The most fertile ground for strange missteps in technological development is found at those times when innovation is rendering old certainties fragile, and no-one really understands where change is leading. The 1860s were such a time in naval design; new developments in propulsion, armour and weaponry alike were sounding the death-knell for the concept of the broadside battery, and of the sail-only warship.
Whilst steam propulsion was being introduced, navies were reluctant to abandon the full sailing rig of earlier warships. At the time the Royal Navy in particular was an intensely conservative organisation obsessed with traditional drilling, many of whose senior staff would rather bury their head in the sand than face up to the threatened obselescence of their vast fleet. However, objections to a total reliance on steam were not entirely due to hideboundedness. Early steam engines were not terribly reliable, and operation of steam powered vessels far from home required the maintenance of a network of coaling facilities; so there were some valid arguments for retention of sail in the early steam age.
1850 French battleship Napoleon; mixed screw and sail, broadside armament
But at a time when armour was increasing greatly in effectiveness, the traditional broadside, relying on weight of shot rather than individual hits, had become increasingly unable to damage modern vessels. This ineffectiveness was well demonstrated at the Battle of Lissa in 1866, when Italian and Austrian vessels clashed in the Adriatic. Almost all of the ships engaged were old-fashioned broadside designs, and the battle revealed that when armoured ships of this type came up against each other, they had serious difficulty in inflicting damage. The only major loss of the battle occurred when the Austrian Ferdinand Max, in a largely unplanned maneuvre, rammed the Re d'Italia and sank it. (For some years afterwards, major navies would build ships with bows designed for ramming, despite the difficulty and risks of such a maneuvre; but the more apposite lessons of the battle were that modern ships required heavy, rifled guns with a good field of fire, particularly forward.)
The stricken Re d'Italia sinks at Lissa, 1866 (painting by C. F. Sorensen)
The debate about how to arm a modern warship became a battleground in itself. In particular, at a time when it was not yet considered acceptable to dispense with the mass of rigging required for full sail, there were serious difficulties in finding an arrangement of weaponry which did not suffer from a restricted field of fire. French designers favoured the barbette, an emplacement projecting from the side of the vessel which allowed the guns to swivel fore and aft, increasing their field of fire. The British were reluctant to abandon the broadside principle, though it was refined into a central battery of heavier guns some of which might be mounted on turntables to increase their firing arc, along with smaller guns firing forward and aft.
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HMS Hercules (1868): the angled channels at either end of the central battery
are intended to allow the turntable guns to bear forward.or aft.
Nevertheless, the voices advocating the adoption of rotating turrets were growing, and naval designers were forced into creative thinking in order to make them work with sailing rigs. One such visionary was the respected British inventor and naval architect Captain Cowper Coles. Coles had already designed a turreted warship, the Rolf Krake, for the Danish navy when he was allowed to build a radical new design for the Royal Navy at Laird's shipbuilders in Birkenhead.
Cowper Coles, doomed designer
Coles's ship, HMS Captain, attempted to solve the problems of field of fire for its two twin 12" gun turrets in two ways. Firstly, it used tripod masts, to do away with the need for rigging that would constrict their use on the broadside. Secondly, and controversially, Coles did way with much of the poop deck at the rear and the forecastle at the bow of the ship, to allow the turrets better firing fore and aft. This alarmed both Laird's and the Chief Naval Constructor, Sir Edward Reed, who feared that the guns would too easily become awash in heavy seas, preventing them functioning. Such designs had previously been applied in coastal defence monitors, not intended for deep sea operation, and had caused problems even there.
HMS Captain, showing the two centreline turrets and the perilously low freeboard.
Errors in weight calculations also dogged the construction of the ship, partly because Coles had been seriously ill and was not in a position to oversee the process. When she was launched, her freeboard (the height of the deck above the waterline) was a worrisome 6'5", rather than the 8'5" intended. Reed's office calculated that a heel over of only 14 degrees would potentially capsize her if the wind was coming from the beam (i.e., sideways). Reed was not opposed to the concept of turret ships - he designed two himself, HMS Devastation and HMS Monarch - but he disagreed bitterly with Coles over the design of the Captain, and the decision to go over his head in authorising the ship's construction formed a major reason for his resignation in 1870.
Edward Reed, Chief Naval Constructor, whose feud with Cowper Coles
over warship design ended in Reed's resignation and Coles's death.
Nevertheless, Captain joined the fleet in 1871 under Captain H. T. Burgoyne and in her initial couple of voyages seemed a good vessel under both steam and sail, and her armament very effective. That autumn, Coles joined the vessel to observe her performance, and the ship set off for the Bay of Biscay. On September 6, whilst underway with her topsails set, she encountered a heavy squall and heeled over. When the crew were unable to adjust her sails in time to prevent the list accelerating, the ill-fated vessel - confirming Reed's misgivings about the dangerously low freeboard - capsized with the loss of all but 18 of her 490 crew. Captain Coles was amongst those who perished.
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HMS Inflexible (1876); by the time this photograph was taken in 1881 it had finallybeen accepted
that full sail was a thing of the past, and the rigging had gone. The turrets are staggered from the
centreline to accomodate fore and aft firing, which is why only the forward one is visible here.
that full sail was a thing of the past, and the rigging had gone. The turrets are staggered from the
centreline to accomodate fore and aft firing, which is why only the forward one is visible here.
The HMS Captain disaster did not, however, prevent the eventual adoption of turret based designs; indeed successful subsequent designs such as HMS Inflexible of 1876 also adopted the solution of centrally located turrets firing past narrow superstructures fore and aft. But it did indicate the dangerous uncertainties involved with radical changes to naval design in the face of new technology. The ultimate fruition of all-gun warship design would require the final abandonment of the requirements for full sailing rig, the replacement of muzzle-loaders with breech-loading weapons, concentration of the weaponry into fore and aft turreted batteries, and the recognition that the most effective combination of guns was produced by a few, large-calibre pieces, rather than an assortment of various sized weapons. This would be the path that led to the epoch making HMS Dreadnought in 1906.
HMS Dreadnought, model for the all-big-gun battleship that
dominated naval warfare prior to the rise of air power.
War is a fascinating subject. Despite the dubious morality of using violence to achieve personal or political aims. It remains that conflict has been used to do just that throughout recorded history.
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