Naval/Maritime History 19th of April - Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1790 – Launch of HMS Queen Charlotte, a 100-gun first-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, at Chatham.


HMS Queen Charlotte was a 100-gun first-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched on 15 April 1790 at Chatham. She was built to the draught of Royal George designed by Sir Edward Hunt, though with a modified armament.

In 1794 Queen Charlotte was the flagship of Admiral Lord Howe at the Battle of the Glorious First of June, and in 1795 she took part in the Battle of Groix.




Scale: 1:48. Plan showing the body plan, sheer lines, and longitudinal half-breadth for 'Royal George' (1788), and a year later for 'Queen Charlotte' (1790), both 100-gun First Rate, three-deckers, after the design had been lengthened by three feet.

Fate
At about 6am on 17 March 1800, whilst operating as the flagship of Vice-Admiral Lord Keith, Queen Charlotte was reconnoitering the island of Capraia, in the Tuscan Archipelago, when she caught fire. Keith was not aboard at the time and observed the disaster from the shore.

The fire was believed to have resulted from someone having accidentally thrown loose hay on a match tub. Two or three American vessels lying at anchor off Leghorn were able to render assistance, losing several men in the effort as the vessel's guns exploded in the heat. Captain A. Todd wrote several accounts of the disaster that he gave to sailors to give to the Admiralty should they survive. He himself perished with his ship. The crew was unable to extinguish the flames and at about 11am the ship blew up with the loss of 673 officers and men.


This review at Spithead, which the artist may have witnessed, demonstrated England's sea power just before the French Revolutionary Wars. In this interpretation, ships ride at anchor in Spithead, opposite Portsmouth, the most important naval base in the country. To the left of centre, the dominant ship is Admiral Lord Howe's flagship, 'Queen Charlotte', a new 104-gun first-rate. Her figurehead is clearly shown, and she fires a salute in honour of the Admiral who is being rowed over in his barge in the foreground. 'Queen Charlotte' flies a Union flag at the main, since Lord Howe, as senior Admiral of the Red was Admiral of the Fleet. To the left, other ships are portrayed anchored in lines both to the right of the 'Queen Charlotte', and on the horizon, indicating the strength and power of the Navy. It is not clear what occasion was being recorded by the artist, but it may have been connected with Russian armament. 'Queen Charlotte' was also Howe's flagship at the Battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794. Howe was nicknamed 'Black Dick' by his officers and men due to his dark complexion and taciturnity. The Scottish born artist was heavily influenced by 17th century Dutch marine artists. He is best known for his works in this style, although he also produced larger history paintings.





Scale: 1:60. A contemporary full hull model of the three-decker 100-gun first-rate ‘Queen Charlotte’ built plank on frame in the ‘Georgian’ style. The quality and finish of the model is exceptional both in the construction and the lavish carved and painted decoration. The ‘Queen Charlotte’ was launched at Chatham Royal Dockyard in 1789 and measured 190 feet along the gun deck by 52 feet in the beam and had tonnage of 2278. She was Lord Howe’s flagship at the Battle of the First of June in 1794 and also took part in Lord Bridport’s action off Croix in 1795. She was accidentally set alight off Leghorn in 1800 with the loss of nearly 700 lives.


Umpire class (Hunt)

• Royal George 100 (1788) – broken up 1822
• Queen Charlotte 100 (1790) – an accidental fire in 1800 destroyed her and killed 673 of her crew of 859
• Queen Charlotte 104 (1810) – renamed Excellent 1860, broken up 1892

Scale: 1:24. Plan showing the starboard profile of the figurehead for 'Queen Charlotte' (1790), a 100-gun First Rate, three-decker.


Scale: 1:24. Plan showing the port profile of the figurehead for 'Queen Charlotte' (1790), a 100-gun First Rate, three-decker.


A view of the Queen Charlotte Man of War, of 100 guns, laying at Spithead, where in the ships Company is represented Manning the Yards, in order to salute the Admiral on coming aboard (PAF7981)

HMS Queen Charlotte (1790) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://collections.rmg.co.uk/colle...el-341405;browseBy=vessel;vesselFacetLetter=Q

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1802 – Launch of French Rhin, a 40-gun Virginie-class frigate of the French Navy launched in 1802


Rhin was a 40-gun Virginie-class frigate of the French Navy launched in 1802. She was present at two major battles while in French service. The Royal Navy captured her in 1806. Thereafter Rhin served until 1815 capturing numerous vessels. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars she was laid up and then served as a hospital for many years. She was finally broken up in 1884.


Quarantine Guard Ship Rhin, Margate Creek



French service
Rhin took part in the Battle of Cape Finisterre and in the Battle of Trafalgar.

HMS Mars captured Rhin on 28 July 1806, after a chase of 26 hours and 150 miles. Her commander, M. Chesneau, struck just before Mars was about to fire her first broadside. Surinam was present or in sight at the capture of the Rhin.

Rhin arrived at Plymouth on 8 August. She was repaired and fitted there from March through August 1809. The Royal Navy commissioned her in June 1809 as HMS Rhin under Captain Frederick Aylmer for the Channel. Captain Charles Malcolm replaced Aylmer in July 1809, and would remain her captain until Rhin paid off in 1815.

British service: Napoleonic Wars
On 16 November 1809, Rhin was in company with Pheasant when Pheasant recaptured the brig Trust.

On 22 March 1810 Rhin captured the French privateer Navarrois. Navarrois was four days out of Bayonne, was armed with 16 guns and carried a crew of 132 men.

On 27 September Wolverine had been in pursuit of a French brig when Rhin joined the chase and after two and a half hours captured the quarry off the Lizard. The French vessel was the privateer San Joseph, of Saint Malo, under the command of a Joseph Wittevronghel, a Dane. San Joseph was one year old, about 100 tons burthen (bm), and armed with 14 guns though she was pierced for 16. She had only been out one day when the British captured her and had taken nothing. Little Belt had been in company with Wolverine at the time.

On 9 October Rhin captured the French privateer brig Comtesse de Montalivet, of Saint Malo. The capture followed a chase of two and a half hours and only ended when the brig lost her maintop-mast. Comtesse de Montalivet was pierced for 16 guns but only mounted 14. She had a crew of 57 men but only 40 were on board as 17 were in prize crews. She was a new vessel on her first cruise and had taken two prizes, one a Portuguese ship and the other an American brig.

On 14 October Rhin recaptured the ship Fama. Fama, which had been sailing from Lisbon to London when she was captured, arrived in Plymouth on 18 October.

On 2 February 1811 Rhin captured the French privateer brig Brocanteur.

On 5 April Rhin captured the schooner Bonne Jeanette. Six days later Rhin captured the American ship Projector. Almost two months later, on 27 May, Rhin was in company with the Princess Charlotte when they captured the American ship Fox. Then on 12 December Rhin captured the French chasse maree Dorade.

On 27 March 1812 Rhin captured the American brig Eclipse. Eclipse. off 300 tons, was armed with six guns and had a crew of 28 men. She had been sailing from Baltimore to Bordeaux when Rhincaptured her, and arrived at Plymouth on 2 April.

On 21 June Rhin and Medusa supported an attack by Spanish guerrillas on French forces Lequitio and the nearby island of San Nicholas. Venerable landed a gun whose fire enabled the guerrillas to capture the fort above the town. Medusa and Rhin landed a carronade each to support their marines and those from Surveillante, who captured the island. Although the guerrillas suffered losses, British casualties were nil. On 24 June, landing parties from Rhin and Medusa destroyed fortified works at Plencia.

On 8 November Rhin was in company with the sloop Helicon when they captured the French privateer Courageuse. The capture took place off the Eddystone after a four-hour chase during which the privateer schooner threw overboard her 14 guns, her anchors and part of her provisions. Courageuse was of 90 tons and carried a crew of 70 men.

British service: War of 1812
On 5 January 1813 Rhin, Colossus and the brig Goldfinch captured the American ship Dolphin. A little over a month later, on 11 February, Rhin and Colossus captured the American ship Print.

On 24 February 1814, Rhin recaptured the Robert. Then on 11 March Rhin captured the American letter of marque brig Rattlesnake.

A satisfying capture occurred on 5 June when Rhin sighted and gave chase to an American privateer schooner. After an eleven-hour chase Rhin captured the Decatur in the Mona Passage about four leagues from Cape Engaño. Her captain was Dominique Diron, who had also commanded Decatur when she had captured the schooner HMS Dominica in 1813. Decatur had sailed from Charleston on 30 March and had made no captures.

On 27 June 1815 Rhin captured French transport No. 749, Leon, and Marie Joseph. Then on 19 July, Rhin was in company with Havannah, Sealark, Menelaus, Ferret and Fly when they captured the French vessels Fortune, Papillon, Marie Graty, Marie Victorine, Cannoniere, and Printemis. The attack took place at Corrijou (Koréjou, east of Abervrach on the coast of Brittany), and during the action Ferret was able to prevent the escape of a French man-of-war brig that she force ashore. Apparently, this cutting out expedition was the last of the war.

