Abstract:

In 1869 Hugh Childers, the First Lord of the Admiralty, described HMS Captain as the ‘crack turret ship’ of the British fleet, just before he saw his seventeen-year-old son Leonard (‘Lennie’) transferred over to the experimental ironclad. With her controversially low freeboard, the  Captain was to finally embody all of the salient features of American Civil War monitors, floating the heaviest possible guns behind the best possible armour protection scheme, yet combined with the speed and strategic range of lofty broadside-armed cruisers like HMS Warrior. The Captain could go anywhere and sink anything.

But when the vessel capsized in a gale off Cape Finisterre, Spain, on 7 September 1870, taking down Lennie, the ship’s nominal designer Captain Cowper Phipps Coles, and close to 500 others, people could only wonder how such a thing could have happened. Historians ever since have likewise questioned how the mid-Victorian Royal Navy could build such a manifestly unstable ship—too low in the water and top-heavy with sails. Both Coles and the ‘public’ have been blamed for the disaster.

Previous studies have neglected the vital role of the American Civil War in both pressuring the Admiralty to maintain British naval supremacy at all costs, and to do so by producing an apex ironclad armed with turrets. From the Trent Affair of 1861 to the Alabama Claims of 1871, the United States posed a unique threat to British global interests and imperial prestige. Just as the original USS Monitor was built to check the Warrior as well as the CSS Virginia, the  Captain was meant to command American waters once again if need be.

The question perhaps is not whether anyone has found the wreck of HMS Captain—an experimental ‘sail-and-turret’ warship foundered in a gale off Cape Finisterre, Spain (7 September 1870)—but why has no one bothered? Nearly the entire crew of 500 men went down with this dangerously low-freeboard ironclad, including her controversial designer, Captain Cowper Phipps Coles.¹ It was the worst disaster suffered by the Royal Navy since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and remained that way well into the twentieth century.² This capital ship was considered ‘the Pride of the Victorian Navy’, the cream of Britain’s naval officer corps also perished, including sons of several prominent Cabinet ministers such as the First Lord of the Admiralty.³ Like the foundering of Henry VIII’s Mary Rose in the mid-sixteenth century, the loss of the Captain was an appalling national catastrophe, touching Queen Victoria personally, and memorialised ever since in large brass panels in St. Paul’s Cathedral, a stained glass window in Westminster Abbey, and gravestones up and down the country. It traumatized Great Britain and helped edge it towards a new era of ‘Splendid Isolation’. Since the discovery of RMS Titanic in 1985, there has been an explosion of popular interest in modern maritime archaeology, utilising advanced side-scan sonar and remotely operated or autonomous underwater vehicle technology. Next to recent finds of First and Second World War shipwrecks, however, the ‘Pax Britannica’ epoch remains relatively unexplored.

Yet it was precisely during this period of British history and national identity that the Royal Navy was proudly regarded as the ‘Global Policeman’. Just as the expensive new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth was deployed in the South China Sea in 2021, ‘Showing the Flag’ in 1870 was considered vital for a sense of international stability and imperial prestige based directly on military and naval deterrence.⁴ Indeed, a 2022 review by popular British naval historian Ben Wilson cites the former UK’s Secretary of State for Defence’s description of the carrier strike group as ‘a physical embodiment of Global Britain.’ The same was practically said of HMS Captain 150 years ago, showcasing ‘international military strength that will deter anyone who seeks to undermine global security.’ ⁵

That this ship and her creator are infamous in British naval and maritime history is an understatement. Popular works like Antony Preston’s The World’s Worst Warships (2002) have condemned not just the Captain as ‘quite simply wrong’ and Coles as ‘bad-tempered’ but the entire class of Union monitor warships from the American Civil War, the Russian circular ironclads of the Vice-Admiral Popov-class, and indeed most coast defence vessels.⁶ This is because these types of floating weapons-platforms were not meant to be especially ‘seaworthy’, plus the line that ‘the best defence is a good offence’. As Rule Britannia! boasted in 1740, ‘All thine shall be the subject main, And every shore it circles thine.’ It was the essence of modern seapower, as deliberated by one navalist writer in 1911, on the eve of the First World War. ‘Many people, after the American war, went turret-mad, and became possessed of the idea that this country should own a numerous fleet of monitors’, he noted, adding with a sneer about how the previous generation thought such a force would oppose an enemy fleet of wooden ships-of-the-line, ‘reduced to submission if possible, or sunk, or scattered as was the Spanish Armada, an historical allusion which these good people found very useful as adding a picturesque touch.’ Coast defence itself as a naval strategy and policy was foolish and cowardly, proclaimed an earlier study on The British Fleet: The Growth, Achievements and Duties of the Navy of the Empire (1894). ‘In time of war our real coasts are the enemy’s own shores, controlling the sea to within gunshot of the enemy’s land defences. Practically coast defence ships are useless to us, and ought to be left out of all reckoning.’ Perhaps more to the point, the real culprit behind such dangerous notions could be found in Liberal parsimony. As author Charles Napier Robinson continued, ‘Naval economists, who yet wished to swim with the current of naval enthusiasm, did not hesitate to point out the economy of construction to be effected by a fleet of monitors or of small vessels carrying turrets. Some contended that no guns were too heavy to be sent afloat, so that they should smash any armour by the weight of their projectiles’.⁷

An 1876 examination of Naval Powers and Their Policy was franker: even though Britain’s ironclad fleet was ‘unquestionably the most powerful in the world’, far more money was needed for the Navy since ‘our naval supremacy is viewed with increasing jealousy on the Continent’. But thanks to ‘the ignorant claptrap of the Liberal press’, Disraeli’s Conservative government had continued a ‘grave mistake’ by devoting ‘the surplus which Mr. Gladstone had bequeathed them to the remission of taxation and nothing else.’ Appeasing the ‘great middle class’, this way had cost the Royal Navy a real preponderance in naval power, ‘of numbers, armament, and materials, which will once for all distance every competitor amongst the navies of the world.’ Real peace as such was never about national or imperial ‘defence’, it was about domination. If the British wanted their voices heard—that is to say, feared—again in world affairs, as in the glory days of Lord Nelson and the aggressive foreign policies of Lord Palmerston, then in ‘order to maintain our independence we must retain the sovereignty of the seas’.  Furthermore, according to the author, a proper, standing, offence-minded policy also meant investing carte blanche in a pre-emptive first-strike capability:

This echoed the complaint of ‘the rage to bolster up a false economy’, according to one ‘Old Sailor’ in Fraser’s Magazine the year before. ‘The unfortunate Captain foundered from the vain idea of a man who did not know a single iota of mathematics, and who endeavoured to link the possible to the impossible, by building a ship which at the same time should prove an efficient cruiser and a floating battery of unrivalled power.’⁸ The tradition may then be traced back to The Times, which on 11 October 1870—the day the court martial’s verdict on the Captain disaster was made public—changed its tune after attacking the Admiralty for dithering on the wholesale adoption of turret ships for the new ironclad navy, American style, for years. The ‘whole history of this ill-fated vessel from beginning to end was exceptional and embarrassing’, it now declared, setting the tone for the history of this tragic event up to this day.⁹ The Captain was an exception and therefore ought to be side-lined—not from just current debates over ironclad designs but marginalised in the evolving history of British seapower itself. And because everyone was not just ‘embarrassed’ but mortified, the ship was perhaps best left forgotten, as soon as possible.

And so the history has gone: naval historian Sir William Laird Clowes in 1903 dismissed the Captain as ‘the production of an amateur’; Fred T. Jane on the eve of the First World War pronounced her ‘an impracticable ship’, the product of a ‘perfect turret craze’; George Ballard in the 1930s noted how ‘Parliamentary and Press agitation’ in the 1860s led to an ‘irresponsible intervention…without parallel in British naval history’; and journalist/naval aficionado Arthur Hawkey condemned Coles in 1963 as ‘the man who was wrong’, while the figure of Chief Naval Constructor Edward Reed, ‘a man of science’, was just ‘right’.¹⁰ A recent monograph by Don Leggett, Shaping the Royal Navy: Technology, Authority and Naval Architecture, c1830-1906 (2015), has likewise emphasised how the Captain’s story is more one of ‘the ability of Coles to mobilise an influential group in Parliament that lobbied on his behalf’ which, in turn, ‘mobilised to encourage the then Liberal government to consider, fund and expedite trials with turret-ships.’¹¹ Bad science and worse politics don’t mix.

The long-term effects of these sentiments are both subtle and striking. The fifty collectible ‘Celebrated Ships’ by Wills’s Cigarettes in 1911 featured a card of HMS Captain, launched in 1787 (and which served as Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent), another for the ironclad-frigate HMS Warrior, and even one for ‘The Merrimac & the Monitor’. Unsuccessful warships were also depicted, such as the HMS Eurydice (foundered in 1878). But there was nothing for the HMS Captain, launched in 1869. Historically, the Navy List itself has drawn a blank from 1870, and no British warship has carried the same name since.

It was, therefore, also the beginning of a long trend of ‘Sea Blindness and British National Identity’ that carries up to this day, according to naval historian Duncan Redford, and it was not until the naval scares of the mid-1880s leading up to the battleship arms race with Imperial Germany, that it (briefly) surfaced again. After the exhaustive experience of one world war followed by another, many people in Britain were more concerned with the threat of devastating air raids, and then the ‘Bomb’, than a sense of ‘absolute naval supremacy’. But whereas Redford suggests ‘the disengagement of naval policy from public debate’ starting after 1870 must be due to ‘a profound and unthinking expression of confidence in the strength of the Navy’, surely the Captain fiasco at this very moment helped trigger a recoil instead.¹² Colin F. Baxter’s discussion in 1977 of ‘The Duke of Somerset and the Creation of the British Ironclad Navy, 1859–66’ for The Mariner’s Mirror noted only that confronted ‘with the French naval challenge and a technological revolution, Somerset had successfully maintained British naval supremacy.’ This was because he had wisely accepted ‘the advice of his naval architects’ and relegated the revolving gun turret concept to experiments whilst pressing ahead with ‘seagoing ironclads based on practical experience’—ships ‘that could sail all over the world’. Criticism of this policy, which favoured partially armoured sailing ships like the gigantic, 9,000-ton Warrior, and of other broadside-ironclads that followed mounting lighter guns behind weaker (4.5-inch-thick) armour than in turret vessels, only succeeded in creating ‘unstable conditions’, Baxter argued, which ‘provided an opportunity for politicians, shipbuilders, and inventors, to mislead the public.’ The Royal Navy nonetheless possessed ‘the most powerful warships afloat.’¹³

“This was a period of remarkable upheaval both at Britain’s doorstep, on the Continent, and abroad; when the mid-Victorians were concerned not only about another great war not only with France but other powers—namely Russia, Prussia, and the United States. And it was exactly these ‘unstable conditions’ which agitated an increasingly wider array of critics of the Admiralty’s shipbuilding policy.”

