USS Galena: De-evolution of a Warship

USS Galena: De-evolution of a Warship

On a chilly February 14, 1862, Valentine’s Day, at the Mystic, Connecticut, shipyard of Maxson, Fish & Co., a sleek-looking ironclad splashed into the water. USS Galena’s launch was eagerly anticipated in that tight-knit shipping community, for it was reputed to be on the cutting edge of warship technology. The local paper, the Mystic Pioneer, proclaimed Galena’s iron plating would be “absolutely impregnable to ordinary projectiles.” Newspapers often get it wrong, however, and the first time Galena met up with the business end of Rebel cannons, those “ordinary projectiles” instead raised havoc with the vessel.

Galena was a product of the ironclad arms race between the Union and the Confederacy that began in the late summer of 1861, when rumors about the construction in Norfolk, Va., of an iron-plated menace known as Virginia began to percolate north. Federal Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles knew such a revolutionary ship could threaten and possibly break the Union blockade of Southern ports, and he targeted opportunistic entrepreneurs with advertisements in Northern newspapers seeking blueprints for iron-plated vessels. To review those plans, Welles instituted an Ironclad Board of veteran seamen Joseph Smith, Hiram Paulding and Charles Henry Davis.

The Ironclad Board had a $1.5 million budget to award to builders and a month in which to award it. The trio reviewed 17 proposed designs. Some were radical, and some were ludicrous. One designer proposed cladding his vessel in rubber, intended to deflect enemy shells. Fortunately for the reputation of the U.S. Navy, that design was rejected.

In the end the board awarded three contracts in September 1861. One went to John Ericsson and his revolutionary Monitor. One board member rejected Ericsson’s plan, but the other two backed it mostly because he assured the board that the ship could be built in less than 100 days for only $275,000.

The other two accepted designs were more typical and reflected the Ironclad Board’s conservative thinking that even ironclads should have sails to supplement their steam engines. New Ironsides was a 4,100-ton, 20-gun behemoth, and then there was Galena, the brainchild of Samuel Pook, a 20-year-old Bostonian soon to be famous for creating the “Pook’s Turtles” ironclads that caused havoc for the Confederates on the Mississippi River in 1862-63.

At first glance, Galena was conventional enough: a 210-foot-long wooden-hulled steam frigate with a 36-foot beam and a sail rig that could muster speeds up to 8 knots. It carried four 9-inch smoothbore Dahlgrens and two rifled 100-pounder Parrotts arranged broadside. The sides of the ship sloped in from the water in what was known as a “tumblehome” design.

But what was truly unique was Pook’s choice of armor: rows of interlocking iron sheets placed in a rail-and-plate arrangement that supposedly made it impenetrable against solid shot up to 6 inches thick. Perhaps due to cost, Pook originally planned to sheathe Galena’s 18-inch-thick hull with only 21⁄2 inches of armor atop 11⁄2 inches of rubber. Once construction began, however, the rubber was replaced by another five-eighths inch of iron, still thinner than called for in any other early ironclad design.

The Ironclad Board was modestly optimistic that Galena would be successful, but others were not. Many officers thought the design of its hull and armor were faulty and vulnerable to shot. Captain Louis M. Goldsborough, commander of the Union’s North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, called it a “most miserable contrivance.” Captain John Rodgers, Galena’s first commanding officer, wrote: “I was convinced as soon as I came on board that she would be riddled under fire, but the public thought differently, and I resolved to give the matter a fair trial.” And while Monitor gained fame for its duel with Virginia and New Ironsides had a successful career, Galena’s maiden battle was a disaster.

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