Later career
Rhin underwent a large repair at Sheerness between May 1817 and August 1820. She was then laid up (roofed over).

In 1822 Rhin was among the many vessels that had served on the north coast of Spain and the coast of France in the years 1812, 1813 and 1814 that received their respective proportions of the sum reserved to answer disputed claims from the Parliamentary grant for services during those years.

From May to October 1838 she was fitted at Chatham as a lazaretto for Sheerness.

Fate
The Admiralty lent Rhin to the Sub-committee for the Inspection of Shipping on the Thames as a smallpox hospital ship on 9 September 1871. She was sold to Charlton & Sons, Charlton on 26 May 1884 for £1,250.



Scale: 1:48. Plan showing the body plan, stern board outline, sheer lines with inboard detail, and longitudinal half-breadth for Volontaire (captured 1806), a captured French Frigate, as taken off at Portsmouth in October 1806. The plan illustrates the ship prior to being fitted as a 38-gun Fifth Rate Frigate. Signed by Nicholas Diddams [Master Shipwright, Portsmouth Dockyard, 1803-1823].

The Virginie class was a class of ten 40-gun frigates of the French Navy, designed in 1793 by Jacques-Noël Sané. An eleventh vessel (Zephyr) begun in 1794 was never completed.

• Virginie

Builder: Brest
Begun: November 1793
Launched: 26 July 1794
Completed: December 1794
Fate: Captured by the British Navy on 22 April 1796, becoming HMS Virginie.

• Courageuse

Builder: Brest
Begun: December 1793
Launched: early August 1794
Completed: December 1794
Fate: Renamed Justice April 1795. Captured by the British Navy in September 1801, but not added to Royal Navy; instead, handed over to the Turkish Navy.

• Harmonie

Builder: Bordeaux
Begun: May 1794
Launched: early 1796
Completed: May 1796
Fate: Beached and burnt to avoid capture by the British Navy in April 1797.

• Volontaire

Builder: Bordeaux
Begun: September 1794
Launched: 7 June 1796
Completed: 1796
Fate: Captured by the British Navy on 4 March 1806, becoming HMS Volontaire.

• Cornélie

Builder: Brest
Begun: March 1794
Launched: 19 September 1796
Completed: April 1798
Fate: Captured by the Spanish Navy in June 1808, becoming Spanish Cornelia.

• Zéphyr

Builder: Brest
Begun: March 1794
Fate: Construction abandoned in April 1804 (never launched).

• Didon

Builder: Saint Malo
Begun: September 1796
Launched: 1 August 1799
Completed: September 1800
Fate: Captured by the British Navy on 10 August 1805, becoming HMS Didon.

• Atalante

Builder: Saint Malo
Begun: September 1799
Launched: 29 June 1802
Completed: July 1802
Fate: Wrecked in November 1805.

• Rhin

Builder: Toulon
Begun: June 1801
Launched: 15 April 1802
Completed: October 1802
Fate: Captured by the British Navy on 27 July 1806, becoming HMS Rhin.

• Belle Poule

Builder: Basse-Indre
Begun: June 1801
Launched: 17 April 1802
Completed: September 1802
Fate: Captured by the British Navy on 13 March 1806, becoming HMS Belle Poule.

• Surveillante

Builder: Basse-Indre
Begun: July 1801
Launched: 29 May 1802
Completed: December 1802
Fate: Captured by the British Navy on 30 November 1803, becoming HMS Surveillante.


Virginie fighting HMS Indefatigable


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_frigate_Rhin_(1802)

Virginie-class frigate - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://collections.rmg.co.uk/colle...el-343103;browseBy=vessel;vesselFacetLetter=R
https://collections.rmg.co.uk/colle...el-358327;browseBy=vessel;vesselFacetLetter=V

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1805 - Boats of HMS Papillon, William Woolsey, captured Spanish felucca-rigged privateer Conception (1) off Jamaica.


HMS Papillon was the French Navy's 12-gun brig Papillon, which the British captured in September 1803. She foundered in September 1805 with the loss of all her crew.





French career and capture
Papillon was launched in 1793 and is sometimes referred to as Papillon No. 2, as the 6-gun brig-aviso Papillon was still in service. The 12-gun Papillon participated in the Croisière du Grand Hiver, an unsuccessful sortie by the French fleet at Brest on 24 December 1794.

In September 1803 the rebel slaves under General Jean-Jacques Dessalines were closely pressing the French troops in northwest Saint Domingue. Captain Walker, of Vanguard, off the Mole St. Nicholas, persuaded the General not to put the garrison of Saint-Marc to death but to march them to the Mole in safety where Vanguard would take possession of the shipping in the bay. Walker succeeded in evacuating the 850 men of the garrison, all very emaciated. He also brought out the brigs Papillon and Trois Amis (a transport), and the schooner Mary Sally, with 40 or 50 barrels of powder. Papillon was pierced for 12 guns but only mounted six. She had a crew of 52 men under the command of Mons. Dubourg.

British service
The British took Papillon into service under her existing name. She was commissioned in 1804 under Lieutenant John Smyth in the Leeward Islands.

In 1805 Lieutenant William Woolsey replaced Smyth. Woolsey received a promotion to Commander in March but was not yet able to take it up.

On 15 April 1805 Papillon was anchored at Savanna-la-Mar, Jamaica, when the master of a drogger informed Woolsey that there was a Spanish privateer felucca off the west coast of the island. Woolsey realised that the felucca would escape if he approached in Papillon and so decided to use a stratagem. He borrowed a shallop from a merchant ship, disguised her as a drogger, and put on board 25 men under the command of Lieutenant Prieur. The mock drogger encountered the felucca by 8 p.m. the same evening and Prieur permitted the unsuspecting privateer to come alongside. He then had his men fire a volley into the privateer and board her. In the action, the privateer lost seven men killed or drowned, and eight badly wounded, out of a crew of 25; the British had two men slightly wounded. Four of the privateer's crew swam ashore, where the militia seized them.

The privateer was Conception, of 25 tons (bm), armed with one 3-pounder gun and small arms. She was three days out of Cuba and had taken no prizes. Woolsey delivered his prisoners and the wounded to Savanna-La-Mar.

Between 1 March and 2 June 1805 Papillon also recaptured the British schooner Desirée. HMS Heureux and HMS Hercule are also both recorded as capturing a ship of the same name during the same period. Papillon is listed in the summary seasonal report to the Admiralty as the captor of Desirée, while earlier letters credit the larger ships. In all likelihood Papillon was in company with the other ships and took actual possession.

Fate
Papillon, still under Woolsey's command, was lost in September 1805, with all her crew. She and Vanguard sailed from Jamaica on 28 July as escorts to a convoy. On 25 September Papillon parted company from the convoy during a gale in the Atlantic. The convoy arrived at Spithead on 14 October but Papillon never arrived.



Film: Master and Commander
Papillon's capture of the Spanish privateer by stratagem in April 1805 bears remarkable similarities to an incident in the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Writer Patrick O'Brian drew on the Napoleonic Wars for his Aubrey–Maturin series of novels on which the film is based. Papillon is the same class of ship as used in the film, and the event's date in the film corresponds with the capture of the privateer's in Jamaica on 15 April 1805.

HMS Papillon (1803) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=show_ship&id=15293

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1809 - HMS Intrepid (64) engaged French frigates Furieuse (flute 20) and Felicite (flute 14).


HMS Intrepid was a 64-gun third rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched on 4 December 1770 at Woolwich. She was sold in 1828.




Intrepid 3rd rate 64 guns bow painted in 1774 by Joseph Marshall


Intrepid stern, painted in 1774 by Joseph Marshall

Initial service
In 1772 Intrepid sailed to the Dutch East Indies. The ship's master on this journey was John Hunter, later an admiral and the second Governor of New South Wales.

She took part in the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781.

French Revolutionary Wars
Intrepid and Chichester captured the advice-brig Serin off San Domingo on 31 July 1794. The Royal Navy took her into service as HMS Serin.

In February 1796, Intrepid was patrolling near Cap-François looking for reinforcements expected from Cork when she encountered a French corvette. After a chase of ten hours, the corvette ran ashore in a cove to the east of Porto Plata, where her crew abandoned her, enabling the British to retrieve her. She turned out to be Perçante, armed with twenty 9-pounder guns and six brass 2-pounders, with a crew of 200 men under the command of Citoyen Jacque Clement Tourtellet. She had left La Rochelle on 6 December 1795 under orders from the Minister of Marine and Colonies not to communicate with any vessel on the way. The British took her into service as the sixth-rate HMS Jamaica. Musquito must have been in company or in sight as she shared in the proceeds of the capture.

Captain Sir William Hargood took command of Intrepid and convoyed a fleet of nine East Indiamen to China. One was Malabar.