Yet as the following article will address, this confident, rather deterministic assertion of British naval prestige remained sorely in doubt, especially by the end of Somerset’s administration as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1866, both within and outside of the Admiralty. Why was such a commanding force as the Royal Navy, in peacetime, ‘influenced’ at all? What propelled mid-Victorians of all backgrounds to fairly demand a ‘solution’ to ironclad shipbuilding policy, even when they were told that it meant jamming a proverbial square peg into a round hole (a low-freeboard, raft-like monitor with a full spread of sail)? Why take such risks? As will be seen, there was indeed a connection between the political pressure brought to bear upon the Admiralty and the perceived state of Britain’s foreign relations. This was a period of remarkable upheaval both at Britain’s doorstep, on the Continent, and abroad; when the mid-Victorians were concerned not only about another great war not only with France but other powers—namely Russia, Prussia, and the United States. And it was exactly these ‘unstable conditions’ which agitated an increasingly wider array of critics of the Admiralty’s shipbuilding policy. The stately Warrior, wrote Palmerston to Somerset, was ‘a fine yacht, but not an efficient Ship of War.’ Toe-to-toe against French ironclads like the fully-armoured Gloire, he could only imagine ‘the Warrior and Black Prince, with their two Pasteboard ends knocked to shivers: the underwater compartments filled with water, everything above waterline smashed to Fragments… Naval Men may see this Matter in a different Light, but to a Simple Landsman this seems to be the inevitable Course of Things.’¹⁴ The Royal Navy could not boast the most powerful warships afloat, especially because they were able to go anywhere. Rival powers were claiming a new form of privileged seapower status; a localised naval supremacy based on superior firepower and armour protection. Monitors, especially, but also mines and other forms of ‘torpedoes’ similarly threatened to turn a large seagoing ironclad’s strengths into acute weaknesses, attacking exposed points both above and below the waterline. The Crimean War (1853–1856) saw Russia turn to what might be called a modern anti-access, area-denial (or ‘A2/AD’) strategy for nullifying the ability of British or French fleets to simply steam up to and burn rich strategic targets like Sevastopol or St. Petersburg.¹⁵

 

In the 1860s it was the threat of war with the Northern states, in particular, which seemed to confirm a sea change in the Balance of Power dynamic. ‘If it can be done, no Time should be lost in preparing for a Storm which as far as political Forecasting goes has been foretold as likely to follow the Conclusion of Peace between the Federals and Confederates,’ Palmerston confided to Somerset on 6 September 1864. And while he had ‘no doubt that we shall find Means to send across the Atlantic and into the St. Lawrence Guns strong enough to send their floating batteries to the Bottom’, he grumbled to the Secretary of State for War less than a week later that the Admiralty could only point to ‘what is to be’ in terms of heavy guns ‘which would smash and sink the Monitors’, and nothing yet in terms of a seagoing turret ship.¹⁶ This was the unique, vexing obstacle that the mid-Victorians demanded the Admiralty to overcome at any price. In the end, that task was left to Coles and the Captain.

Leading public sentiment was The Times, perhaps more so in the mid-nineteenth century—under the editorship of John Thadeus Delane—than at any other time in its history. As U.S. President Abraham Lincoln remarked to visiting correspondent William Howard Russell, the British newspaper was ‘the most powerful thing in the world, except perhaps the Mississippi’.¹⁷ The trick was how to press for the Royal Navy’s adoption of turret ships, instead of more expensive and vulnerable broadside-ironclads, while playing down the only living example of turret-armed warships in action: the monitors of the American Civil War.

“Coles himself felt cheated by the Americans’ ‘taking away the Palm of the invention from this country’, he wrote to the Admiralty.”

When news first reached Britain of the dramatic duel between the South’s converted ironclad ‘ram’—the CSS Virginia and the North’s even more radically-designed turret-vessel, the 1,000-ton USS Monitor—on the second day of the Battle of Hampton Roads (8-9 March 1862), both the press and Parliament were nervous. Not only were the Americans building steam-plated, iron-plated warships as well, they were actively fighting with them—proving their capabilities in a trial by fire and rapidly improving upon their wartime experiences daily. The practically demonstrated concept of a heavily armoured, rotating gun turret mounted in the centre-line of a vessel was especially intriguing. Coles himself felt cheated by the Americans’ ‘taking away the Palm of the invention from this country’, he wrote to the Admiralty.¹⁸ This was all the more significant since during the height of the Trent Affair three months earlier, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine delighted its readers in describing how the largely wooden Royal Navy would, in case of war with the Yankees, ‘assail their harbours, burn their fleets, destroy their commerce, and keep their whole seaboard in a state of constant alarm; and we shall give employment by these means to no inconsiderable portion of the half million of men whom they boast to have under arms.’¹⁹ Whereas the popular American periodical Harper’s Weekly depicted John Bull menacing ‘Brother Jonathan’ (Uncle Sam) with his armoured henchman ‘Warrior’ in its 11 January 1862 issue, it also made clear in ‘An Advocate of Moral Force’, on 31 May 1862, that the British Lion had been forced to change his attitude thanks to the ‘Monitor’ in the background.²⁰ As the U.S. Minister to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, wrote to his son, ‘In December we were told that we should be swept from the ocean in a moment, and all our ports would be taken. They do not talk so now. So far as this may have a good effect to secure peace on both sides it is good’.²¹ Even the Monitor’s designer, the brilliant yet irascible Swedish-American inventor-engineer John Ericsson, took the opportunity of the Trent crisis to devise a name for his ‘impregnable battery’, still building in January 1862. For, in addition to checkmating the rebels’ attempts to turn the tide of the Civil War at sea with ironclads, his vessel would ‘startle’ and ‘admonish’ ‘Downing Street’ whilst also monitoring ‘the Lords of the Admiralty’, ‘suggesting doubts as to the propriety’ of their efforts to complete huge, oceangoing ironclads of the Warrior-class.²² Indeed, since the gladiatorial contest at Hampton Roads, the comparable strength of individual ships appeared more important than between whole fleets. Comparing ships themselves was likewise more about the size of their individual guns (no longer their respective broadside armaments) and the thickness of their iron armour-plating, measured in inches: a matter of opposing statistics—which also suggested a race. ‘We still measure our ships by “rating,” and we still “rate” them by the number of their guns’, The Times thus complained four years later, in March 1866. ‘Nobody, excepting Captain Coles, ever thought of revolutionizing the whole character of a man-of-war.’ Hence there could be ‘no denying that the Admiralty, unfortunately perhaps, but not unnaturally, has been adhering throughout to old principles in the face of new systems’, since the numbers approximated not only the relative power of ships but their value.²³ A small craft, like a biblical David, could defeat a Goliath. True enough, the largest warship ever sunk in history, the converted Japanese aircraft carrier Shinano at 73,000 tons fully laden, succumbed on 29 November 1944 to the USS Archerfish, a 1,500-ton submarine. It did not take long during the American Civil War for patriots in the Northern states to take comfort as well as pride in ‘Our Little Monitor’: a typically ingenious (and cost-effective) ‘Yankee Invention’.

By the beginning of 1863 a fleet of turret vessels began to emerge from Northern factories, arsenals and shipyards. Not only did the new monitors quickly neutralise any further threats from home-spun Confederate armoured ‘rams’, but the Federals were eager to try them out against fortified rebel port cities like Charleston, South Carolina. Yet, on 14 January 1864 a Times leader observed how the Union’s faith in low-freeboard monitor-ironclads was based upon the immediate necessities of the Civil War, with much ‘obscurity’ surrounding ‘the performances of these vessels.’ When a concentrated squadron of them failed to blast their way past Charleston’s defences (7 April 1863), their shortcomings could no longer be hidden from public view despite cover-up attempts by the Department of the Navy. U.S. naval officers, by and large, seemed to hate their own vessels. They were too limited by having only two guns in revolving turrets, which themselves seemed prone to mechanical breakdown. And their semi-submersion meant long periods living below deck, underwater, and in inhospitable Southern climates. The monitors, judged The Times, were clearly failures.²⁴

But, in fact, the odd and ungainly vessels had been quite heavily engaged with Confederate forts Wagner, Moultrie and Sumter in nineteen distinct actions between 18 July and 8 September 1863 alone.²⁵ The Times also overlooked the real problem for Federal military and naval leaders before Charleston: enemy harbour obstructions, including minefields—not necessarily Union ironclad designs. This was the same problem Britain faced in 1854 and 1855, with similar results, before Cronstadt in the Baltic in the war with Russia; for the ‘torpedoes’ and channel barriers were themselves protected by shore batteries and shallow-draft gunboats.²⁶ As Sir Julian Corbett confirmed, even in the midst of the First World War, ‘the impression that “the use of a fleet by itself to bombard coast defences with the object of forcing the enemy fleet to sea or of destroying it in inside the defences” has seldom, if ever, been attempted. Against an effective fleet and effective defences it has certainly never been undertaken with success.’²⁷ Yet the ‘Thunderer’ as usual struck a chord with its mid-Victorian readership. Despite what the Navy Department in Washington chose to believe, ‘in this country most persons will be of opinion that the American Monitors have achieved only indifferent success even in the circumscribed sphere of operations for which they were designed.’ This did not, on the other hand, suggest that the ‘turret question’ had been settled. Rather, it was how bad a job the Americans had made of it. In language full of speculative equivocation, The Times assured its readers ‘it certainly does not follow that the two ships which we ourselves are constructing on the turret principle [Royal Sovereign and Prince Albert] should be as inefficient as the American Monitors are said to be. Their armour is certainly far stronger, their machinery may very possibly be far better, and, for anything yet known, they may earn a much better reputation than the American specimens have acquired.’²⁴

