macedonian and maybe Constitution and United States) had 46 cwt guns as the main armament instead of 57 cwt ones. This arrangement was simplified in 1853, by eliminating the 55 cwt 8" shell gun and 51 cwt 32-pounder. They upped the shell gun batteries to ten 8" of 63 cwt all in one group on the main deck.
 
74s and Pennsylvania were supposed to be armed like the frigates, but with an additional gun deck or two (with the heavier armament) and then the spar deck on top. Since many had 42-pounders on the lowest deck, they actually decreased in sheer weight of broadside, though it was made more useful by having longer 32-pounders up top instead of carronades and the shell guns.
 
Actually, a lot of the overrigging was an obsession with speed. This led to a lot of capsizing, especially amongst the late brigs. Just look at some of the sail rigs for like Somers, Bainbridge, and Truxton. They are /scary/. All of the sail training ships they kept decades later were ship-rigged, I notice, most of them sloops. Jamestown, Portsmouth, St Marys, Dale, Preble, etc. You'll notice by then they'd gained double topsails.
 
@CaptArmstrong: I remember him discussing the headrails in the plans specifically and why they were anacronistic for the era the ships were operational in.

Albany's capsizing was probably a mix of her extreme clipper form (even more than Constellation and Macedonian, which are very sharp-ended) and switching her from the bark rig she was designed for to a full ship-rig. This was the era where we lost a lot of ships to overrigging. Just didn't have the stability to handle whatever took her down either way.
 
Saratoga was the prototype of the next six and was a bit small, so they increased the size of the rest, about as small as they could be while carrying a full load of the new 32-pounder cannons and 8" shell guns, while being fast and long-range. Jamestown's the oddball that's quite a bit bigger than the others.
 
The proceeding 2nd class sloop class (Cyane) was about ten feet shorter than the smaller members of the 1840s sloops. Dale was the oddball 3rd class, which was specifically built close to the original War of 1812 Peacock's dimensions, but proved small and slow. The rebuilt Peacock was faster than the Boston class of the 1820s, but too small and sharp to carry a useful warload and it messed with her sailing until she was stripped of some fo her cannons as an exploration ship. Cyane was the first new one to be really satisfactory and they just kept getting better from there.
 
Macedonian was, of course, built on roughly the dimensions of the original frigate, while Constellation was specifically ordered on to be the same size as the Brandywine-type frigates.

Chapelle specifically mentions working from these plans for New York and Philadelphia though, but he also talks about using the spar diagram for Philly and inboard of New York for reference as well. These were archived in a USN book series on the Barbary War.
 
 
On an unrelated note, also attaching the heavy sloops comparison again since we've been discussing them.
 
@Charlie: I /just/ had my copy of that book earlier and was reading about all those short-lived cruisers, including Congress.

Future Granite State, the last American 74. She lasted as a recieving ship until 1921.
 

Future Granite State, the last American 74. She lasted as a recieving ship until 1921.
 

She still has guns twenty years later. Notice they lowered the yards and they're resting on the spar deck bulwarks.
 
Nah, these are big sloops! A whole class of them (albeit individual designs). The only bigger non-razee sailing sloop was Constellation, which was built to heavy frigate dimensions. The 1840s class of large sloops were a good 20+ feet longer than the previous classes, which were almost 10 feet longer than the Wasp/Frolick/Peacock of the War of 1812. St Marys there is exactly 150 feet between perpendiculars. Jamestown, the biggest, was about 7 inches shorter than the rebuild Macedonian. They're all the size range of conventional 18-pounder frigates.
 
EDIT: Oh yeah, the other end of St Marys from that drydock.

I'm just scratching the surface of what I've found so far.
 
In the higher-res view of the Sabine officer's picture from a couple pages ago, I realized I had never noticed the canvas cover over the Dahlgren boat howitzer. I thought the carriage was empty, with just the two ammo boxes on either side on the axle.

She still has guns twenty years later. Notice they lowered the yards and they're resting on the spar deck bulwarks.
 
Nah, these are big sloops! A whole class of them (albeit individual designs). The only bigger non-razee sailing sloop was Constellation, which was built to heavy frigate dimensions. The 1840s class of large sloops were a good 20+ feet longer than the previous classes, which were almost 10 feet longer than the Wasp/Frolick/Peacock of the War of 1812. St Marys there is exactly 150 feet between perpendiculars. Jamestown, the biggest, was about 7 inches shorter than the rebuild Macedonian. They're all the size range of conventional 18-pounder frigates.
 