Hargood remained and Intrepid remained in China until the Peace of Amiens in 1802, defending Macau at the Macau Incident of January 1799.

On 4 April 1801, Intrepid captured Chance. The prize agent failed and what prize money could be recovered from his estate was not paid until 1828.

Napoleonic Wars
In April 1809, a strong French squadron arrived at the Îles des Saintes, south of Guadeloupe. There they were blockaded until 14 April, when a British force under Major-General Frederick Maitland and Captain Philip Beaver in Acasta, invaded and captured the islands. Intrepid was among the naval vessels that shared in the proceeds of the capture of the islands.

Fate
The Navy fitted Intrepid as a receiving ship in May 1810. She then went into Ordinary until 1815.

On 26 March 1828, the "Principal Officers and Commissioners of His Majesty's Navy" offered for sale at Plymouth "Intrepid, of 50 guns and 1374 tons". The Navy sold Intrepid for £3,030 on that day to D. Beatson.


Scale: 1:48. Plan showing the body plan, sheer lines, and longitudinal half-breadth proposed (and approved) for Intrepid (1770), a 64-gun Third Rate, two-decker. The plan includes a table of mast and yard dimensions. The later alterations to the quarterdeck and forecastle roughtree rails are dated 1805. Signed by John Williams [Surveyor of the Navy, 1765-1784]


The Intrepid-class ships of the line were a class of fifteen 64-gun third rates, designed for the Royal Navy by Sir John Williams. His design, approved on 18 December 1765, was slightly smaller than Sir Thomas Slade's contemporary Worcester class design of the same year, against which it was evaluated competitively. Following the prototype, four more ships were ordered in 1767–69, and a further ten between 1771 and 1779.



Intrepid class (Williams)

• Intrepid 64 (1770) – sold for breaking 1828.
• Monmouth 64 (1772) – broken up 1818.
• Defiance 64 (1772) – sank 1780.
• Nonsuch 64 (1774) – broken up 1802.
• Ruby 64 (1776) – broken up 1821.
• Vigilant 64 (1774) – broken up 1816.
• Eagle 64 (1774) – broken up 1812.
• America 64 (1777) – broken up 1807.
• Anson 64 (1781) – razéed to 44-gun frigate 1794, wrecked 1807
• Polyphemus 64 (1782) – broken up 1827.
• Magnanime 64 (1780) – razéed to 44-gun frigate 1794, broken up 1813.
• Sampson 64 (1781) – sold for breaking 1832.
• Repulse 64 (1780) – wrecked 1800.
• Diadem 64 (1782) – broken up 1832.
• Standard 64 (1782) – broken up 1816.

Scale: 1:48. A contemporary ful hull skeleton model of the Intrepid (1770), a third rate 64 gun two-decker ship of the line. Numerous hand written labels attached to inner and outer surfaces of frame identifying specific parts. The ‘Intrepid’ model was almost certainly the one referred to in the following letter from King George III to Lord Sandwich in September 1773: ‘I shall be very curious to receive the model you mean to send tomorrow, and doubt not from the ingenuity of Mr Williams that it will thoroughly explain the construction of a ship, which the more I reflect on it the more it shows the perfection to which mechanics has arrived.’

HMS Intrepid (1770) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrepid-class_ship_of_the_line
https://collections.rmg.co.uk/colle...6;browseBy=vessel;vesselFacetLetter=I;start=0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_frigate_Félicité_(1785)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Furieuse_(1809)

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1816 – Launch of HMS Minotaur, a 74-gun Ganges-class third rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, at Chatham Dockyard.


HMS Minotaur was a 74-gun third rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched on 15 April 1816 at Chatham Dockyard.



She was never commissioned for sea service; on completion of construction the new vessel was immediately placed in reserve at Sheerness Dockyard until,1842 when she was fitted as a receiving ship for naval conscripts. By 1859 she had become a guardship in Sheerness harbour, and in 1861 was converted into a floating lazarette for passengers from merchant vessels who were suspected by the Customs Service of bringing in disease. Five years later she was sailed to Gravesend to serve as a hospital for cholera patients.

In July 1866 she was renamed Hermes. She was broken up at Sheerness Dockyard in 1869


Scale: 1:48. Plan showing the body plan, sheer lines with modifications to the gun ports, and longitudinal half-breadth for 'Minotaur', a 74-gun Third Rate, two-decker, building at Chatham, similar to 'Tremendous' (1784) under repaired at Chatham Dockyard. Signed by William Rule [Surveyor of the Navy, 1793-1813]



Fight of HMS Tremendous (in the foreground) and HMS Hindostan against the French frigate La Cannonière, 21 April 1806, by Pierre-Julien Gilbert

The Ganges-class ships of the line were a class of six 74-gun third rates, designed for the Royal Navy by Sir Edward Hunt.



Ships

• HMS Ganges

Builder: Randall, Rotherhithe
Ordered: 14 July 1779
Launched: 30 March 1782
Fate: Broken up, 1816

• HMS Culloden

Builder: Randall, Rotherhithe
Ordered: 12 July 1779
Launched: 16 June 1783
Fate: Broken up, 1813

• HMS Tremendous

Builder: Barnard, Deptford
Ordered: 1 January 1782
Launched: 30 October 1784
Fate: Sold out of the service, 1897

• HMS Invincible

Builder: Woolwich Dockyard
Ordered: 25 June 1801
Launched: 15 March 1808
Fate: Broken up, 1861

• HMS Minden

Builder: Lovji Nusserwanjee Wadia, Duncan Docks, Bombay
Ordered: 9 July 1801
Launched: 19 June 1810
Fate: Sold out of the service, 1861

• HMS Minotaur

Builder: Chatham Dockyard
Ordered: 3 December 1811
Laid Down: December 1812
Launched: 15 April 1816
Fate: Hulked, 1842, BU 1869








Scale: 1:24. Plan showing the midship section with diagrams illustrating the method of attaching the beams to the sides for 'Minotaur' (1816), a 74-gun Third Rate, two-decker.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Minotaur_(1816)

Ganges-class ship of the line - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://collections.rmg.co.uk/colle...el-331405;browseBy=vessel;vesselFacetLetter=M

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1828 – Launch of HMS Leda, a 46-gun Seringapatam-class fifth-rate frigate built for the Royal Navy during the 1820s, one of seven ships of the Druid sub-class.


HMS Leda was a 46-gun Seringapatam-class fifth-rate frigate built for the Royal Navy during the 1820s, one of seven ships of the Druid sub-class.



Description
The Druid sub-class was an enlarged and improved version of the Serinapatam design, modified with a circular stern. Leda had a length at the gundeck of 159 feet (48.5 m) and 133 feet 5 inches (40.7 m) at the keel. She had a beam of 41 feet 2 inches (12.5 m), a draught of 15 feet (4.6 m) and a depth of hold of 12 feet 9 inches (3.9 m). The ship's tonnage was 1171 38⁄94 tons burthen. The Druid sub-class was armed with twenty-eight 18-pounder cannon on her gundeck, fourteen 32-pounder carronades on her quarterdeck and a pair of 9-pounder cannon and two more 32-pounder carronades in the forecastle. The ships had a crew of 315 officers and ratings.

Construction and career
Leda, the fourth ship of her name to serve in the Royal Navy, was ordered on 15 May 1821, laid down in October 1824 at Pembroke Dockyard, Wales, and launched on 15 April 1828. She was completed for ordinary at Plymouth Dockyard in May 1828 and the ship was roofed over from the mainmast forward.



HMS Seringapatam at anchor in Valetta Harbour between 1824 and 1827


Scale: 1:48. Plan showing the body plan, sheer lines, and longitudinal half-breadth for building Seringapatam (1819), a 36/44-gun Fifth Rate Frigate at Bombay. The plan is described as being an improved draught on the lines of the President (captured 1804). A copy was sent to Bombay on 6 September 1813 onboard the Acorn (1807), an 18-gun Ship Sloop, which had been commissioned in June for the East Indies

The Seringapatam-class frigates, were a class of British Royal Navy 46-gun sailing frigates. The first vessel of the class was HMS Seringapatam. Seringapatam's design was based on the French frigate Président, which the British had captured in 1806. Seringapatam was originally ordered as a 38-gun frigate, but the re-classification of British warships which took effect in February 1817 raised this rating to 46-gun.



The Admiralty ordered six further ships to this design – including three ships which had originally been ordered as Leda-class frigates, but the Seringapatam design was subsequently altered to produce a Modified version which was labelled the Druid sub-class, and three of the ships formerly ordered to the Seringapatam original design (Madagascar, Nemesis and Jason) were re-ordered to this modified design. Subsequently a further modification of the design was produced, which was labelled the Andromeda sub-class, and the remaining three of the ships formerly ordered to the Seringapatam original design (Manilla, Tigris and Statira) were re-ordered to this modified design. Further vessels were ordered to both modified designs, but the majority of these were subsequently cancelled. Both modified types are listed below.