The Times also had to note that the monitors, according to its special correspondent in Richmond, Virginia, presented unique threats to the notion of British naval supremacy. While the Federal combined siege of Charleston was bound to rank as ‘as one of the most stupendous follies ever witnessed upon earth’, the writer was ‘tempted to raise a warning voice about the disparity of armament on board of the English and American navies.’ Visiting officers of Her Majesty’s navy into Confederate ports still seemed to think that their smoothbore 68-pounders were good against ironclads; ‘The experience gained at Charleston enables me confidently to affirm that as well might you pelt one of the Yankee Monitors or the [broadside-ironclad USS] Ironsides with peas as expect them to be in any way damaged by 8-inch shot.’ In this respect America was far ahead of Britain, wielding guns of enormous size, weight, and hitting power.²⁸

Having inspected both private shipyards and U.S. naval facilities in Philadelphia and Baltimore, a specially appointed British naval attaché, Captain James Goodenough, also heard from Union ironclad officers who felt that ‘had the enemy possessed equal guns to theirs, they would have suffered severely.’ Fortunately for the Union going into 1864, the Confederacy did not (nor did Britain or indeed any other Great Power). Yet aside from the sixty or so double-ended, heavily armed, paddlewheel steamers the Northern states had built and were building for service in Southern waters, it was clear to him that the main thrust of Union naval shipbuilding was ‘divisible into two great classes, first; ironclad ships for harbour and coast defence and, secondly, fast wooden vessels to cut up an enemy’s commerce.’²⁹ As the South had no merchant marine to speak of, a strategy of using monitors to deflect the blows of maritime powers like Britain or France, whilst counter-thrusting with fast Alabama-type wooden screw cruisers was obvious. Yet however concerned Britain was by these developments, there was no call for panic. ‘The Dahlgren gun is a most unmanageable brute on board ship,’ insisted one indignant though anonymous letter writer to the Richmond correspondent, ‘and its carriage and working apparatus as intricate as watchwork’. The simple fact that Rear-Admiral John Dahlgren himself had not taken Charleston surely meant the power of his guns was overblown if not irrelevant—next to heavy rifled ordnance, that is. ‘Home-Made’ was certain that the ‘eight 14-ton guns on board the Ironsides would cut a very different figure in a seaway’, topped off with some John Bull chest-thumping that ‘the Warrior would finish a dozen [“Monitors”] in as many minutes.’³⁰

 

From the North America and West Indies Station, Rear-Admiral Sir Alexander Milne’s departing memorandum to his successor Vice-Admiral Sir James Hope highlighted instead how susceptible Halifax was to an American attack. During the Trent Affair, when the prospect of war with the Northern states seemed very real indeed, Milne hoped to defend his two main bases with some of the (wooden) naval force at his disposal, then use his and Commodore Hugh Dunlop’s squadron in the Gulf of Mexico to sweep the Union blockade and try to impose a British one of the main Northern ports whose own defences were considered far from complete. But now he had to point out that ‘extensive works are in progress in nearly all the principal harbours, and in some places, such as New York, great efforts are being made to arm their forts effectively,’ so his previous reports to the Admiralty could no longer ‘be looked on as having any great value’.³¹ In terms of Union ironclad warships—and monitors in particular—Milne thought they were ‘models not to be copied’ by the Royal Navy. From scattered reports of visiting naval officers and clippings from the press, he gathered they were too uncomfortable and too small. This meant limited endurance for crews, and limited range for operations and ammunition during combat. Their slow-firing monster smoothbores were housed in semi-automated turrets apparently liable to derangement when struck by enemy shot.³²

Even Edward Reed launched his career as Chief Constructor of the Navy in light of events in America. In an 1862 article for the popular Cornhill Magazine titled ‘The Great Naval Revolution’, Reed asked his readers rhetorically ‘if our new ships cannot be made fit to go to sea, and if something cannot be done in the way of plating our noble line-of-battle ships and frigates sufficiently for practical purposes, still leaving them capable of asserting our rights on foreign shores?’

“Yet while he asserted that the Monitor and the Coles turret vessel designs were coastal defence follies, Reed also agreed with the New York journals which boasted that fleets of such small ironclads ‘could sweep the seas’. Only his own broadside-ironclad system could prevent this, otherwise ‘we shall not a have a single small vessel to send against our enemy up the St. Lawrence, on the Lakes, or, indeed, anywhere else.’”

This was to prepare the public for his own plans for central-battery-type ironclads which he was then submitting to the Admiralty. In such times of technological and political upheaval, he continued, it was both the duty and the burden of the Board of Admiralty to weigh ‘such practical suggestions as competent persons anywhere and everywhere may offer’ (that is, trained naval architects even outside the Surveyor’s office, such as himself). Indeed, Reed had already outlined his proposal for smaller, handier seagoing ironclads on a ‘belt-and battery’ armour configuration in Cornhill’s December 1861 issue. Yet while he asserted that the Monitor and the Coles turret vessel designs were coastal defence follies, Reed also agreed with the New York journals which boasted that fleets of such small ironclads ‘could sweep the seas’. Only his own broadside-ironclad system could prevent this, otherwise ‘we shall not a have a single small vessel to send against our enemy up the St. Lawrence, on the Lakes, or, indeed, anywhere else.’³³

Certainly military and naval specialists such as those debating at the Royal United Service Institution considered it ‘an unsolved problem whether wooden or iron ships, or ships built of wood and covered with armour plates of iron, are the most suitable for ships of war’. HMS Prince Consort began as a second-rate ship-of-the-line, but in the emerging ironclad arms race with France, she was hurriedly converted to a 7,000-ton, fully armoured frigate throughout 1862. In October 1863, the Admiralty telegraphed for her to proceed immediately to Liverpool to guard the two turret-armed ‘Rams’ built by Lairds for the Confederate States Navy, before they attempted to slip away like ‘No. 290’ (the commerce-raider CSS Alabama) had the year before. Bluejackets, stokers, and marines were to be mustered from the Cambridge, the Reserve, and the local headquarters; ‘officers necessary are to be selected from any ships in harbour’. But on her way north, she nearly foundered in a heavy Irish Channel gale, and how much of that was due to heavy iron plates straining her wooden seams? Some even argued that for both seaworthiness and protection from shot, that wood should be planked on the outside of armour plates as well.³⁴  Even so, the Controller of the Royal Navy, Rear-Admiral Robert Spencer Robinson, assured the Board of Admiralty that upon inspection ‘the only evidence of the ship having worked to a very slight degree, is that the cement is cracked in the joints of the Armour Plates, but generally there is no evidence whatever of the ship having strained during the gale.’ He felt indicated in any event with his decision from 1861 to convert wooden ships-of-the-line into broadside-ironclads, since ‘nothing has occurred to the Prince Consort to throw any doubts on the solidity of her structure, or on the capacity of a wooden ship to bear Armour Plates.’³⁵

This did not certify, however, that such heavy-laden vessels were sufficiently buoyant. So the question remained how susceptible they were to ‘bad luck’ at sea compared to wooden warships—but especially to other types of ironclads. All of the pointed criticism of the USS Monitor, which foundered at the end of 1862, was blunted by Britain’s Prince Consort near-fatal experience at the end of 1863. Perhaps the only thing that saved the latter was her added size—her depth of hull—which gave her just enough added time to make it to shore safely. This did not prevent, however, Opposition in the Commons like Sir James Elphinstone from accusing the Admiralty of being ‘administered in an irresponsible manner’. The eighty-gun Majestic had already been watching the controversial ships on the Mersey, rushing the Prince Consort into stormy seas with an inexperienced crew was merely ‘“Bunkum,” to show the American Government that we were determined to keep the rams in safe custody’.³⁶

This overriding sense of prudence failed to satisfy many when it came to Britain’s first turret ironclad, the 5,100-ton Royal Sovereign, which also started life as a wooden-hulled ship-of-the-line and was ordered to be converted into a Coles ‘cupola’ vessel in April 1862. Was she intended to be a heavily armed and armoured replacement for the older floating batteries after all or something more? As reported on 1 August 1864, her heavy guns were fired with 40-lb. charges without inconveniencing the turret crews with concussion or smoke. The Times, therefore, thought ‘it must be admitted…by every unprejudiced mind that the English turret principle has been fairly tested and has proved a decided success; and this may be asserted without entering any further into the somewhat foolish controversy of “central v. broadside ships’ batteries” than to observe that the 12-ton 10½-inch gun has been fired in the Channel from a central battery on board a ship, whereas it has not from a ship’s broadside battery.’ As a coastal vessel for shallow waters, however, the Royal Sovereign suffered from deep draft—more the obvious fault of the Admiralty than Coles—and since her smoothbores could not presently be rifled safely, her relative efficiency was indeed shrunk ‘to a very narrow compass.’³⁷ Moreover, within six weeks her commanding officer, Captain Sir Sherard Osborn, reported that wood carriages for her 12-ton guns were ‘a mistake, they should be of iron. Most of them are already defective, and one not safe to fire with.’ More mechanisation was needed for running them in and out of the turret ports than block and tackle. Ventilation was inadequate, and they were prone to destruction from fire on the one hand and leaks on the other. ‘Skylights, Hatchways, and Turret flaps all leak, and we are very damp indeed when it rains.’ Rather than lowering her target profile, Osborn thought the raised bulwarks a ‘very great comfort’ and wished they were fully six feet in height with a deck still higher out of the water. Reed took note of this for future reference while Palmerston, after his own inspection of the Royal Sovereign the previous month, only saw a broad-beamed platform slowly moving through narrow waters and thus vulnerable to a boarding party. Moving quickly, they would likely dodge the main guns firing shrapnel and then lob hand grenades ‘into the Tops of the Turrets’.³⁸ The experimental vessel was soon taken out of commission to effect necessary repairs and modifications.