EDIT: Oh yeah, the other end of St Marys from that drydock.

I'm just scratching the surface of what I've found so far.
 
In the higher-res view of the Sabine officer's picture from a couple pages ago, I realized I had never noticed the canvas cover over the Dahlgren boat howitzer. I thought the carriage was empty, with just the two ammo boxes on either side on the axle.

The first ones were Library of Congress. The recent ones I've been finding on the Naval History and Heritage Command website. http://www.history.navy.mil/A lot have been uploaded in the past year. All of these pictures I've been posting have been the small thumbnails, the full-size ones are incredible (you can really zoom in). I've been pouring over details on the Santee/Sabine, the various sloops, and steamers like the Hartford and Pensacola the last couple days. They even have one I knew of USS Dale in much higher resolution that makes me want to fix the spar deck I put on her, as well as work on the sloops to get them to this awesome late-19th century look.
 
Here's one of Cumberland in 1860, before the war started.
 

 
Here's one of Santee decked over. I think the aft window really shows the side pivot port for the Parrott.

 
And a great shot of Saratoga. Similar style stern to Portsmouth, but it has additional moldings. Harder to see in this thumbnail, you can zoom in and see it clearly in the fullsize TIFF on the website. In the Portsmouth picture above you can see the same mouldings on the tiny quarter galleries, but they don't extend across her transom. I can also tell in later photos of St Marys from the 1890s that she never got quarter galleries of her own.
 
 

The Naval Heritage website has a bunch of photos of Delaware's figurehead from your link, both the wooden one and the bronze replica they cast (as well as the physical casting of it!).
 
Continuing the discussion of the 1840s sloop sterns, here's St Marys, circa 1874. She's got the spar deck already, but no quarter galleries. Great look at the quarter ports though.
 

 
EDIT: An interesting detail I noticed on St Marys and Portsmouth both, the rudder chains wrap around the stern.

That really only held through the war years. Once peace reigned again, American ships actually became remarkable alike. Paint became standardized with the white stripe (then later extending the stripe over the bow), Any remaining gingerbread was either removed or painted black, with just a few decorative motifs like stars and eagles. You definitely see in the 1820s-1830s there was a standardization through the navy.
 
Probably from Constitution, as you'll notice Boston's is quite different. I think he really kept the same bulwark lines and just turned them into railings. Don't forget that the original six got extensive rebuilds, with different heads. Just compare the depiction of Constitution and President in my comparison, plus Constitution as she is now.
 
Speaking of Constitution and that picture you link, here's one of her old figureheads.

 
And the infamous Andrew Jackson figurehead that replaced Washington.

 
HMS Macedonian's. This was likely the only major piece of the original frigate to appear in the American rebuild.

 
And Ohio's Hercules figurehead displayed on the side of a highway in New York.

 
Some decoration details from Alabama/New Hampshire/Granite State.

Certainly changed. For instance, the berthed up bulwarks later in the war. I was just struck by how much it was shaped like those two (which were based on anachronistic drawings by probably a junior naval constructor as practice that featured those rail shapes, but as solid bulwarks). Obviously the whole image past the bow is even more simple than the rest.
 
 
Yeah, I know. The last Snow died a few years ago too. I was pointing out that the forum member physically lives next to the old site of the shipyard.
 
And now onto the new stuff. First off, this should raise interesting questions on Portsmouth's stern. It's definitely round, but the quarter galleries are faired in completely.

 
 
Portsmouth's gun deck after the spar deck was added on top (she was built open-topped). Three visible Dahlgrens, a Parrott in the back, and a sailor reading a newspaper. I have been finding some amazing Portsmouth pictures.
 

 
 
Being burned to recover her metal in Governer's Island, New York in 1915.
 

 
On the subject of the gunport windows last page. I think Constellation's constellation windows are even crazier. Also she looks amazingly sleek in her late-19th century guise.

Hmm, not bad. The railing on that one reminds me of the flow of New York and Philadelphia's draughts. Where they continue unbroken until getting to the bits abaft the cathead. You can see what I mean here in the comparison I did.

Looking at the plans, the Brandywine-class frigates have a very flat stern with rounded corners. Portsmouth is closer to Constellation. Looking at Germantown again though, with her quarter galleries on, her stern almost looks flat (despite not being so). Explains why she and Portsmouth only have two stern ports and no quarter ports too. The structure of the hull itself looks in between Brandywine and the Hartford style. You can see what I'm talking about with Germantown here.