• HMS Seringapatam
  • Builder: British East India Company, Bombay Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 21 August 1813
  • Laid down: November 1817
  • Launched: 5 September 1819
  • Completed: 10 April 1821 at Plymouth Dockyard.
  • Fate: Receiving ship at Cape of Good Hope in July 1847; coal hulk 1852, broken up between 1873 and 1883.

Druid sub-class (1st modified version of Seringapatam Class)

• HMS Druid
  • Builder: Pembroke Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 23 July 1817
  • Laid down: August 1821
  • Launched: 1 July 1825
  • Completed: 21 December 1825 at Plymouth Dockyard.
  • Fate: Sold to be broken up in April 1863.
• HMS Nemesis- had first been ordered to Modified Leda class, later to original Seringapatam design
  • Builder: Pembroke Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 23 July 1817
  • Laid down: August 1823
  • Launched: 19 August 1826
  • Completed: never completed; laid up at Plymouth Dockyard.
  • Fate: Broken up in July 1866.
• HMS Madagascar – had first been ordered to original Seringapatam design
  • Builder: East India Company, Bombay Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 5 April 1819
  • Laid down: October 1821
  • Launched: 15 November 1822; 1164 tons (bm)[1]
  • Completed: January 1829 at Portsmouth Dockyard.
  • Fate: Sold to be broken up at Rio de Janeiro 5 May 1863.
• HMS Leda
  • Builder: Pembroke Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 15 May 1821
  • Laid down: October 1824
  • Launched: 15 April 1828
  • Completed: never completed; laid up at Plymouth Dockyard.
  • Fate: Sold to be broken up on 15 May 1906.
• HMS Hotspur
  • Builder: Pembroke Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 15 May 1821
  • Laid down: July 1825
  • Launched: 9 October 1828
  • Completed: never completed; laid up at Plymouth Dockyard.
  • Fate: Renamed Monmouth 1868. Sold to be broken up in 1902.
• HMS Africaine
  • Builder: Chatham Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 8 January 1822
  • Laid down: September 1825
  • Launched: 20 December 1827
  • Completed: 3 March 1828.
  • Fate: Sold to Trinity House in May 1867.
• HMS Eurotas
  • Builder: Chatham Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 13 September 1824
  • Laid down: February 1827
  • Launched: 19 February 1829
  • Completed: 20 March 1828.
  • Fate: Sold to be broken up in November 1865.
• A further vessel, HMS Jason, also first ordered to Modified Leda Class, then to the original Seringapatam design, was again re-ordered subsequently, now to the Andromeda design, but was never finally built.

Andromeda sub-Class (2nd modified version of Seringapatam Class)

• HMS Andromeda
  • Builder: East India Company, Bombay Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 5 April 1827
  • Laid down: August 1827
  • Launched: 6 January? 1829; 1166 tons (bm)
  • Completed: not completed – laid up at Plymouth Dockyard.
  • Fate: Provision hulk November 1846. Sold to be broken up on 24 December 1863.
• HMS Seahorse
  • Builder: Pembroke Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 9 January 1823
  • Laid down: November 1826
  • Launched: 22 July 1830
  • Completed: never completed as sailing frigate; laid up at Plymouth Dockyard.
  • Fate: Converted to a steam/screw-driven frigate 1845–47. Screw mortar frigate 1856. Coal hulk 1870, renamed Lavinia. Sold to be broken up 1902.
• HMS Stag
  • Builder: Pembroke Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 9 January 1823
  • Laid down: April 1828
  • Launched: 2 October 1830
  • Completed: 9 July 1831 at Portsmouth Dockyard.
  • Fate: Broken up in August 1866.
• HMS Maeander
  • Builder: Chatham Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 13 September 1824
  • Laid down: February 1829
  • Launched: 5 May 1840
  • Completed: 17 January 1848.
  • Fate: Hulked 1857. Wrecked at Ascension in July 1870.
• HMS Forth
  • Builder: Pembroke Dockyard.
  • Ordered: 9 June 1825
  • Laid down: November 1828
  • Launched: 1 August 1833
  • Completed: never completed as a sailing frigate; laid up at Plymouth Dockyard.
  • Fate: Converted to a steam/screw-driven frigate 1845–47. Screw mortar frigate 1856. Coal hulk 1869, renamed Jupiter. Sold to be broken up 1883.

The remaining ships ordered or re-ordered to this design were never completed:

• HMS Jason – ordered 23 July 1817 from Woolwich Dockyard, firstly to Modified Leda Class design, later altered to original Seringapatam design in October 1820, to Druid design in 1822, and finally to Andromeda design in 1826; cancelled 7 February 1831.
• HMS Statira – ordered 23 July 1817 from Plymouth Dockyard, originally to Modified Leda Class, later altered to original Seringapatam design in October 1820, to Druid design in 1822, and finally to Andromeda design in 1826; cancelled 31 August 1832.
• HMS Manilla – ordered 5 April 1819 from East India Company's Bombay Dockyard, firstly ordered to original Seringapatam design, later altered to Andromeda design in 1826; cancelled 7 February 1831.
• HMS Euphrates – ordered 22 October 1820 from Portsmouth Dockyard, cancelled 7 February 1831.
• HMS Pique – ordered 25 October 1820 from Plymouth Dockyard, cancelled 16 June 1832.
• HMS Tigris – ordered 25 October 1820 from Plymouth Dockyard (utilising teak frames from Bombay Dockyard), firstly to original Seringapatam design, later altered to Andromeda design in 1826; cancelled 31 August 1832.
• HMS Pique – ordered 25 October 1820 from Plymouth Dockyard, cancelled 16 June 1832.
• HMS Spartan – ordered 13 September 1824 from Portsmouth Dockyard, cancelled 7 February 1831.
• HMS Theban – ordered 13 September 1824 from Portsmouth Dockyard, cancelled 7 February 1831.
• HMS Inconstant – ordered 9 June 1825 from Sheerness Dockyard, cancelled 9 March 1832.
• HMS Orpheus – ordered 9 June 1825 from Chatham Dockyard, cancelled 7 February 1831.
• HMS Severn – ordered 9 June 1825 from Plymouth Dockyard, cancelled 7 February 1831.
• HMS Tiber – ordered 9 June 1825 from Portsmouth Dockyard, cancelled 7 February 1831.

Scale: 1:24. Plan showing the midship section with later alterations, for the 46-gun Fifth Rate Frigates building in the Royal Yards. Copies were specifically sent to Plymouth and Bombay in 1821 for the Druid (1825), Madagascar (1822), Nemesis (1826), Leda (1828), Hotspur (1828), and later in 1822 to Plymouth for Statira (cancelled 1832)


Scale: 1:48. Plan showing the plans and elevations of the starboard quarter illustrating the circular stern for Hotspur (1828)/ Druid (1825), Leda (1828), Nemesis (1826), Eurotas (1829), Africaine (1827), and Madagascar (1827), all 46-gun Fifth Rate, Frigates



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Leda_(1828)

Seringapatam-class frigate - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://collections.rmg.co.uk/colle...el-347533;browseBy=vessel;vesselFacetLetter=S

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1847 - The Bombardment of Tourane (15 April 1847) was a naval incident that took place during the short reign of the Vietnamese emperor Thiệu Trị (1841–47), which saw a considerable worsening of relations between France and Vietnam.


The Bombardment of Tourane (15 April 1847) was a naval incident that took place during the short reign of the Vietnamese emperor Thiệu Trị (1841–47), which saw a considerable worsening of relations between France and Vietnam. The French warships Gloire and Victorieuse, which had been sent to Tourane (now Da Nang) to negotiate for the release of two French Catholic missionaries, were attacked without warning by several Vietnamese vessels. The two French ships fought back, sinking four Vietnamese corvettes, badly damaging a fifth, and inflicting just under 1,200 casualties. In response to this and other provocations, the French eventually decided to intervene actively in Vietnam, and a decade later launched the Cochinchina Campaign (1858–62), which inaugurated the period of French colonial rule in Vietnam.



Background
French missionaries had been active in Vietnam since the seventeenth century, and by the middle of the nineteenth century there were perhaps 300,000 Catholic converts in Annam and Tonkin. Most of their bishops and priests were either French or Spanish. Most Vietnamese disliked and suspected this sizeable Christian community and its foreign leaders. The French, conversely, began to feel responsible for their safety. During the reigns of the Vietnamese emperors Minh Mạng (1820–41) and Thiệu Trị (1841–47), Catholic missionaries were forbidden to live and work in Vietnam, and several European missionaries who ignored this edict were either banished or, on occasion, executed.

French naval captains in the Far East were given instructions to negotiate with the Vietnamese authorities when such cases occurred. On two occasions they intervened with considerable success. On 25 February 1843, capitaine de frégate Favin-Lévêque, captain of the French warship Héroine, anchored off Da Nang to intercede for the release of five missionaries detained at Huế for two years. After long and frustrating negotiations, the five missionaries were released. In 1845, the French corvette Alcmène (capitaine de frégate Fornier-Duplan) went to Tourane to ask for the release of Dominique Lefèbvre, the French vicar apostolic of Lower Cochinchina, who was being held prisoner at Huế. Again, the Vietnamese acceded to the French request, and Lefèbvre was released.