In the meantime, British military and naval officers despatched to North America to both observe the operational art of the Civil War as it transpired—as well as assess the North’s capability to harm the British Empire if Anglo-American relations seriously ruptured—had submitted a range of alarming reports. Not only were U.S. port cities armed to the teeth, backed by a substantial ironclad navy centred around heavily armed turret vessels, but how to successfully defend Canada seemed problematic in the extreme. ³⁹ At the heart of these considerations was what the Royal Navy could or could not do. According to one memo, warships ‘of any size may reach Quebec when the St. Lawrence is free from ice, about the end of April.’ Vessels drawing up to eighteen feet might then proceed from there 135 miles to Montreal. But while this included the Crimean War-era floating batteries, the heaviest wooden vessels that could be safely deployed were light screw sloops like those of the Rosario-class, mounting mostly 32-pounders. The 140-mile passage between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario was more precarious; most of the southern shoreline was U.S. territory, ‘as well as several islands entirely commanding the channel’. Canals could accommodate vessels drawing no more than nine feet, meaning only the iron batteries and wooden gunboats could hope to enter the Great Lakes. But this was in peacetime. ‘In the event of hostilities’, the memo concluded, ‘it would be very difficult if not impossible for vessels to pass into Lake Ontario by the St. Lawrence’. And while warships might be constructed on Lake Ontario and Lake Huron, it was not recommended that any exceed fourteen feet ‘on account of the anchorages’, thereby precluding screw corvettes of the Jason-class, for example—and the Americans had all the advantages for shipbuilding on the Lakes, namely thriving port cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, and ample resources all linked by railroads.⁴⁰

If time was working against a more assertive British foreign policy in this direction, so was cost. Gladstone was staggered by those outlined in the (North America and West Indies Station) imperial defence reports submitted by Lieutenant-Colonel William Jervois of the Royal Engineers and others since 1862. In a printed memo to Palmerston’s Cabinet dated 12 July 1864, the Chancellor of the Exchequer argued that by spending extravagantly abroad the British were trying to compensate for the Americans’ home-grown advantages by sea and land. It wasn’t worth it. Nor was it a guarantee that simply throwing more money at the problem would be satisfactory in either the short or long term. The 1862 Commission wanted over £1 million for permanent fortifications in Canada, he recounted, plus another million for ‘temporary works for time of war’—meaning as soon as possible given the state of Anglo-American relations since at least the Trent Affair. A naval force floating 550 guns and manned by over 9,000 men was also considered essential for operations along the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, excluding, however, Lake Huron, which would require another fleet ‘of great strength.’ But to facilitate any coherent defence, more millions would have to be pumped into local infrastructure, including new roads and the enlargement of canals such as the one linking Ottawa to Lake Huron. Kingston had to be turned into a major imperial dockyard capable of building and repairing steam vessels with all its required basins, yards, workshops, and rolling stock. A new arsenal and coal depot would also be necessary. Gladstone thought this added up to ‘six to eight millions of money, and probably very much more.’ At any rate, this was just for a concentrated regional defence of North America, since the 1862 Commission had no intention of trying to defend the frontier of New Brunswick bordering the U.S. state of Maine, for example, or indeed anywhere west of Lake Huron. That would be a hard sell to Her Majesty’s settlers in those regions. Jervois was willing to abandon even more of Canada in the face of a major U.S. invasion by focusing almost exclusively on fortifying Quebec and Montreal. Yet the linchpin of these elaborate proposals was the Royal Navy’s command of the St. Lawrence River—a strategic waterway running through the country every bit as important in a potential Anglo-American conflict as the Mississippi River was to the fortunes of the American Civil War. While this was perhaps naturally assumed by the Commissioners in 1862—in trying to play to Britain’s strengths—Gladstone observed it was ‘before the Americans had shown what they could achieve in the way of rapid multiplication of iron-clad vessels, not of high sailing qualities, but such as, creeping along the coast into the St. Lawrence, might be found, when there, too numerous for us to deal with by the seagoing iron ships we should have to send across the Atlantic.’ Quebec might be fortified with great effort, only to have it eventually fall into American hands, like Vicksburg had in July 1863, if the river was lost.⁴¹

“In the absence of seagoing, imperial turret ships, which might successfully contend with local monitor-ironclads, Britain had to now openly admit what it could not do. Until then, the Canadians (and perhaps other colonial peoples worldwide) would carry on with their lives assuming everything was fine, with a powerful British man-o’-war keeping watch offshore.”

There were more deep-rooted, imperial sensitivities to consider as well. How would Quebec, which was largely French, react to a long siege ‘in a war which they might not deem their own’? Why did Jervois in his report presume ‘so absolutely the inability of the Canadians, aided by a British force, to meet the Americans in the field at the opening of a war’? By blanketing the colony with troops and ships from the Mother Country, a host of issues would likely arise, and Gladstone saw only ‘a proceeding which would entangle us in a long course of probably both dangerous and costly embarrassments, without securing the attainment of any useful end.’ In truth, naval technological developments on the far side of the Atlantic had exposed a deeper problem: the nature of the British Empire. The time had clearly come to put into action all the chatter of ‘calling on the Colonies to bear their full share of military burdens’—to, in fact, alter Britain’s ‘system of Colonial defence’—given the manifestly ‘altered circumstances of capability, power, and privilege.’ In the absence of seagoing, imperial turret ships, which might successfully contend with local monitor-ironclads, Britain had to now openly admit what it could not do. Until then, the Canadians (and perhaps other colonial peoples worldwide) would carry on with their lives assuming everything was fine, with a powerful British man-o’-war keeping watch offshore.⁴²

Nevertheless, inflamed by an overriding sense of necessity, the Prime Minister wrote that Britain should ‘lose no Time in putting Canada into a State of Defence.’ His Foreign Secretary agreed that ‘Halifax ought to be made so strong as to be impregnable and the railroad to Quebec at once undertaken on joint British and Canadian credit.’ This was sure to be ‘the great question’ for the next session of Parliament.45 In the meantime, Palmerston engaged in an historic debate with his unruly Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone, over the next military budget. The core problem was that their broadside-ironclad navy was a liability against rival powers protected by both turret ships and forts mounting monster guns. A comprehensive upgrade was in order if Britannia was to retain her ranking as a leading maritime state commanding a vast global empire. Having already lectured Gladstone again about the perils of democracy (as spoofed by Punch that June⁴³ ), Palmerston now suggested that anyone ‘who looks carefully at the Signs of The Times’ must agree that the general population had no real interest in an extension of the franchise—and wanted the country ‘kept in an efficient Condition of Defence.’ Yet Britain had to be practically pre-mobilised for a variety of potential dangers from multiple directions. A peacetime defence economy was now ‘insufficient…to repel and avert those sudden Dangers to which we might be exposed.’ Here the message was altogether different from the 1860 rallying cry to defend the British Isles from a French invasion or sudden ironclad raids against weakly defended Royal Navy bases; Britain now needed to deter potential attacks from militarised enemies like the United States against distant imperial targets. Proper statesmanship called for a sober calculation of threats ‘to which our widely extended Interests at Home and abroad may be exposed.’⁴⁴ This echoed his frenzied speech to the Commons in June 1862, that Parliament’s duty was ‘to enable the Government of this country to hold a proper position with regard to the affairs of the world’:

Although Gladstone questioned whether the projected cost of ‘£25½ million’ for the Army and Navy (£26½ million if counting the annual charge of coastal fortifications in England) was ‘fair and reasonable’, Palmerston retorted that such an assessment was completely arbitrary. Past budgets were for cheaper, simpler times, and hardly counted as a goal for retrenchment. This was most prominent when it came to the navy. Here, ‘a total & sweeping Change is taking Place in every maritime Country as to the Construction of Ships of War’, he wrote, ‘& this change is accompanied by a great Increase in the Cost of Each Ship.’ The ironclad revolution was washing away Britain’s wooden walls. Numbers were no longer about whose fleet was largest but whose fleet had the most ironclads. In this respect, Britain had to ‘keep Pace with France[,] America & Russia’ who were surging ahead by investing wholesale in the latest technologies. More specifically, ‘we are yet unprovided with Cannon of Sufficient Power.’ It was now useless to chance a British ironclad or coastal fort against an enemy ironclad whose armour was impervious to 68-pounders and whose guns could blast through 4½-inch-thick iron plates. At the moment, only a few experimental Armstrong guns were on hand; these now had to be multiplied on a vast scale, as quickly as possible. Otherwise, the whole edifice of British national and imperial defence—and international status—would crumble into the sea.⁴⁵

Thus, the fine line being worked out in the 1860s was not just one of naval defence versus offence, home and abroad, but how opposing political ends and technological means translated into British foreign policy during the twilight days of Palmerston. It was remarkable how Lord Clarence Paget, the Admiralty spokesman in the Commons, could rationalise the naval bombardment of Japan—‘chastising those insolent Daimios’—as all Britain did was ‘vindicate our right to free and unfettered ingress and egress to and from those inland waters’, while in the same breath assert that British sympathies ‘as a nation, must always be with weak States [like Denmark] when engaged in a gallant struggle with stronger Powers’.⁴⁶ This subtle hypocrisy—an equation of naked weakness versus strength—had not been lost on Russia, America, France, Prussia, and indeed a rapidly increasing roll call of states who were accordingly cladding themselves in iron. This choice then imposed upon Palmerston’s government in turn, forcing a reconsideration of just how far the British people might be willing to go to get their way, everywhere, all the time, against anyone. From Berlin in March 1864, talented diplomat Robert Morier wrote ‘that England stands outside the cycle of organic changes now going on in Europe’ and that her alternate bursts of ‘exaggerated triumph’ and ‘impotent rage’ over the complicated Continental interests at work in the unification of Italy, for example, were ‘childish’. Much of this, in turn, came down to ‘British taxpayers’, and thus, ‘non-intervention is the true policy for England’.⁴⁷ As Paget tried to explain to his listeners in December 1864, ‘there is a growing disposition on the part of England, under all circumstances except where her own honour and her own interests make it absolutely incumbent on her to do otherwise, to refrain from mixing herself up in foreign quarrels.’⁴⁸  The ‘turret versus broadside’ question had, if nothing else, managed to drive up the costs of such perceived national honour and imperial interests to the point that the British press thought Paget’s ‘the least satisfactory of the public speeches of the season’—but why? Because despite the high bill for naval power set for 1865 and beyond, ‘the expenditure predicted is just the natural sequel of the system defended.’ That is, more broadside-ironclads, and still no high seas, low-freeboard turret ship on the horizon as the best possible solution for contesting inland waters far and wide. ‘In a season of peace a man may leave his rifle at home,’ thought The Times, ‘but then he wouldn’t take out a bow and arrow.’⁴⁹

