Ships intended primarily for the presence role did not necessarily have to be very fast, but they needed long endurance, heavy armament, and survivability. Nearly all the masted cruisers built for the Royal Navy before about 1880 shared these characteristics.
It was not obvious to all in British government that global naval presence was worth while. It was certainly expensive; battleships were often maintained in reserve at home, but cruisers on foreign stations had to be manned and maintained and refitted periodically. In times of crisis, the Admiralty also questioned the value of dispersed ships conducting presence operations. In 1858 the French navy approached the size of the Royal Navy, and in at least one category (frigates) they were superior. The naval members of the Board wanted the fleet concentrated in home waters to deter the French from any idea of invasion, some members suggesting in addition spoiling attacks on the French Channel ports (Cherbourg in particular was being fortified as a fleet base).
The Royal Navy was probably the largest single item in the British national budget of the time. William Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister during much of the late nineteenth century, was an ardent anti-imperialist hostile to naval spending. In 1861, well before he became Prime Minister for the first time, he argued since steam made it possible to reach out to the world rapidly and reliably, the bulk of the fleet could be maintained in home waters. Implicit in Gladstone’s argument was that the ships (cruisers) on foreign stations were there to protect British colonies. Gladstone could accept a reduced fleet capable of responding to crises, but not naval presence. He would have dramatically reduced the peacetime British cruiser force, which provided presence. Once Gladstone was in office in 1868, he tested the idea. His First Lord, H C E Childers (who famously disregarded professional naval opinion) argued that money saved by eliminating most of the ships on station could be spent instead on more ironclads in home waters and in the Mediterranean. This idea corresponded to Gladstone’s preference for home defence over Empire defence (he was a ‘little Englander’). The idea was tested by sending a Flying Squadron commanded by Rear Admiral Geoffrey Phipps Hornby abroad in 1869. Among the drawbacks to the idea were the low speed of existing ships and their very limited coal endurance. Phipps Hornby later described the Flying Squadron as a valuable means of training officers and men (largely under sail) and of showing the flag (cruising under sail also minimized dependence on foreign coal). Despite its prestige, the squadron could not be in more than one place at a time: the United Kingdom still needed a large cruiser force continuously on station.
Presence, and the somewhat similar imperial police role, required large numbers of small ships, ranging downwards from cruisers capable of fleet operations to steam sloops, gun-vessels, and gunboats. About 1860, for example, large numbers of shallow-draught sloops and gunboats were required for China, even though China was not in any sense a British colony. These small units were never really expected to engage enemy cruisers, but they seemed absolutely essential; during the nineteenth century after 1815 they saw much more action than larger and more capable warships. They were caught up in the financial problems the Royal Navy faced by 1900, as the cost of adequate warships escalated while resources did not. Hence Admiral Fisher’s famous call, upon becoming First Sea Lord in 1904, to scrap all the small ships abroad which could ‘neither fight nor run away’.
In effect Fisher was saying that he could no longer include the cost of the Imperial maritime police force in the Royal Navy budget; in order to maintain a navy adequate for war, he could not continue to pay for assets really needed by the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office. He probably hoped that they would realize that they needed the small warships badly enough to be willing to pay for them, but that did not happen (on the other hand, surprisingly few of the sloops were scrapped). The problem has continued to haunt navies, when maritime solutions to national problems other than naval warfare pop up. If that seems abstract, think about strategic submarines. Both in Britain and in the United States, Polaris submarines and their successors did the national job formerly done mainly by land-based bombers. They did not contribute to conventional naval missions. However, in neither country did governments pay for the new strategic weapons out of the budgets formerly allocated to the land-based bombers. Instead, the submarines were paid for by cutting general-purpose naval forces.
The Shape of the Fleet and the Changing Role of the Cruiser
Nineteenth-century cruisers are often regarded as direct descendants of the frigates and sloops of the age of sail. That is not quite true. Sailing frigates and sloops were generally faster than the line-of-battle ships, to the point that they could escape from such ships. As long as steam engines were bulky and inefficient, steam-powered battleships were generally as fast as (if not faster than) most steam frigates and lesser craft. It took a large frigate (often filled with machinery) to outrun a steam-powered battleship when both ships were under steam. Frigates lost their place in fleet engagements, although they certainly retained their roles in trade defence and attack. Only in the mid-1870s did the combination of steel hulls and more efficient machinery restore the cruiser’s speed advantage. It took about a decade more for the cruiser to regain a place in the battle fleet, partly because the nature of the fleet itself was changing.
Even the term cruiser (sometimes spelled cruizer) was not widely used as a ship type until the 1880s. Before that ships were classified as frigates, corvettes, sloops, gun-vessels, and gunboats, of which only the first three figure in this book. The categories were left over from the sailing ship era. In 1878 frigates and corvettes were first officially redesignated cruisers, but the earlier designations survived well into the 1880s in official documents. Sloops remained as a separate category, and so did the lesser cruising vessels.
The evolving roles of cruising ships were intertwined with radical changes in the character of the fleet and of naval warfare. There were three distinct naval roles. One was to protect trade, either directly (by convoy) or by denying an enemy the ability to deploy raiders (blockade and attack at source, i.e., raids on ports harbouring raiders), or by destroying the raiders individually at sea. A second was the destruction or neutralization of the enemy’s main fleet. It made the first type of operation possible, by limiting the scale of threat that escorts or blockaders or harbour attackers had to face. A third was to capitalize on control of the sea (secured mainly by battlefleet action) to move troops to strategic places and thus to upset an enemy’s position ashore. For example, the British fleet victory at Trafalgar (which effectively finished the French and Spanish battle fleets) secured free use of the sea, which the British used first for an unsuccessful descent on the Dutch North Sea coast and then to support Wellington’s Peninsular campaign. Without Trafalgar, there could have been no Peninsular campaign. Trafalgar also made the blockade of various French ports effective. Despite Trafalgar, the Royal Navy had to keep hunting down French raiders until the end of the war.
Steam dramatically changed the situation. A steam warship was independent of the vagaries of the wind. It might no longer be necessary to operate ships in the dense line-ahead formations of the past. Until the 1880s or even later, steam plants were extremely inefficient. For example, it was common in the 1840s and 1850s to design steam warships with a coal endurance of about two weeks and a stores endurance of five months, the assumption being that the ship would spend most of her time cruising under sail. The protracted blockades of the age of sail were no longer practical.
Moreover, sailing ships had been governed by prevailing winds, so that in effect the winds created highways in the otherwise trackless sea. That is why we can read about a British fleet well out of sight of land waiting for the Spanish gold convoy to approach, or an attack on some other large convoy. Steamships could manoeuvre much more freely. In a world without radio, the best way to locate – to destroy – an enemy’s warships was at or near their port. As in the sailing ship era, the alternatives were to enter the port (a cutting-out expedition) or to blockade it. The effect of the new steam and other (e.g., heavy gun) technology was to limit the number of ports which could support major warships, and thus to limit the number of ports which had to be dealt with. During the sailing ship era, blockade was far preferable to direct attack on a fleet in port because ships generally could not engage the fortifications protecting the port. Fortifications