Map of Tourane (Da Nang) found in the home of a mandarin of the Vietnamese military in 1859. The map itself is at right, with annotations in Sino-Vietnamese script; a legend is at left, written in French.

Bombardment
The 1845 intervention was ordered by Admiral Cécille, the senior French naval officer on station. In 1847, Dominique Lefèbvre secretly re-entered Vietnam. He and another missionary, Duclos, were imprisoned. The arrest of the two missionaries provoked a further confrontation between the Vietnamese rulers and the ships of the French Navy charged with protecting the interests of Roman Catholic missionaries in Vietnam.

In March 1847, Cécille sent the 54-gun frigate Gloire (capitaine de vaisseau Augustin de Lapierre) and the 24-gun corvette Victorieuse (capitaine de frégate Charles Rigault de Genouilly) to Tourane, with instructions to negotiate for the liberation of the two imprisoned French missionaries and to seek a commitment from the Vietnamese authorities to allow freedom of worship for Roman Catholics in Vietnam.

Probably because the Vietnamese considered Lefèbvre's return to Vietnam a deliberate provocation by the French, the negotiations failed. Discussions dragged on without result, and on 15 April 1847 six Vietnamese corvettes attacked the two French ships in the Bay of Tourane. In the brief action that followed, the French sank four Vietnamese corvettes and disabled a fifth, and inflicted nearly 1,200 casualties on the outclassed Vietnamese sailors.

According to the French, the Vietnamese spun out the negotiations to win time to assemble a fleet, and then treacherously attacked the two French warships without warning. Colonel Alfred Thomazi, the historian of the French conquest of Indochina, also claimed that the Vietnamese first attempted to lure the French officers to their deaths:

Thiệu Trị, indignant with this interference, decided to end the affair with a surprise attack. His plan was to invite the French officers to a banquet, kill them, and then burn and sink the ships. But Commandant Lapierre was on his guard, and declined the invitation. The mandarins, seeing the first part of their programme go astray, passed on to the second. They attacked.

Thomazi gave the following description of the battle in Tourane Bay:

Gradually the Annamese war fleet, consisting of five corvettes with covered batteries, several bricks and a large number of junks, gathered in the bay, and one morning, without prior warning, attacked the French vessels. These, as their armament was far superior, had little difficulty in destroying the entire enemy fleet, but they had to get underway thereafter, abandoning the Christians to the vengeance of their persecutors.

Lefèbvre was released by the Vietnamese authorities either before or shortly after the battle (the sources differ).

Significance
The Vietnamese naval defeat at Tourane dramatically demonstrated the technological superiority of the French warships over the antiquated vessels of the Vietnamese fleet. In the eyes of many thoughtful Vietnamese, it demonstrated that the kingdom's blind adherence to the values and traditions of the past had left it painfully vulnerable to European coercion, and spurred calls for modernization.

Harassment of the Christians eventually provided France with a pretext for attacking Vietnam. The tension built up gradually. During the 1840s, the persecution of Roman Catholic missionaries in Vietnam evoked only sporadic and unofficial French reprisals, such as that taken by de Lapierre and Rigault de Genouilly in 1847. In 1857, however, the execution of two Spanish Catholic missionaries by the emperor Tự Đức led directly to French intervention in Vietnam. In September 1858, a joint French and Spanish naval expedition landed at Da Nang. Its commander was Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly, one of the two French naval captains involved in the 1847 incident. The resultant Cochinchina campaign inaugurated the era of French colonial rule in Vietnam.

Bombardment of Tourane - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Rigault_de_Genouilly

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1847 – Launch of French Tage ("Tagus"), a 100-gun Hercule-class ship of the line of the French Navy.


The Tage ("Tagus") was a 100-gun Hercule-class ship of the line of the French Navy.




Scale model on display at the Musée National de la Marine in Paris


Service history
She was laid down as Polyphème in 1824, renamed Saint Louis, and eventually Tage.
She was launched only in 1847. From 1857 to 1858, she was converted to steam ship.

After 1871, she was used as a prison ship to hold insurgents of the Commune of Paris. Later she ferried prisoners to New Caledonia.

She served as a hulk before being scrapped in 1896.



1/40th-scale model of the 100-gun Hercule on display at the Musée national de la Marine.

The Hercule class was a late type of 100-gun ships of the line of the French Navy. They were the second strongest of four ranks of ships of the line designed by the Commission de Paris. While the first units were classical straight-walled ships of the line, next ones were gradually converted to steam, and the last one was built with an engine.



Design
The Hercule class evolved as an enlargement of the straight-walled, 90-gun Suffren class, suggested by Jean Tupinier.

With the Henri IV, a rounded stern was introduced. The next ships were built with the rounded stern, and it was retrofitted on the early units of the class.


100-gun ships ("vaisseaux de 100") of the Restoration
Hercule class, of the Commission de Paris

• Hercule 100 (launched 29 July 1836 at Toulon)
• Tage 100 (launched 15 August 1847 at Brest)
• Henri IV 100 (launched 14 September 1848 at Cherbourg)
• Jemmapes 100 (launched 2 April 1840 at Lorient)
• Lys 100 originally (1821), renamed Ulm and commissioned as an 82-gun, steam-powered ship.

Hercule class ships of the line (further ships of this class)
The ships of the Hercule class, designed to be 100-gun sailing ships of the line, were modified and transformed into 90-gun steam ships of the line

• Tage 90 (launched 15 April 1847 at Brest) – Transport 1875
• Austerlitz 90 (launched 15 September 1852 at Cherbourg) – Stricken 1872
• Fleurus 90 (launched 2 December 1853 at Toulon) – Stricken 1869
• Prince Jérôme 90 (launched 2 December 1853 at Lorient) – Transport 1872
• Duguay-Trouin 90 (launched 29 March 1854 at Lorient) – Stricken 1872
• Turenne 90 (launched 15 April 1854 at Rochefort) – Stricken 1867
• Ulm 90 (launched 13 May 1854 at Rochefort) – Hulk 1867
• Wagram 90 (launched 19 June 1854 at Lorient) – Stricken 1867
• Navarin 90 (launched 26 July 1854 at Toulon) – Transport 1873
• Eylau 90 (launched 15 May 1856 at Toulon) – Stricken 1877

1/75th-scale model of Prince Jérôme, on display at the Swiss Museum of Transport. She was transformed into a sail and steam ship of the line while on keel.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ship_Tage

Hercule-class ship of the line - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1851 - Launch of clipper ship Flying Cloud


Flying Cloud was a clipper ship that set the world's sailing record for the fastest passage between New York and San Francisco, 89 days 8 hours. The ship held this record for over 100 years, from 1854 to 1989.



Flying Cloud was the most famous of the clippers built by Donald McKay. She was known for her extremely close race with Hornet in 1853; for having a woman navigator, Eleanor Creesy, wife of Josiah Perkins Creesy who skippered Flying Cloud on two record-setting voyages from New York to San Francisco; and for sailing in the Australia and timber trades.


"The Clipper Ship Flying Cloud off the Needles, Isle of Wight", by James E. Buttersworth, 1859-60

Construction


Lines of Flying Cloud

Flying Cloud is popularly called an extreme clipper, as are many of Donald McKay's ships, but as her dead rise was less than 40" she was not. Donald McKay built many fast clipper ships, but only one, Stag Hound was an extreme clipper, even if others may have been advertised as such. It was popular to advertise clippers as "extreme" because of the popular conception of speed.



Flying Cloud was built in East Boston, Massachusetts, and intended for Enoch Train of Boston, who paid $50,000 for her construction. While still under construction, she was purchased by Grinnell, Minturn & Co., of New York, for $90,000, which represented a huge profit for Train & Co.

A reporter for the Boston Daily Atlas of 25 April 1851 wrote, "If great length [235 ft.], sharpness of ends, with proportionate breadth [41 ft.] and depth, conduce to speed, the Flying Cloud must be uncommonly swift, for in all these she is great. Her length on the keel is 208 feet, on deck 225, and over all, from the knightheads to the taffrail, 235— extreme breadth of beam 41 feet, depth of hold 21½, including 7 feet 8 inches height of between-decks, sea-rise at half floor 20 inches, rounding of sides 6 inches, and sheer about 3 feet."

World record voyage to San Francisco during Gold Rush

Drawing of Flying Cloud from a 1919 book on China Clippers

Within six weeks of launch Flying Cloud sailed from New York, rounded Cape Horn and made San Francisco in 89 days, 21 hours under the command of Captain Josiah Perkins Cressey. In July, during the trip, she ran 284, 374 and 334 nautical miles, a total of 992 nautical miles over the three consecutive days. In 1853 she beat her own record by 13 hours, a record that stood until 1989 when the breakthrough-designed sloop Thursday's Child completed the passage in 80 days, 20 hours. The record was once again broken in 2008 by the French racing yacht Gitana 13, with a time of 43 days and 38 minutes.