With Palmerston’s attempt to vote on the Navy Estimates having failed on 6 March 1865, respected railway engineer and magnate Sir Morton Peto attacked the Government’s policy three days later (the anniversary of the battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads): ‘the general feeling prevalent in the public mind’ was that Captain Coles ‘had not received justice at the hands of the Government, or that amount of consideration which the importance of his invention demanded.’ Captain Osborn’s report of the trial of the Royal Sovereign, meanwhile, had been mysteriously suppressed. ‘The great fault of the Admiralty was that they never made up their minds what class of ships they wanted, and what class of duties they required them to perform’, added Conservative MP and Royal Navy Captain Sir John (Dalrymple-) Hay.  ‘One was for having the guns in a box; another in a turret; a third was in favour of broadsides. One considered that broadside guns should be light, another that they should be of the heaviest description. Our ships were unfortunately built without reference to each other and without reference to their service in a fleet.’ If tensions with the United States—‘the most formidable naval power in existence’—unfortunately burst into war, then none of the ships found on the North America and West Indies Station were either iron-plated or mounted a gun which could penetrate iron armour. If Sir James Hope ‘were called on to blockade one of the North American ports he could not do so for one single day with such [wooden] ships—a single Monitor would come out and set fire to those under his command.’ Paget responded to these criticisms that there was ‘no foundation for those reports which have been set afloat that the Admiralty desire to keep back the adoption of the turret system.’

It was simply unreasonable to ask Coles, who was not a shipbuilder, to proceed with a fully seagoing turret vessel from the outset. His own design concepts—like those in the Controller’s Department for other types of ironclads—had evolved considerably since 1861. The central dilemma remained: how to join a turret armament with unrestricted fields of fire, like in American monitors, with masts and sails for long-range cruising. Coles had offered ‘tripod masts’ which minimised interference on an open deck. But these were still exposed to enemy fire and, given their novelty, should be tried on Channel service vessels first.⁵⁰

By then the Civil War in America was drawing to a close: as Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s beleaguered Army of Northern Virginia quietly abandoned their trenches before Petersburg, Virginia (ending ten months of stalemate against the vast Union combined forces brought to bear by Union General Ulysses S. Grant), on 3 April 1865, Coles submitted to the Admiralty his plans for a single-turreted, oceangoing ironclad based on the dimensions of Reed’s recently launched central-battery armoured corvette, HMS Pallas. Coles had asked for help from Joseph Scullard, the Chief Draughtsman of Portsmouth Royal Dockyard to work out the necessary details, including weights. Pound for pound his ‘3,500-ton’ ship was ostensibly stronger than Reed’s, wielding heavier guns behind thicker armour. Given the media hype, unwanted political attention, and tensions brewing between Coles and the Controller’s Department (namely Robinson and Reed), Somerset deferred judgement to a special ‘Turret Ship Committee’.

Sensing that the Coles turret ship-interest might soon be awarded an official construction contract after all, Robinson hurriedly pushed for yet another Reed-designed central-battery ironclad. As was relayed to the Committee, he argued there was an inherent risk with a major warship mounting only two 20-ton ‘600-pounders’ in a mechanism (a rotating gun turret) which might jam when struck, as happened to the Federal monitors at Charleston.⁵¹ Even though his own objections to the Coles submission stymied its progress to no small degree, the Controller wrote the Board on 10 May that because precious time was now being lost deliberating the Coles seagoing turret ship ‘that a duplicate Bellerophon be built by Contract, and that as the new design called the Hercules cannot be commenced at Chatham before July, time will be afforded for a decision on Captain Coles’s plan to be arrived at.’ Reed’s 7,600-ton pride and joy boasted ten of the new rifled, muzzle-loaded 12-ton guns (9-inch, firing 253-pound shells) behind 6 inches of iron casemate. The 8,800-ton, improved Hercules could float 9 inches of plating and 18-ton guns. But Robinson (and Reed) added crucially, that ‘if that decision is favourable, the ship can be built in the Dockyard instead of the Hercules; if again it should be adverse to Captain Coles’s design, the Hercules may be gone on with or a duplicate [armoured corvette] Penelope may be built.’⁵²

But such railroading tactics only served to expose divisions within the Board itself, some of whom suspected a politically dangerous ploy of bait-and-switch at work. On 11 May, Paget wanted confirmation whether or not the Admiralty was going through with a Hercules at Chatham and a 4,500-ton Penelope at Pembroke; ‘A Ship or Ships to be built by Contract on the Turret system if Captain Coles would furnish satisfactory designs, but with regard to this ship I was desired to be, and was, very guarded in my expressions’ (before Parliament). The Secretary worried that plans laid before and approved by the Commons in March should not be changed in May: ‘[‘It will be urged’] That the abandonment of the Hercules Target, while a Committee is now investigating the subject is premature and that either Captain Coles’ Turret Ship is condemned already, or that the constitution of the Hercules Target is a waste of public money; since under the proposed arrangement only one of these ships can be built at the present time.’ Robinson repeated it was neither his nor the Admiralty’s fault that the Coles proposal had not led immediately to a contract in April, and it was already understood that if Coles’s design was rejected (again) that the default position of the navy was to build another Bellerophon. Besides, pursuing this option now would ‘prevent the difficulties which invariably attend the execution of novel and untried designs, by fixed agreement and stipulated Contracts where neither party can exactly forsee [sic] what will be required of them.’ The Civil Lord since the previous April (1864) ⁵³, Hugh Childers was also under the impression that an improved Bellerophon (Hercules) was to be built at Chatham and that a committee was bound to review a formally requested submission by Coles for a seagoing turret ship. ‘There could at that time have been no idea that the construction of Captain Coles’s ship should have begun in April; nor did I ever hear of the suggestion that if her plan was not approved a second Bellerophon would be built by contract.’⁵⁴

Parliament’s reaction to such news would surely be one of surprise—and censure. ‘It will be said that there never was any intention to build a turret ship; that there was a foregone conclusion that Captain Coles’s plan would be condemned; that accordingly the Admiralty contemplated from the first a Hercules and a 2nd Bellerophon; and that the present change (which excludes Hercules if the Turret ship should be approved, but is not accompanied by any change as to the Hercules target) carries out that intention.’ Paget concurred: there should be no changes to the current building programme, and any such changes should be ‘distinctly communicated to the House of Commons before any order is given.’ But Admiral Sir Frederick Grey, the First Naval Lord, thought Paget and Childers (and Somerset) were rather overreacting. The Controller was only proposing ‘to adhere to the plan of building the Hercules at Chatham, to substitute a 2nd Bellerophon for the Contract ship which it was stated might be a turret ship or some other ship[,] and if the plan for the turret ship is approved to build her also at Chatham.’ This would, as Robinson hinted, reduce ‘risk’ by keeping the turret ship’s construction (and, perhaps, design) under tighter control at a government yard. In any case, Grey’s own preference, ‘turret vs. broadside’, was laid on the table: ‘the advantage of having at the earliest period a second Bellerophon, the only ship [existing] combining moderate length, great speed, complete protection and an armament of 12-ton guns should not be lost.’ When Captain Key on the Excellent later requested to make modifications to some of Coles’s turret arrangements on Royal Sovereign, Grey doubted that any objections that Coles may have ‘would be allowed to have any weight. He is weak and ill and cannot shake off the impressions that in everything ordered by the Admiralty there is some concealed desire to deprecate his invention.’⁵⁵ Although the Turret Ship Committee rejected the proposal of Coles, it did state its desire for the Board to commission a double-turreted sailing ironclad of larger dimensions.⁵⁶ This suited the Controller’s department well enough, since it left Coles out of the loop for now and Reed to design the Royal Navy’s first seagoing turret ship, HMS Monarch, with a high-profile freeboard of fourteen feet out of water.

If Somerset and the Board thought this decision would placate Coles and his supporters, they were fatefully wrong. It seemed nonsensical that Reed would produce an apex ironclad armed with rotating turrets whilst simultaneously advancing another whose guns were swivelled from port to port in a central box—the Monarch or the Hercules (and both with equal displacement). The issue of freeboard was then used by Coles in 1866 to attack both types of ironclad as coming from the Admiralty—since American monitors, now being built by Russia as well, concentrated weight even more to carry even heavier guns behind thicker armour on both the turrets and along the waterline. He ignored the fact that they were mastless, with shallow drafts and smaller hulls which limited their coal bunkerage, and thus also their operational range. Ericsson meanwhile had his own supporters in Britain like John Bourne, a notable shipbuilder and engineer. His pamphlet on Captain Coles and the Admiralty, By the Son of An Old Naval Officer (1866) made full use of Ericsson’s calculations to attack the idea of a full-masted, seagoing turret ship. Coles, the pamphlet stressed, was professedly not an engineer—his ‘incertitude and vacillations’ over the years had been proof of this—and ‘whatever delays have occurred since that time in constructing a seagoing turret vessel is equally imputable to Captain Coles’ impracticability; and I would only here remark that he has, from first to last, been treated by the Admiralty with all possible indulgence.’ Despite the recent fallout over Coles’ attacks on Reed in the press, it was obvious that the Chief Constructor was in a much better position to build a seagoing turret ship than Coles was—something which the Board painfully reminded the outspoken turret advocate in January.⁵⁷ The Coles system did not work. Sinking the ‘towers’ at their circumference well below deck meant that unless the vessel had a very high freeboard, the seas would wash over the deck, force out the thin turret lining, and soon swamp the vessel. Ericsson’s turrets, by contrast, rested upon a central spindle necessitating a much smaller perforation in the deck to operate. Higher freeboard meant more hull area to be plated or plated thinly. ‘The result is that the side of Coles’ vessel are not, and cannot be made, shot-proof against heavy guns; and I maintain that a single 15-inch shot from one of Rodman’s guns—such as are now in common use in America, Russia, Sweden, and other countries—if directed against the stern of the Royal Sovereign, would disable her at a blow, by breaking up the gingerbread work of toothed wheels and winches which turn the turrets, and jamming the whole fast so that the turrets could not be moved.’⁵⁸

