When we last looked at the Water Witch, she had been sent off to the Gulf of Mexico. For about a year, she served honorably in that theater, but by November of 1848, she was in need of repairs, which were done in Pensacola, before being returned to Norfolk, and thence to the Washington Navy Yard. Her hull was checked, and found to be in decent shape, but over the following year, she was given a new engine, and then in 1850, a new boiler was built. Designed my James Montgomery, this boiler was supposed to be a real improvement.
Unfortunately, it was not the case. In March of 1851, the new Water Witch left Norfolk, and returned four days later due to “inefficiency of steam power.” From there, she was sent back to the Washington Navy Yard; along the way, she was “injured by collision with a vessel on her passage” as an 1854 document from the Secretary of the Navy put it. This document gives the history of all the steam ships in the Navy, including all the correspondence produced for each one; the section on the Water Witch is particularly long and excruciating.
The ship was sent up to Baltimore, although it is unclear why. A few months later, Chief Engineers Benjamin Franklin Isherwood and Henry Hunt were sent there to bring back the ship – and determine its worth.
Their report is scathing, principally about the Montgomery boiler, which worked not at all as it was supposed to. It was an “utter and irremediable failure.” In fact, even the changes Montgomery proposed to make on it were unlikely to make much of a difference. Instead, the suggested starting essentially over, with just the shell of the boiler being used to save time and money.
When the Water Witch returned to the Navy Yard, it was also determined that the hull itself was in poor shape, and that thus Commodore Skinner authorized the building of an entirely new boat, this one of wood, that would receive the old machinery (and, presumably, new boiler) of the Water Witch.
The iron hull, while only about five years old, was to be disposed of. Thus, on April 14, 1852. President Millard Fillmore was an honored guest at the Navy Yard, as the next day’s Daily American Telegraph reported, along with “heads of departments, members of Congress, and a large concourse of other gentlemen, together with ladies.”
Millard Fillmore visits the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1851 (Philadelphia Free Library)
It was a “delightful day,” though less so for the Water Witch, whose hull was towed out into the middle of the Anacostia and battered by “shells and cannon-balls” The results of the testing were not impressive. The Telegraph reported that “the firing proved that iron is not so invulnerable as many have heretofore supposed, and unsuited to such purposes.”
This was, presumably, why work on iron-clad vessels ceased at this point and was not recommenced until John Ericsson built his Monitor.
Next week: The third iteration of the Water Witch.