In the early days of the California Gold Rush, it took more than 200 days for a ship to travel from New York to San Francisco, a voyage of more than 16,000 miles. Flying Cloud's better-than-halving that time (only 89 days) was a headline-grabbing world record that the ship beat three years later, setting a record that lasted for 136 years.


Clipper ships were in great demand during the California Gold Rush

Flying Cloud vs. Andrew Jackson
In newspaper accounts of the day, the clipper Andrew Jackson was acclaimed as holding the record passage to San Francisco. After careful scrutiny of the logbooks, Cutler concludes that a case can be made for either Flying Cloud or Andrew Jackson holding the record.

Andrew Jackson holds the record for fastest passage pilot-to-pilot, arriving at the San Francisco pilot grounds in 89 days and 4 hours. Because Andrew Jackson spent all night between the Farallon Islands and the Golden Gate awaiting a harbor pilot, some will consider this figure as the appropriate indicator of fastest sailing performance around Cape Horn.

However, Flying Cloud holds the record time for a completed voyage from New York to San Francisco, 89 days 8 hours anchor-to-anchor.

Woman navigator
Flying Cloud's achievement was remarkable under any terms. But, writes David W. Shaw, it was all the more unusual because her navigator was a woman, Eleanor Creesy, who had been studying oceanic currents, weather phenomena, and astronomy since her girlhood in Marblehead, Massachusetts. She was one of the first navigators to exploit the insights of Matthew Fontaine Maury, most notably the course recommended in his Sailing Directions. With her husband, ship captain Josiah Perkins Cressey, she logged many thousands of miles on the ocean, traveling around the world carrying passengers and goods. In the wake of their record-setting transit from New York to California, Eleanor and Josiah became instant celebrities. But their fame was short-lived and their story quickly forgotten. Josiah died in 1871 and Eleanor lived far from the sea until her death in 1900.

Race with clipper Hornet in 1853
Hornet had a two-day head start on Flying Cloud in their famous 1853 race. She left New York for San Francisco, 26 April 1853, with Flying Cloud departing two days later.

After the roughly 15,000 mile voyage around Cape Horn, both ships arrived in San Francisco harbor 106 days later at almost the same time, with Hornet sailing in just 45 minutes ahead of the Flying Cloud.

British clipper to Australia and New Zealand, New Brunswick timber trade


Drawing of Flying Cloud from a 1913 book on clipper ships

In 1862, Flying Cloud was sold to the Black Ball Line, Liverpool, sailing under British colors without change of name, and was soon traveling between the mother country and Australia and New Zealand. Her latter years were spent in the log trade between Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.

Loss of the ship
On June 19, 1874, Flying Cloud went ashore on the Beacon Island bar, Saint John, New Brunswick, and was condemned and sold.[10] The following June she was burned for the scrap metal value of her copper and iron fastenings.

Ballad
A well-known ballad about a ship named Flying Cloud tells the story of an Irishman who was pressed into sailing on the ship on a slaving voyage from Baltimore via Bermuda to West Africa, which led to another voyage as a pirate ship that resulted in the execution of the crew at Newgate. However, these events are nothing to do with the actual history of the clipper ship

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Cloud_(clipper)

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1863 – Launch of SMS Nymphe, the lead ship of the Nymphe class of steam corvettes

SMS Nymphe was the lead ship of the Nymphe class of steam corvettes, the first ship of that type to be built for the Prussian Navy. She was ordered as part of a naval expansion program to counter the Danish Navy over the disputed ownership of Schleswig and Holstein. Nymphe was laid down in January 1862, she was launched in April 1863, and she was completed in October that year. She had one sister ship, Medusa, and the vessels were wooden-hulled ships armed with a battery of sixteen guns.

Nymphe saw action during the Second Schleswig War against Denmark in 1864 at the Battle of Jasmund. She was heavily engaged by a Danish frigate in the battle, and she received around 70 hits, mostly to her rigging, though she was not seriously damaged. The ship was in the process of being recalled to Germany during the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, and as a result, saw no action during the conflict, but she did see battle with French warships during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. A French squadron of ironclads had anchored off Danzig, and Nymphe launched a surprise night attack on the idle vessels, though she inflicted no serious damage on the armored vessels. Her attack nevertheless convinced the French admiral that his heavy ships were not useful in a close blockade of German ports, and so they left.

In 1871, Nymphe embarked on a major overseas deployment to the Pacific Ocean and East Asia, where her captain conducted negotiations with various governments and she toured numerous cities. She remained abroad until mid-1874, after which she was converted into a training ship for apprentice seamen. She served in that capacity for the next decade, during which she conducted training cruises, usually to the Americas, though in 1882 she toured the Mediterranean Sea. In poor condition and in need of a complete reconstruction by 1885, she was stricken from the naval register in July 1887 and hulked. Nymphe was ultimately sold in 1891 and broken up in Hamburg.


Nymphe, center, at the Battle of Jasmund, battling the Danish frigate Sjælland (right background)

Design
The two Nymphe-class corvettes were ordered in the early 1860s as part of a program to strengthen the Prussian Navy as the likelihood of a conflict with Denmark over the Schleswig-Holstein Question became increasingly likely. The design for the class was completed in 1861 and work began on both ships the next year.

Service history
Nymphe was ordered on 23 July 1861, the first of the wooden steam corvettes to be built for the Prussian Navy. Her keel was laid down on 25 January 1862 at the Königliche Werft (Royal Shipyard) in Danzig, and on 23 July her name was decided by an order from the Prussian Navy Department. The completed hull was launched on 15 April 1863 and she was completed for sea trials by late October. During the trials, it was discovered that the Prussian crew members did not have sufficient experience with the steam machinery to operate the equipment, and so technicians from J Penn & Sons, the manufacturer of the ship's engines, had to remain aboard to assist them. Nymphe was transferred to Swinemünde to spend the winter months on 25 November, since the port would not remain frozen over as long as Danzig. In addition, as tensions with rose between Denmark and Prussia over the Schleswig-Holstein Question, the move west would allow Nymphe to cooperate with the gunboats based in Stralsund.

Second Schleswig War
Nymphe was commissioned for the first time on 20 February 1864, shortly after the outbreak of the Second Schleswig War against Denmark. She joined the squadron commanded by Kapitän zur See (KzS—Captain at Sea) Eduard von Jachmann, whose flagship was the frigate Arcona. The Danish fleet, which was much more powerful than the Prussian fleet, immediately proclaimed a blockade of the Baltic and North Sea ports of Prussia and the other German states. The Danes began seizing Prussian merchant ships in the area, prompting Admiral Prince Adalbert of Prussia, the commander of the Prussian Navy, to begin plans for an operation against the blockade using Jachmann's squadron. By mid-March, the Prussian ships were ready for action and the ice had receded far enough that Prince Adalbert ordered Jachmann to conduct a reconnaissance of the blockading force on 16 March. Two days before, the Danish squadron commanded by Rear Admiral Edvard van Dockum arrived off Swinemünde. Arcona and Nymphe patrolled off Greifswald, but the weather was very poor, with snow showers hampering visibility. The Prussian gunboats, led by the paddle steamer Loreley, remained closer to Swinemünde. Jachmann spotted three vessels at around 15:30, but there was not enough time before dark to catch them. Instead, Jachmann turned back to Swinemünde, intending to try again the following day.

Battle of Jasmund

Painting of the battle, depicting the Prussian squadron, by Willy Stöwer

The next morning, at 7:30, Jachmann took his ships out of the mouth of the Oder, initially steaming east. Unable to locate any Danish warships, the Prussians turned west and, as they approached the island of Greifswalder Oie, lookouts aboard the ships spotted smoke to the northwest at about 13:15. The Prussians continued on toward the island of Rügen; off the Jasmund peninsula, Jachmann's ships encountered Dockum's squadron. There, with Arcona and Nymphe in the lead, Jachmann turned to engage the Danes; Loreley increased speed to join the two corvettes while Jachmann sent the gunboats to the coast of Rügen, where they could be used to cover his withdrawal. From further north, Dockum was awaiting the arrival of the steam frigate Tordenskjold.

At 14:30, Arcona opened fire, targeting the frigate Sjælland; a few minutes later, after Sjælland closed to 1,600 yards (1,500 m), Dockum turned his flagship to starboard and began firing broadsides at Arcona. Jachmann turned Arcona to starboard as well, having realized the strength of the Danish squadron. He failed to inform the captains of Nymphe and Loreley of his decision to withdraw, and they continued to steam east for several minutes before they conformed to his maneuver. At this time, Dockum shifted fire to Nymphe and scored several hits, including damage to her funnel that reduced her speed temporarily. Dockum attempted to overtake and cut off Nymphe and Loreley from Arcona, but Nymphe's crew was able to quickly repair the damage she had sustained, allowing her to increase speed, though she continued to take hits.