Yet for all the tough talk issuing from across the Atlantic, post-war demobilisation had, at the same time, seen the powerful Union Army quickly evaporate, and the new British naval attaché, Captain John Bythesea, noted that the fleet of coastal monitors had now carefully gone into ordinary at the new U.S. ironclad base at League Island, Philadelphia.⁵⁹ One of the newest double-turreted versions, however, the 3,500-ton USS Miantonomoh was despatched later that spring on a ‘goodwill’ visit to Imperial Russia (the American Union’s only outspoken friend during the dark days of the Civil War). Headed by Ericsson’s closest and most influential backer, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Vasa Fox, the Miantonomoh was escorted by two large paddlewheel steamers, who towed the monitor midway across the Atlantic to save on her limited coal reserves. Fox invited Bythesea to witness the historic voyage first-hand aboard the mastless ironclad. And while Bythesea was duly impressed with the American ironclad’s internal arrangements (multiple steam engines providing a good margin of failsafe power supply for motive power, operation of the turrets, pumps, and ventilated life-support below deck) he thought the guns too low in the water to be run out in even moderate seas.⁶⁰

But once she was finally anchored at Spithead, outside Portsmouth harbour, Fox could not resist the suggestion to the visiting Lords of the Admiralty (as well as Reed and Coles) ‘that if the experiment could be made without exciting ill-feeling on either side, he would allow the whole ironclad fleet of England to open fire on the Miantonomoh,’ reported an astonished representative from The Times, ‘and continue it for two days, provided that the Miantonomoh might afterwards be allowed to have ten hours’ firing at our ships in return.’⁶¹ Reaction across the country was swift and shocked. Of course the brash American official was politely jesting; of course the Royal Navy seemed unable to call his bluff. The Times lamented how the monitor was a ‘wolf in the fold, and the whole flock was at its mercy.’⁶²

 

As the history of HMS Captain relates, the Board earlier that spring had already relented to Coles to build his own version of a ‘perfect’ double-turreted ironclad, more powerfully armed and armoured than any British ironclad afloat or in the works—fast, and capable of carrying the flag to every corner of the empire. Palmerston had passed away in October 1865, Earl Russell’s government failed to carry through a measure of Reform the following year, and a Conservative government under the Earl of Derby and Disraeli was now in place with Sir John Pakington replacing Somerset (but still approving of Coles). The only way the naval inventor could possibly achieve this was by substantially lowering the freeboard of Reed’s forthcoming Monarch down to ‘8-feet’ and applying the savings of weight into other areas. Just as there would not have been a Monitor without the Warrior—and everything she threatened—there would not have been a Captain without the Monitor. The visit of the Miantonomoh practically sealed the ship’s fate, as Coles and his supporters were now convinced that a low-freeboard turret ship that could patrol oceans as well as reach distant shores safely enough was manifest, despite the eventual misgivings which Reed and the other constructors within the Admiralty had about low-freeboard ships, their centre of gravity in relation to their metacentric height, and later their relative ‘curve of stability’ on the high seas. All the visage of the Miantonomoh needed was a global imperial-sized array of masts and sails.

Even before the Captain was contracted in February 1867 to be built by Laird Brothers at Birkenhead—experienced not just with construction of Coles turret ships like the Huascar for foreign powers, but also the enormous, 10,500-ton broadside giant HMS Agincourt—Robinson knew the ship would be trouble.67 If she succeeded in all of the areas outlined by the Admiralty (speed, seakeeping, firepower, and protection—and did even it all for less cost, in a smaller package, than Reed’s Monarch) then his department would never hear the end of it. If the Captain failed it would further damage the reputation of the navy. Yet when she was launched at the end of March 1869, she was more than two feet deeper in the water than designed. Although Lairds held their breath (as the Admiralty withheld their final payment), Coles thought this made the ship more stable, and at least more stealthy—like a monitor. Trial cruises, even to the Mediterranean, suggested the ship sailed well enough. Still, Robinson, now a vice-admiral and a member of a Board under Hugh Childers since 1868, wanted more tests.⁶³

Even Lairds felt it prudent in such an experimental design. After working out the Captain’s centre of gravity in early August 1870 (which was two feet below the ship’s metacentre—more than safe enough), Admiralty constructor Frederick Barnes was next tasked by Robinson to ascertain the Captain’s curve of stability—a first for major Royal Navy warships. After some delays Barnes finally delivered his preliminary report on 23 August: without coal, provisions, ammunition, and empty boilers, the centre of gravity was only 1.29 feet below the metacentre—jeopardising stability, although the ship could take water into its double-bottom to compensate, as designed. All of his calculations did not indicate a danger to the ship. Indeed, ‘the Captain would with proper management, be quite safe.’ But these did not anticipate ‘if a force of wind sufficient to hold a ship at a definite angle was applied suddenly, as in a gust’, in which eventuality the ship would incline far more…In the case of a ship inclined to eight degrees, a sudden squall would then incline the ship to 15 or 16 degrees’.⁶⁴ If this was combined with a wave slope of only 7 degrees pushing against the same side, while the vessel was in the trough of the sea, the Captain might capsize before she had time to right herself. The ship’s stability vanished beyond 21 degrees, and a certain combination of fierce wind and waves working together might be enough to sink her, pushing more and more without letting up until the vessel finally toppled over. Barnes had been instructed by Robinson to make his calculations assuming the Captain’s forecastle and poop deck had been shot away in combat. But as history tells, the vessel was fatally susceptible to calamity just the same. She was not an all-weather vessel, or she would have to be handled very carefully indeed by an experienced crew in command of all of the available data. As it turned out, Robinson was away when Barnes submitted his report, and his immediate superior, Nathaniel Barnaby, did not forward the information to the fleet (either to Gibraltar or Vigo, before it set sail again on 2 September), thinking it “‘presumptuous to have pressed the curves in the face of the officers trying the Captain.’”⁶⁵ So even then no one considered the Captain would actually sink. What Robinson’s technical officers had provided, however, was a means for him to disqualify the low-freeboard, sail-and-turret ship concept once and for all. Even if the fleet had not encountered the fierce gale with winds reaching Force 10 by midnight of 6 September and made it safely back to England a week or so later, HMS Captain would have been impounded (and either left in Ordinary or altered at great expense in an effort to improve her stability)—and Coles, at any rate, would never get another chance to build more men-of-war for the navy. The math was all on Robinson and Reed’s side after all. After the Captain’s actual foundering on 7 September, Reed went so far as to call it the ‘revenge’ of science over politics.⁶⁶

 

Even so, as David McGee concluded in his 1994 study of this controversy, the Captain’s ‘intended purpose was never firmly established by the Admiralty.’ This then determined the configuration of the vessel itself, from low freeboard to a large spread of canvas. That is, a heavily armoured turret ship with the semblance of a monitor but with the range and speed to rival any broadside-ironclad in the world on top. Again, the context of the times was crucial (and in McGee’s case at least, in relation to the Captain’s story, fairly side-lined.). Since the end of the Civil War, both the U.S. presidential administrations of Andrew Johnson then Ulysses Grant had pressed Great Britain for damages relating to the depravations of the CSS Alabama and other British-built Confederate cruisers. Although he was Britain’s Foreign Secretary at the time, Russell was loathe to admit any legal or moral responsibility to the endlessly bothersome Yankees. As he relayed to Childers in February 1869, ‘Up to a few years ago American statesmen, and generals, and admirals, all thought that at the beginning of a war England would have the best of it; but that opinion had changed, and was then unanimous that the United States would be successful at the commencement of a war between us. Neither Lincoln, nor Johnson, nor Seward wished to try the experiment, but I am by no means confident that Grant may not throw down his glove.’ But the young First Lord of the Admiralty assured him there was nothing to worry about, as the Americans critically had ‘nothing with which they could think of crossing the Atlantic to attack us’, while ‘our ironclad fleet is quite equal to offensive operations on their coast.’ This was due to the fact that Britain was, at last, ‘the only nation who are building seagoing turret ships’. The long spell questioning British naval supremacy which was cast by the original Monitor was finally broken. So confident was Childers in the ‘crack turret ship’ of the Royal Navy that his seventeen-year-old son Leonard would be transferred over to the Captain at the first opportunity.⁶⁷

Missing in all the increasingly personal squabbles over ‘guns versus armour’, or an ironclad’s speed, manoeuvrability, size, and cost was the sailor’s first concern: the sea. Britannia had to rule the waves before her men-of-war might command her enemies’ shores. It was what the Captain was supposed to do, as a crack imperial ship—imposing Her Majesty’s will everywhere she might float—that set the stage for a tragedy. HMS Captain’s reach exceeded her grasp. The fault was political and strategic, not just one of metacentric height or vanishing angles of stability. The American Civil War was fought at a terrible price, including the loss of the USS Monitor. But it remained a civil war, an American conflict only, and not a world war of the mid-nineteenth century. As renowned historian James McPherson observed in wonder, ‘The American Civil War proved an exception to the rule that large-scale internal wars become international wars.’⁶⁸ Part of the reason for this, however, has been obscured. McPherson has pointed to the importance of the battlefield in shaping European attitudes to the war, and then Lincoln’s decision to turn the bloodbath of Antietam (17 September 1862) as a pretext for delivering the Emancipation Proclamation. Once the Civil War was clearly about liberating slaves as well as restoring the American Union, British leaders, in particular, drew back from the notion of intervention. Other historians like Howard Jones, however, have challenged this theory; Palmerston’s ‘Liberal Coalition’ Cabinet as well as most of the leading British press actually treated news of the Emancipation Proclamation that October with serious alarm: clearly the Lincoln administration, losing the contest, had now resorted to inciting servile insurrection—stirring up a vicious race war—against helpless white women and children on the Southern home front. Images of the Indian ‘Mutiny’ and the massacre at Cawnpore from five years earlier filled everyone’s heads.⁶⁹ Gladstone and Russell both circulated memos calling for intervention in the American conflict on humanitarian grounds if nothing else. Palmerston was cautious, especially since the military members of his government, Sir George Cornewall Lewis as Secretary of State for War and Somerset representing the Royal Navy, demurred. Even assuming ‘the right to intervene,’ Lewis asked in his printed Cabinet memo of 7 November 1862, ‘would such an intervention be expedient?’ Imposing Britain’s will against weaker powers and/or those on Britain’s doorstep was one thing. ‘But the Northern States, even weakened by the Secession, are a great Power, and the intervention of European fleets and armies on the Potomac is very different from their intervention at Navarino or Antwerp’, he warned. As for how the British might intervene—forcefully if it came to breaking the Union blockade, for example—it was ‘difficult and expensive to send large armies across the Atlantic, and the wooden ships of Europe would encounter the small iron-cased steamers of America, which, though not sea-going ships, would prove destructive in the ports and rivers.’⁷⁰ What was good for Britain during the Trent crisis was no longer the case scarcely a year later. Ericsson’s Monitor and her forthcoming sister ships had changed all that, making the ocean of all things a barrier for Palmerston’s roving foreign policy as represented by invulnerable warships in an invincible fleet. In the 1860s, radical innovations in guns, armour protection, and ship design momentarily favoured the defensive.

