Ironclad: Modernity at Sea

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The duel of the CSS Virginia and the USS Monitor: the first clash between ironclad warshipsThe Ship of Theseus is a very old thought experiment, relayed to us by Plutarch in his “Life of Theseus.” In its original formulation, Plutarch relates that the ship used by the Greek hero Theseus (slayer of the Minotaur), was lovingly maintained by the Athenians, who honored the legendary hero by taking the vessel on an annual pilgrimage to make sacrifices to Apollo. Wooden Greek ships, of course, are predisposed to rot, which compelled the men of Athens over the years to replace the various timbers of the ship - removing rotted planks and beams and replacing them with new pieces, to preserve the ship in its original splendor. This, according to Plutarch, sparked a philosophical debate among the Athenian thinkers: if, after enough time had passed, literally every element of the ship - the mast, the sail, the ropes, and every timber of its hull - had been replaced, was it really Theseus’s ship, or was it an entirely different vessel? This question is mildly interesting, of course, and relates to all manner of philosophical questions about forms and matter and various platonic minutia. For our purposes, however, it forms a useful place to begin an exploration of the remarkable ways that naval combat changed in the 19th century. In this case, the Ship of Theseus is useful because we are similarly talking about literal ships, and like the hero’s vessel, warships in the 19th century went through radical changes. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, warships looked essentially like t…