Nymphe and Loreley came under heavy fire from the pursuing Danish squadron; at 16:00 Loreley broke off to the west toward Stralsund and Dockum allowed her to leave, preferring to continue after Jachmann's corvettes. Both sides continued to score hits on each other until they checked fire at around 16:45 as the range grew too far. By 18:00, Dockum ended the chase and steamed off to the east, allowing Jachmann to return to Swinemünde. In the course of the battle, Nymphe had received 19 hits in the hull and around 50 to her rigging, and her gig was shot away. Though she was the most heavily damaged vessel on either side of the battle, she was nevertheless never in serious danger, and her crew suffered just two dead and four wounded.

Jachmann made several more sorties into the Baltic without encountering any Danish vessels on 19 March, 9 and 14 April, and 6 May. On 6 June, Nymphe participated in a naval review held for King William I in Swinemünde. Jachmann's squadron steamed from there to Pillau on 12 June, remaining there for ten days before returning. On 24 September, she went into the shipyard in Danzig for periodic maintenance, and in mid-November, she moved to the newly-acquired naval base in Kiel to spend the winter.

Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars
In early 1865, the Prussian Navy decided to send Nymphe and the gunboat Delphin to the Mediterranean Sea. The two ships began a short training cruise to Sonderburg and Wismar, and on 6 August, Nymphe took the 15 cm gun from Delphin on board in preparation for the voyage to the Mediterranean to improve the gunboat's seakeeping. Once they arrived in the Aegean Sea on 22 September, Nymphe transferred the gun back to Delphin. The cruise was cut short in March 1866, as both vessels were ordered to return to Prussia as tensions with the Austrian Empire began to mount. The ships arrived in Geestemünde in mid-July, by which time the Austro-Prussian War had broken out and been decided at the Battle of Königgrätz. Nymphe joined the North Sea Flotilla, but with the war all but over she saw no action. The flotilla was dissolved on 29 September and Nymphe went to the new naval depot in Geestemünde, where she was decommissioned on 31 March 1867. On 16 April, the ship was moved to the Baltic, visiting Kiel and Danzig, where she entered the Königliche Werft for extensive repairs to her boilers

Nymphe remained out of service until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870, when she returned to service as part of the general mobilization of what was now the North German Federal Navy. She was assigned to the defenses of Neufahrwasser that protected Danzig on 21 July. The following day, a French squadron consisting of three ironclads and an aviso under Admiral Édouard Bouët-Willaumez arrived off Danzig and anchored in the Putziger Wiek at around 18:00, on the western end of the Danziger Bucht. Nymphe's commander, Korvettenkapitän (KK—Corvette Captain) Weickhmann, decided to make a surprise attack the next morning. At midnight, he sortied began a slow approach to the French squadron, which remained at anchor overnight. At 1:15, Nymphe came within sight of the French ships, and at a distance of 1.3 nautical miles (2.4 km; 1.5 mi), she turned to port and fired a broadside at the French ironclad Thétis before turning to starboard to fire another broadside. The French quickly returned fire, but Nymphe escaped and the French vessels could not get underway quickly enough to catch her. By 3:00, Nymphe was safely behind the coastal fortifications at Neufahrwasser.

Bouët-Willaumez decided that the attack demonstrated that the large ironclads couldn't be effectively used close to shore, and that smaller, shallower-draft vessels would be necessary. He therefore took his ships away from Danzig, which Nymphe confirmed by a reconnaissance to Rixhöft. At this point, the North German naval command decided to embark on a commerce raiding strategy to attack French merchant shipping in the Atlantic Ocean. Nymphe was deemed to be too slow for the task, and so she was decommissioned on 25 August so her crew could be transferred to the faster corvette Augusta, which entered service in late October.

Overseas deployment
Nymphe remained in reserve through the end of the war, when she was recommissioned under command of KK Louis von Blanc on 1 June 1871 to relieve her sister ship Medusa, which had been blockaded by French warships in Japan during the war. Nymphe left Kiel on 25 July and made a stop in Cowes, where she was visited by the British royal family. She reached Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on 14 October, where she stayed for two weeks. During this period, some of her crew were in a local restaurant when a fight broke out between them and some pro-French civilians; the sailors were arrested by the Brazilian police, which prompted the German government to consider sending a squadron of warships to coerce their release. In response to the threatened naval deployment, the Brazilian authorities released the men, allowing Nymphe to proceed with her voyage on 27 October. While in South Africa, nine members of her crew deserted to join a diamond rush; Nymphe quickly left port on 22 November after the desertion to prevent any others from joining them.

After crossing the Indian Ocean, she visited several ports in Australia and then sailed north into Oceania and visited several islands that had not yet been visited by German vessels. These included the town of Levuka in Fiji in early March 1872, where Blanc negotiated a protection agreement, which was rejected by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. On 15 March, Nymphe arrived in Apia in Samoa, where she helped to settle disputes between German merchants and chiefs on the islands. She left the islands at the end of the month and arrived in Yokohama, Japan on 20 April, where she met the frigate Hertha, the other member of the East Asia station. Nymphe then began a tour of Japanese and Russian ports, including Nagoya, Japan, which had recently been opened to foreign ships, before stopping in Hong Kong on 25 December. Nymphe visited Singapore in March 1873, after which a large portion of her crew became ill. She then went to Borneo to enforce German demands for financial compensation for a German company. Nymphe then visited Jolo in the Sulu Archipelago, then part of the Spanish Empire, where Sultan Jamal ul-Azam requested that Germany sign a protectorate agreement, since he wished to declare independence from Spain. Blanc passed the request on to Berlin, where it was rejected by Bismarck.

On 11 April, she returned to Singapore; Blanc and a contingent from the ship traveled overland to Bangkok, Siam, where they delivered the Order of the Black Eagle to the King of Siam, Chulalongkorn. Nymphe left Singapore on 16 May to begin a survey for a potential German coaling station in the South China Sea. She surveyed the Anambas Islands, but these proved to be unusable, as did Hainan, which lacked a suitable harbor. Nymphe also examined the Chusan Archipelago, but these too lacked a usable harbor. Nymphe left Chinese waters on 10 October to return to Yokohama. There, Blanc began preparations to open a hospital for German naval and merchant sailors, which was opened in 1878. The ship received the order to return to Germany on 12 September, and she crossed the Pacific to San Francisco, United States, before steaming south, rounding Cape Horn on 11 February 1874. While passing into the Baltic, the ship ran aground on a rock off Langeland, and she had to be pulled free by a pair of gunboats. Nymphe arrived in Kiel on 12 May and was decommissioned there eight days later.

Later career
Nymphe was recommissioned on 1 June for use as a training ship for Schiffsjungen (apprentice seamen). She initially embarked on a cruise in the Baltic with the brigs Undine and Musquito before carrying Prince Friedrich Karl of Prussia to visit the kings of Denmark and Sweden. She participated in a fleet review for now Kaiser Wilhelm I on 19 September. She moved to Danzig, where she was decommissioned for an overhaul on 15 October. This work was completed by late 1875, and she returned to service on 1 April 1876 for training ship duties. Nymphe embarked on a major training cruise to North and South America, ranging as far north as Halifax, Canada and as far south as Montevideo, Uruguay. While in Uruguay, she steamed up the Uruguay River to Paysandú, where a memorial for the German consul, who had been murdered several years earlier, was dedicated with military honors. The ship arrived back in Kiel on 10 September 1877, where she was decommissioned on the 27th.

The ship was reactivated on 1 January 1878 to begin the next year's training routine. She began the overseas training cruise in mid-July, and it repeated the destination of the previous year's cruise, though this time she only went as far south as Rio de Janeiro. In January 1879, she stopped in several ports in Venezuela to protect Germans during a period of unrest in the country. She carried a Venezuelan government delegation from Puerto Cabello to La Guaira to negotiate with the rebels there. She was replaced by the ironclad Hansa, allowing her to continue her training cruise. She returned to Kiel on 12 September; six days later, while Admiral Albrecht von Stosch, the Chief of the Kaiserliche Admiralität (Imperial Admiralty), was visiting the ship in Wiker Bucht, she was driven aground by a sudden gust of wind. Stosch had to be taken ashore by a boat, while Nymphe was pulled free by another vessel. The ship was decommissioned in Danzig on 30 September for repairs and a re-boilering.

On 3 April 1880, Nymphe was recommissioned and began training cruises in the Baltic. She began the overseas cruise on 12 July; on the way out, she stopped in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Danish naval officers visited the ship. Unlike in previous years, the training cruise was for the most part limited to the West Indies. She made a stop in Puerto Cabello, where she was visited by the President of Venezuela, Antonio Guzmán Blanco. On the way back to Germany, she stopped in Hampton Roads, United States, where she was visited by the family of President James A. Garfield. She was decommissioned in Danzig on 3 October and she remained out of service for the next year and a half. On 1 April 1882, she was reactivated for another training cruise, which this year went to the Mediterranean to strengthen the German naval forces in the region during the 'Urabi revolt in Egypt. Nymphe left Kiel on 15 July and visited several ports in the Levant, stopped in Suda Bay, Crete, and had to go to Malta since a number of her crew were sick. An outbreak of typhoid fever prompted a second stay in Malta in December, and this time, the entire crew disembarked in Valletta so the ship could be disinfected.