This both dovetailed with and bolstered foreign policies on all sides that were increasingly neutral and isolationist on a point of nationalism as opposed to imperialism—the ‘Global Britain’ of the Victorian Age, the ‘Pax’. The Captain as an ideal struggled mightily to reverse this trend—a sense of impending decline? ‘Not for nought does [Russia] strain her eyes across the Atlantic, to note the first glitter of steel and the first wave of the star-spangled banner’, warned the Morning Post on 22 December 1870. ‘In 1866, when the Miantonomoh was lying at Cronstadt, with hundreds of eager spectators crowding to stare at her double turrets and heavy armament…the compliments showered by the Russians upon their visitors invariably ended in vague menaces against Great Britain, and hints that the two young empires could not do better than make common cause against the old one.’⁷¹ Here the rise of one or more continental land powers—even when asserting naval strength in their own waters—must inevitably entail the fall of a stable world order imposed by the ‘maritime powers’ Britain and France.

 

Perhaps it is this sense that likewise accounts for the doomed Captain’s continued obscurity, a subconscious desire to leave failed things dead and buried. But that would be a grave mistake. ‘What is perhaps most important is how these wrecks speak to us about people’, writes marine archaeologist James P. Delgado, ‘a better understanding not only of the times and cultures that produced these ships of war, but of the people who built, lived in, fought in, and died in these ships.’ After all, the Captain’s importance in British naval history is not so much about the ‘lost ship’ as the people lost, because ‘like so many in history, they were caught up in something bigger than themselves, and in events over which they as individuals had no choice.’⁷² Thus it was left to Robert Lowe, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Gladstone’s Liberal Party government, to try and impose a sense of meaning to the terrible news of the Captain’s loss. On 16 September 1870, at a public banquet in Elgin, he reminded his audience of ‘the progress we believed we were making in naval matters’, and while he deemed it ‘impossible to imagine a catastrophe more melancholy, and yet it seems to be the price we are doomed to pay for great improvements.’ Somewhere, at some point, he reasoned, ‘there was some fatal miscalculation and mistake’—bringing to his mind ‘Byron’s most forcible lines’:

The armaments which thunder-strike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in the capitals.
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada’s pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.⁷³

