British Cruisers of the Victorian Era. Norman Friedman

and embrasures at bow and stern (for end-on fire) and with the corvettes’ sharp end lines and full midsections. Like Barnaby’s corvettes, they had knee bows. The sharp tapering to the ends was accompanied by sharp rise of floor. This combination made them handy (as intended) but did not confer the desired speed. The lines did, however, make them remarkably suitable for meeting weather from any direction. In the worst gale they would rise or scud equally well under steam or sail. They did, however, roll too quickly to be efficient gun platforms, which suggests that metacentric height was greater than expected due to too low a centre of gravity (underestimated weights). Initially the ships had a light poop and forecastle, both open at the break, the poop covering two cabins with a chaser between them, and the forecastle covering the heads and another chaser. After the first commission both were strengthened and fully enclosed and machine guns mounted on top. Machinery divided the hull in two lengthwise, a narrow communication passage running along the starboard side through the upper part of the boiler and engine rooms, with a watertight door at each end. This was the first class to have glass scuttles in place of the older square hanging ports or ‘rat hole’ plug scuttles. Like the larger cruisers, these ships started out with two heavy guns, in this case 7in 4½-tonners on slides, one between funnel and mainmast and the other on the quarterdeck, both intended to fire on the broadside. They had two 64pdrs on the broadside and two more under the forecastle and poop as chasers. This combination gave them a heavy broadside, but using it put so much weight on one side (the heavy guns would be traversed to bear) that the ship heeled. Of this class, Wild Swan and Pelican were rearmed with breech-loaders. They were given two 6in at quarterdeck broadside ports, four 5in at broadside ports, and two 5in chasers firing through embrasures at bow and stern. Penguin received a pair of 5in breech-loaders on her poop instead of the single 64pdr below it. Osprey and Cormorant were never rearmed, because new guns were not available until they were too old. Due to the unusual hull form, space for the horizontal engines could be found just half-way between bow and stern, so the engines were, unusually, forward of the mainmast rather than abaft as in other three-masted Royal Navy ships of this period. That made for an unusually long propeller shaft, a source of trouble, and the mainmast had to be stepped on the main deck instead of the keel. Like Egeria, Penguin was relatively slow (she was the slowest of the class, making 9.875kts with 666 IHP; her Devonport-built sister Pelican made 12.241kts on 1056 IHP). After her first commission her machinery was replaced by Devonport-built compound engines. Built under contract (by Robert Napier and Sons), Penguin was launched on 25 March 1876. Displacement was 1130 tons (170ft pp × 36ft × 15ft 9in). Complement was 150. Penguin went to the Pacific on completion in 1877, returning in 1881 to have her machinery replaced. Unlike her sister Wild Swan, which went into the yard at the same time, she was not rearmed at this time with breech-loaders due to a shortage of guns. She went into reserve, recommissioning in 1886 for the East Indies. On return in 1889, she was selected for conversion to a survey ship, all her guns except a pair of broadside 64pdrs being removed. Space left vacant by the 7in guns was used for deckhouses and her boat complement was increased. In this form she commissioned in January 1890, not being paid off until March 1907, in Sydney, where she was reduced to harbour depot ship – the last of her class to remain at sea. She was transferred to the new RAN.

      HMS Doterel was the name ship of a class very similar to the Penguins, distinguishable by their vertical stems. They displaced 1130 tons (170ft pp × 34ft × 15ft) and were armed with two 7in 90cwt guns plus four 64pdrs, all on pivoted slides, plus four machine guns. They had three cylindrical boilers feeding a horizontal compound engine: Doterel made 11kts on 900 IHP. Endurance under steam was 1480nm at 10kts. Doterel was launched at Chatham on 2 March 1880. She was lost on her maiden voyage, exploding and sinking off Sandy Point, Punta Arenas on 26 April 1881.

      (Allan C Green, courtesy of State Library of Victoria)

      Given the emergence of foreign colonies as potential raider bases, British war planners of the late nineteenth century envisaged attacks on them. This was not the colonial warfare of the past, in which colonies were worth seizing for their rich resources; rather it was a coldly strategic counter to commerce raiding. Thus when the British contemplated war against France in 1898 their arrangements included convoys of troops (escorted by cruisers) to seize French naval bases abroad. This anti-raider mission is why, for example, the British were so anxious to seize Tsingtao in China and German East Africa in the opening phase of the First World War. Without bases, enemy raiders at sea would not last for very long, whether or not they were sucked into a focal area. The German squadron based at Tsingtao certainly caused considerable havoc when it was forced to sea, but it seems unlikely that it could have remained at sea for very long with limited resources – many of which the Admiralty indirectly controlled.

      It was bad enough to face the French or the Russians, but beginning in the 1880s the two threats merged, particularly in the Mediterranean.⁴

      In the 1850s and 1860s the British also faced the possibility of conflict with the United States due, among other reasons, to disagreements over the border with Canada. For example, in 1858 there was a considerable scare as the French seemed about to match or even to surpass British naval strength. First Naval Lord Admiral Sir Richard Dundas pointed to the possibility that the United States would feel encouraged to attack British possessions in North America in the event of a war with France.⁵ Second Naval Lord Admiral Martin considered that the United States might fight if the Royal Navy imposed a blockade against France. At this time the French navy nearly equalled the Royal Navy in size, and France had more frigates (though fewer smaller cruisers). Thus it could be argued that France could blockade England (which was already importing much of her food) quite aside from the usual threat of a direct invasion by the large French army.

      The US Navy had a long-standing war policy of raiding British commerce, as it had no hope of challenging the British fleet. In the past it had built unusually large fast frigates like USS Constitution in hopes of overwhelming British convoy escorts. In 1854 it announced plans for five new fast screw frigates and a screw corvette. The British were led to design their own fast screw frigates as answers to these ships; in the process they pushed wood hull construction as far as it could go. It turned out that the British frigates were much faster than their US counterparts, but also that their powerful engines overstrained their hulls. There was a real possibility of war against the United States several times during and immediately after the American Civil War, but it was always averted. The United States disappeared as a naval threat only when the large fleet built up to fight the Civil War was allowed to decline precipitously in the early 1870s.

      Trade Protection

      During the centuries leading up to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy relied heavily on convoy to protect seaborne trade. Convoy Acts forced merchant ship owners to submit to Royal Navy orders and to join convoys with escorts. Many historians have observed that this apparently successful policy was discarded after 1815, and it is often suggested that the Royal Navy’s failure to protect vital shipping from U-boats in 1914-17 could be traced to a lack of interest in trade protection and to the abandonment of a previously successful policy in favour of an emotionally satisfying offensive (rather than defensive) strategy. None of this seems to match reality. For the Royal Navy, perhaps the most interesting lesson of the American Civil War was the striking success of Confederate raiders. Blockade could not deal with them, because they were built and armed abroad (British connivance in Confederate raiding was a major source of post Civil War tension). The closest approach to blockade, which netted the very successful CSS Alabama, was to station the cruiser USS Kearsage off the port of Cherbourg, in the expectation that the Confederate ship would have to put into port for resupply. There was no hope whatever of patrolling the open Atlantic, and the Union Navy lacked resources for any kind of convoy strategy

      It is difficult to trace the evolution of British thinking about trade protection, because responsible officers only rarely had to explain themselves to civilians, such as the First Lord of the Admiralty, who were not already familiar with their thinking. The considerable volume of the program to build small cruisers (frigate down to gun-vessel) during the 1840s and 1850s suggests an attempt to maintain