Notes

1. Most sources point to 473 officers and crew perished: only 18 survived.[↩]
2. The pre-dreadnought HMS Bulwark exploded at anchor off Sheerness on 26 November 1914, with 736 men killed. Even though the catastrophe took place during wartime, the subsequent investigation blamed an internal detonation of cordite charges.[↩]
3. For a recent list of notable casualties see Howard J. Fuller, Turret versus Broadside: An Anatomy of British Naval Prestige, Revolution and Disaster, 1860–1870 (Warwick: Helion & Company Limited, 2020), xxii–xxiii. As described by Hamilton Williams, it was a ‘picked crew of the smartest fighting ship in the British Navy’; ‘Evolution of the Ironclad’ essay-lecture, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), WMS/9, MS 7096, 59[↩]
4. See for example, BBC News, 30 July 2021, ‘China warns UK as carrier strike group approaches’, (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58015367).[↩]
5. 8 January 2022, The Times, review of Chris Terrill, How to Build and Aircraft Carrier: The Incredible Story of the Men and Women Who Brought Britain’s Biggest Warship to Life (Penguin Books Ltd, 2022). Secretary Ben Wallace’s remarks were from June 2021.[↩]
6. Antony Preston, The World’s Worst Warships (London: Conway Maritime Press, 2002), 16–29.[↩]
7. R. A. Fletcher, Warships and Their Story (London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1911), 144–5; Charles Napier Robinson, The British Fleet: The Growth, Achievements and Duties of the Navy of the Empire (London: George Bell & Sons, 1894), 260.  Robinson was a founder of both the Society for Nautical Research and the Navy Records Society, having joined the Navy in 1861, at age thirteen.[↩]
8. ‘Notes on the Navy’, ‘By an Old Sailor’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. 12 (July–Dec 1875), November 1875, 674 (the writer later admitted he served ‘under the regime of Mr. Childers’).[↩]
9. 11 October 1870, The Times.[↩]
10. William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to 1900, 7 vols. (London: Chatham Publishing, 1997 reprint of 1903 original), 7: 26–7; Fred T. Jane, The British Battle-Fleet: Its Inception and Growth throughout the Centuries (London: Conway, 1997 reprint of 1912 original), 188; G. A. Ballard, ‘British Battleships of 1870: The Captain’, The Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1931), 244–69; also The Black Battlefleet: A Study of the Capital Ship in Transition (London: Nautical Publishing Co., Lymington & the Society for Nautical Research, Greenwich, 1980), 99–113; Arthur Hawkey, HMS Captain (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1963), reprinted as Black Night off Finisterre: The Tragic Tale of an Early British Ironclad (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1999), 136.[↩]
11. Don Leggett, Shaping the Royal Navy: Technology, Authority and Naval Architecture, c1830-1906 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 12–-64; see also his analysis, ‘Neptune’s New Clothes: Actors, Iron and the Identity of the Mid-Victorian Warship’, in Don Leggett and Richard Dunn (eds.), Re-inventing the Ship: Science, Technology and the Maritime World, 1800–1918 (Farnham: Ashgate publishing Limited, 2012), 71–92.[↩]
12. Duncan Redford, ‘The Royal Navy, Sea Blindness and British National Identity’, in Duncan Redford (ed.), Maritime History and Identity: The Sea and Culture in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 61–80.[↩]
13. Colin F. Baxter, ‘The Duke of Somerset and the Creation of the British Ironclad Navy, 1859–66’, The Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. 63, No. 3 (1977), 279–84.[↩]
14. 11 June 1862 and 27 March 1861, Palmerston to Somerset, Somerset Papers Collection, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire Record Office, D/RA/A/2A/38 and D/RA/A/2A/37.[↩]
15. See for example D. Bonner-Smith and A. C. Dewar (eds.), Publications of the Navy Records Society, Vol. LXXXIII, Russian War, 1854—Baltic and Black Sea, Official Correspondence (London: Navy Records Society, 1943); 13 March 1856, ‘Operations in the Baltic’, Hansard, vol. 141, 48–119; and 4 April 1856, ‘Sir Charles Napier at Acre’, Hansard, vol. 141, 480–522; and 1854, ‘The Return from the Baltic!!’, Punch, vol. xxvii, 117.[↩]
16. 6 September 1864, Palmerston to Somerset, Somerset Papers, Aylesbury, D/RA/A/2A/40; 11 September 1864, Palmerston to Ripon, Palmerston Papers, Broadlands (University of Southampton), MS 62, Private Letterbook, April 1862 to March 1865.[↩]
17. From Arthur Irwin Dasent, John Thadeus Delane—Editor of The Times, His Life and Correspondence, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1908), 2: 34; see also Laurence Fenton, Palmerston and The Times: Foreign Policy, the Press and Public Opinion in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: I. B. Taurus, 2013).[↩]
18. The National Archives, Kew (‘TNA’) Admiralty (ADM) 1/5802, 11 April 1862; enclosed letter from Coles to Clarence Paget dated 31 March 1862.[↩]
19. February 1862, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 228.[↩]
20. 11 January 1862 and 31 May 1862, Harper’s Weekly.[↩]
21. 4 April 1862, Charles Francis Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., from Worthington Chauncey Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), 1:123.[↩]
22. 20 January 1862, Ericsson to Gustavus Vasa Fox (Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy), quoted from John Ericsson, Contributions to the Centennial Exhibition (New York: Nation Press, 1876), 465–6.[↩]
23. 10 March 1866, The Times.[↩]
24. 14 January 1864, The Times.[↩][↩]
25. Rear-Admiral John Dahlgren reported to U.S. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles on 2 September 1863 that while the combination of land-based siege artillery on Morris Island and Union ironclads’ fire had reduced Sumter ‘useless to the Confederate system of defences’, he had lost ‘three flag-captains in the short space of two months’, killed, wounded or sick, in the attacking squadron; 2 September 1864, from Report of the Secretary of the Navy In Relation to Armored Vessels (Washington DC: GPO, 1864), 231–2; Dahlgren’s tally of ironclad engagements with Charleston’s outer forts is dated 28 January 1864, 583. [↩]
26. For various British reports on Russian ‘infernal machines’ see Sir Charles Napier Papers, TNA PRO 30-16, 5; 4 February, 1856, TNA ADM 1/5674; 23 February, 1856, Foreign Office to Admiralty, TNA ADM 1/5677 (information clandestinely supplied via the Swedish Minister at St. Petersburg, General Nordin).[↩]
27. Apparently written for Admiral Sir William Reginald Hall, Director of Naval Intelligence (1914–1919), TNA ADM 1/8492-154.  Under ‘1854. Franco-British Fleet in the Baltic’, Corbett noted, ‘After full reconnaissance it was decided that an attack on the Russian Fleet in its base without troops was impracticable, and no attack was made in spite of strong pressure from Public opinion at home.’[↩]
28. 23 and 31 January 1864, The Times.[↩]
29. 24 January 1864, Goodenough to Admiralty, TNA ADM 1/5879.[↩]
30. 29 January 1864, The Times. Warrior was armed with 68-pounder, muzzle-loaded smoothbores and experimental 110-pound rifled Armstrong breechloaders (later proven to be largely defective at the breach).[↩]
31. See for example Kenneth Bourne, ‘British Preparations for War with the North, 1861–1862’, English Historical Review 76 (October 1961), 600–32; and Howard J. Fuller, Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power (Westport: Praeger, 2007), especially 36–43, 68–72.[↩]
32. 15 March 1864, Milne to Admiralty, ‘Memoranda relative to the North American & West Indian Station’, TNA ADM 1/5871.  Port Royal, Jamaica was considered by a recent Royal Engineer’s survey to be all but defenceless against modern ordnance and steam-powered warships, 19 March 1864, War Office to Admiralty, TNA ADM 1/5905. The deployment of heavy vessels to Bermuda was always fraught with risk, as demonstrated a year later when the 101-gun screw ship-of-the-line HMS Duncan, flagship of the North America and West Indies Station, ran aground on an uncharted coral reef in the Bermuda Narrows; 3 March 1865, Hope to Admiralty, TNA ADM 1/5922.[↩]
33. ‘The Great Naval Revolution’, Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 5 (January to June 1862), 550–59; ‘On a Further Reconstruction of the Navy’, Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 4 (July to December 1861), 715–24.[↩]
34. Barrass, ‘On Armour-Plated Ships, and the Stability of Vessels in a Seaway, Considered in Relation to the Principle of the Lever and the Laws of Motion, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, Vol. 8 (1864), 198–216; 26 October 1863, TNA ADM 3/271.[↩]
35. 13 November 1863, Robinson to Board, TNA ADM 1/5842.[↩]
36. 10 March 1864, Hansard, ‘The Prince Consort and the Lively’, Vol. 173, 1767–70. James Dalrymple-Horn-Elphinstone, 2nd Baronet, was Conservative MP for Portsmouth (1857–1865). For the Laird Rams (later HMS Scorpion and Wivern) see for example Andrew R. English, The Laird Rams: Britain’s Ironclads Built for the Confederacy, 1862–1923 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2021).[↩]
37. 1 August 1864, The Times.[↩]
38. 23 September 1864, Robinson to Board, TNA ADM 1/5801 (Osborn’s enclosed report is dated 13 September 1864); 2 August 1864, Palmerston to Somerset, Somerset Papers, Aylesbury, D/RA/A/2A/40.[↩]
39. See for example, Howard J. Fuller, ‘“The absence of decisive results”: British Assessments of Union Combined Operations’, in Craig Symonds (ed.), Union Combined Operations in the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 115–134.[↩]
40. Undated, presumably 1864, ‘Navigation to Lake Ontario’, Somerset Papers (Edward Adolphus Seymour, 12th Duke of Somerset), Devon Archives Record Office, Exeter, Box 19, A1-5.[↩]
41. 12 July 1864, Defence of Canada-printed memo by Gladstone, Palmerston Papers, Broadlands, CAB/183-193. See also Trevor Cox, ‘The American Civil War and the British Imperial Dilemma’, University of Wolverhampton Ph.D. thesis (2015); and Paul Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1966), 91–4.[↩]
42. 12 July 1864, Defence of Canada, 4–9. As a Colonial Office memo of 16 September 1864 warned, with some two-thirds of annual British revenue currently devoted towards military expenditure (‘£28,000,000’ of ‘£43,000,000’), Canada might be asked to contribute ‘about £900,000’ for its own defence if keeping the same proportion; TNA CO 325/48.[↩]
43. 11 June 1864, Punch, ‘Out of the Race’.[↩]
44. 9 October 1864, Palmerston to Gladstone, from Philip Guedalla (ed.), The Palmerston Papers: Gladstone and Palmerston, being the Correspondence of Lord Palmerston with Mr. Gladstone 1851–1865 (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1928), 297–304.[↩]
45. 22 October 1864, Gladstone to Palmerston, and 7 November 1864, Palmerston to Gladstone, from Guedalla, Gladstone and Palmerston, 305–8, 310–14; also Spencer Childers (ed.), The Life and Correspondence of the Right Hon. Hugh C. E. Childers 1827–1896, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1901), 1: 120–7. See also 12 May 1864, Palmerston to Gladstone, 281–2, where he argued that opposed to the vote, ‘What every Man and Woman too have a right to, is to be well governed and under just Laws’.[↩]
46. As reported by The Times on 5 December 1864; Paget’s 2 December speech to his constituents at Deal (Kent).[↩]
47. 15 March 1864, Morier to Lady Salisbury, in Rosslyn Wemyss (ed.), Memoirs and Letters of the Right Hon. Sir Robert Morier, G.C.B., From 1826 to 1876, 2 vols. (London: Edward Arnold, 1911), 1: 401–8. As Kenneth Bourne observed, ‘Palmerston’s policy of bluff was certainly always dangerous—and it was made more so by Russell’s tendency to forget that it was bluff’, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England 1830–1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 109.[↩]
48. 5 December 1864, The Times.[↩]
49. 7 December 1864, The Times.[↩]
50. 9 March 1865, ‘Supply—Navy Estimates’, Hansard, Vol. 177, 1373–1456. Sir Samuel Morton Peto, 1st Baronet, ‘Liberal’ Member for Finsbury (1859–65); Captain Sir John Dalrymple Hay, RN (3rd Baronet), Conservative Member for Wakefield (1862–65), and the Chairman of the Iron Plate Committee. Given the acute absence of a Naval member of the Board of Admiralty in the House of Commons, leaving the Secretary or a Civil Lord to field increasingly technical questions from MPS relating to shipbuilding, Somerset’s memo of March 1865 directed the Board to inform the Secretary ‘at all times…the progress of business on which he may be called upon to give explanations in Parliament’, TNA ADM 1/5933; see also C. I. Hamilton, The Making of the Modern Admiralty: British Naval Policy-Making, 1805–1927 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 126–31. [↩]
51. 8 April 1865, Robinson to Board, TNA ADM 1/5941.[↩]
52. 11 May 1865, ‘Proposed alterations in Programme for 1865—Remarks by Lord. C. Paget’, TNA ADM 1/5942; Robinson’s enclosed ‘Proposal to build a duplicate Bellerophon’ is dated 10 May, and his enclosed follow-up proposal for an improved Penelope for service on Foreign Stations is dated 26 May.[↩]
53. Replacing Radical James Stansfeld in April 1864.[↩]
54. 11 and 12 May 1865, Robinson to Board, TNA ADM 1/5942; the enclosed minute by Childers is dated 15 May, with Paget concurring in his enclosed minute dated 16 May; Grey’s minute is dated the following day.[↩]
55. 12 May 1865, Robinson to Board, TNA ADM 1/5942; 25 May 1865, Grey to Key, Private Letterbook of Rear Admiral Sir F. W. Grey, National Archives of Scotland, GD 51/17/68.[↩]
56. Report of a Committee of Naval Officers Appointed to Examine the Design of a Sea-Going Turret-Ship Submitted to the Admiralty by Captain Cowper C. P. Coles, R.N.; see also the all too public ‘reply’ by Coles, Letters from Captain Cowper Coles to the Secretary of the Admiralty on Sea-Going Turret-Ships (Portsea: James Griffin and Co., 1865).[↩]
57. See 10 January 1866, Robinson to Board,  and 13 January 1866, Paget to Coles in Navy (Turret Ships), Parliamentary Papers, return ordered 1 March 1866, and printed 6 July 1866, 177–9.[↩]
58. John Bourne, Captain Coles and the Admiralty, By the Son of An Old Naval Officer (1866), 19–22.[↩]
59. 6 March 1866, Bruce to Clarendon, enclosing 6 March 1866, Bythesea to Bruce, TNA FO 5/1063. Bythesea had been awarded a Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Baltic during the Crimean War.[↩]
60. See 20 June 1866, Bythesea to Clarendon, in TNA ADM 1/5992; and Report of the Committee Appointed by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to Examine The Designs Upon Which Ships of War Have Recently Been Constructed with Analysis of Evidence (Parliamentary Paper 1872), Appendix, 34–41.[↩]
61. See 30 June, and 2 and 16 July 1866, The Times; also John D. Champlin (ed.), Narrative of the Mission to Russia, in 1866, of the Hon. Gustavus Vasa Fox, Assistant-Secretary of the Navy, from the Journal and Notes of J. F. Loubat (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873), 43.[↩]
62. 17 July 1866, The Times.[↩]
63. Robinson was made Third Naval Lord from 18 December 1868 with the fall of Disraeli’s government and a new one head by Gladstone with Childers as First Lord of the Admiralty. Both Romaine and Milne thought this a serious mistake; see for example their undated memos (possibly early December 1868) in Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Milne Papers, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, MLN 165/11.[↩]
64. See David B. McGee, ‘Floating Bodies, Naval Science: Science, Design and the Captain Controversy, 1860–1870’, University of Toronto Ph.D. thesis (1994), 458–66, 477.[↩]
65. Parliamentary Papers, Minute by the First Lord of the Admiralty with Reference to H.M.S. Captain with the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Court Martial and the Board Minute Thereon (London: Harrison and Sons, 1871), 154.[↩]
66. Macmillan’s Magazine, November 1870.[↩]
67. 12 February 1869, Russell to Childers, 17 February 1869, Childers to Russell, and 21 September 1869, Childers to Emily Childers, in Childers, The Life and Correspondence, 1: 171-2, 181-2.  Russell replied with relief on 19 February, inasmuch as the ‘Alabama Convention’ was to be rejected. ‘We may now insist on honourable conditions, or none at all’; 1: 173.[↩]
68. James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: McGraw Hill, 2001), 237.[↩]
69. Howard Jones, Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 182–6, 199 and Howard Jones, ‘History and Mythology: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War’, in Robert E. May (ed.), The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1995), 34–52.[↩]
70. 7 November 1862, Secretary for War Sir George C. Lewis, Recognition of the Independence of the Southern States of the North American Union, TNA WO 33/12, 2.[↩]
71. 22 December 1870, Morning Post.[↩]
72. James P. Delgado, War at Sea: A Shipwrecked History from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University 2019), 7.[↩]
73. From Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), Canto 4, Stanza 181; as reported in the 21 September 1870 Hampshire Telegraph and Naval Chronicle (Portsmouth).[↩]