The ship was out of service owing to the fever until 26 February 1883, after which she visited numerous Greek ports; while in Piraeus, she was visited by the Greek king, George I. She then began the voyage back to Germany, and on the way she stopped in Lisbon, where she was visited by the King of Portugal, Luís I. Nymphe arrived in Kiel on 6 September and she was decommissioned there on 29 September. The ship conducted short training cruises in the Baltic and took part in training exercises with the main fleet in June 1884. On 16 July, she began the next major cruise to the West Indies, during which she stayed in Sabanilla, Colombia, from late February to late March 1885. Her presence was necessitated by a revolution in the country that threatened German interests. She returned to Germany in early September and joined fleet exercises in the North and Baltic Seas. The ship was decommissioned for the last time on 7 October. Nymphe was worn out by this time, and it was determined that further use would require a complete rebuilding of the vessel's wooden hull, so she was stricken from the naval register on 21 July 1887 and thereafter used as a hulk for machinist training in Kiel. In 1891, she was sold for scrap and broken up in Hamburg.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_Nymphe_(1863)

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1912 – The British passenger liner RMS Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic at 2:20 a.m., two hours and forty minutes after hitting an iceberg.
Only 710 of 2,227 passengers and crew on board survive.
Part I


RMS Titanic – A passenger ocean liner and, at the time, the world's largest ship. On 14 April 1912, on her maiden voyage, she struck an iceberg, buckling part of her hull and causing her to sink in the early hours of 15 April. 706 of her 2,224 passengers and crew survived. Her loss was the catalyst for major reforms in shipping safety and is arguably the most famous maritime disaster, being the subject of numerous media portrayals


15 April 1912
Preparing to abandon ship (00:05–00:45)


Edward J. Smith, captain of Titanic, in 1911

At 00:05 on 15 April, Captain Smith ordered the ship's lifeboats uncovered and the passengers mustered. He also ordered the radio operators to begin sending distress calls, which wrongly placed the ship on the west side of the ice belt and directed rescuers to a position that turned out to be inaccurate by about 13.5 nautical miles (15.5 mi; 25.0 km). Below decks, water was pouring into the lowest levels of the ship. As the mail room flooded, the mail sorters made an ultimately futile attempt to save the 400,000 items of mail being carried aboard Titanic. Elsewhere, air could be heard being forced out by inrushing water. Above them, stewards went door to door, rousing sleeping passengers and crew – Titanic did not have a public address system – and told them to go to the Boat Deck.

The thoroughness of the muster was heavily dependent on the class of the passengers; the first-class stewards were in charge of only a few cabins, while those responsible for the second- and third-class passengers had to manage large numbers of people. The first-class stewards provided hands-on assistance, helping their charges to get dressed and bringing them out onto the deck. With far more people to deal with, the second- and third-class stewards mostly confined their efforts to throwing open doors and telling passengers to put on lifebelts and come up top. In third class, passengers were largely left to their own devices after being informed of the need to come on deck. Many passengers and crew were reluctant to comply, either refusing to believe that there was a problem or preferring the warmth of the ship's interior to the bitterly cold night air. The passengers were not told that the ship was sinking, though a few noticed that she was listing.

Around 00:15, the stewards began ordering the passengers to put on their lifebelts, though again, many passengers took the order as a joke. Some set about playing an impromptu game of association football with the ice chunks that were now strewn across the foredeck.

On the boat deck, as the crew began preparing the lifeboats, it was difficult to hear anything over the noise of high-pressure steam being vented from the boilers and escaping via the valves on the funnels above. Lawrence Beesleydescribed the sound as "a harsh, deafening boom that made conversation difficult; if one imagines 20 locomotives blowing off steam in a low key it would give some idea of the unpleasant sound that met us as we climbed out on the top deck." The noise was so loud that the crew had to use hand signals to communicate.

Titanic had a total of 20 lifeboats, comprising 16 wooden boats on davits, 8 on either side of the ship, and 4 collapsible boats with wooden bottoms and canvas sides. The collapsibles were stored upside down with the sides folded in, and would have to be erected and moved to the davits for launching. Two were stored under the wooden boats and the other two were lashed atop the officers' quarters. The position of the latter would make them extremely difficult to launch, as they weighed several tons each and had to be manhandled down to the boat deck. On average, the lifeboats could take up to 68 people each, and collectively they could accommodate 1,178 – barely half the number of people on board and a third of the number the ship was licensed to carry. The shortage of lifeboats was not because of a lack of space nor because of cost. Titanic had been designed to accommodate up to 68 lifeboats – enough for everyone on board – and the price of an extra 32 lifeboats would only have been some US$16,000 (equivalent to $415,393 in 2018), a tiny fraction of the $7.5 million that the company had spent on Titanic. In an emergency, lifeboats at the time were intended to be used to transfer passengers off the distressed ship and onto a nearby vessel. It was therefore commonplace for liners to have far fewer lifeboats than needed to accommodate all their passengers and crew, and of the 39 British liners of the time of over 10,000 long tons (10,000 t), 33 had too few lifeboat places to accommodate everyone on board. The White Star Line desired the ship to have a wide promenade deck with uninterrupted views of the sea, which would have been obstructed by a continuous row of lifeboats.

Captain Smith was an experienced seaman who had served for 40 years at sea, including 27 years in command. This was the first crisis of his career, and he would have known that even if all the boats were fully occupied, more than a thousand people would remain on the ship as she went down with little or no chance of survival. As Smith began to grasp the enormity of what was about to happen, he appears to have become paralysed by indecision. He had ordered passengers and crew to muster, but from that point onward, he failed to order his officers to put the passengers into the lifeboats; he did not adequately organise the crew; he failed to convey crucial information to his officers and crew; he sometimes gave ambiguous or impractical orders and he never gave the command to abandon ship. Even some of his bridge officers were unaware for some time after the collision that the ship was sinking; Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall did not find out until 01:15, barely an hour before the ship went down, while Quartermaster George Rowe was so unaware of the emergency that after the evacuation had started, he phoned the bridge from his watch station to ask why he had just seen a lifeboat go past. Smith did not inform his officers that the ship did not have enough lifeboats to save everyone. He did not supervise the loading of the lifeboats and seemingly made no effort to find out if his orders were being followed.

The crew was likewise unprepared for the emergency, as lifeboat training had been minimal. Only one lifeboat drill had been conducted while the ship was docked at Southampton. It was a cursory effort, consisting of two boats being lowered, each manned by one officer and four men who merely rowed around the dock for a few minutes before returning to the ship. The boats were supposed to be stocked with emergency supplies, but Titanic's passengers later found that they had only been partially provisioned despite the efforts of the ship's chief baker, Charles Joughin, and his staff to do so.[90] No lifeboat or fire drills had been conducted since Titanic left Southampton. A lifeboat drill had been scheduled for the Sunday morning before the ship sank, but was cancelled for unknown reasons by Captain Smith.

Lists had been posted on the ship assigning crew members to specific lifeboat stations, but few appeared to have read them or to have known what they were supposed to do. Most of the crew were not seamen, and even some of those had no prior experience of rowing a boat. They were now faced with the complex task of coordinating the lowering of 20 boats carrying a possible total of 1,100 people 70 feet (21 m) down the sides of the ship. Thomas E. Bonsall, a historian of the disaster, has commented that the evacuation was so badly organised that "even if they had the number [of] lifeboats they needed, it is impossible to see how they could have launched them" given the lack of time and poor leadership.

By about 00:20, 40 minutes after the collision, the loading of the lifeboats was under way. Second Officer Lightoller recalled afterwards that he noticed Smith standing near the bridge looking out at the ocean in a trance-like daze. According to Lightoller, "I yelled at the top of my voice, 'Hadn't we better get the women and children into the boats, sir?' He heard me and nodded reply." Smith then ordered Lightoller and Murdoch to "put the women and children in and lower away". Lightoller took charge of the boats on the port side and Murdoch took charge of those on the starboard side. The two officers interpreted the "women and children" evacuation order differently; Murdoch took it to mean women and children first, while Lightoller took it to mean women and children only. Lightoller lowered lifeboats with empty seats if there were no women and children waiting to board, while Murdoch allowed a limited number of men to board if all the nearby women and children had embarked. Neither officer knew how many people could safely be carried in the boats as they were lowered and they both erred on the side of caution by not filling them. They could have been lowered quite safely with their full complement of 68 people, especially with the highly favourable weather and sea conditions. Had this been done, an extra 500 people could have been saved; instead, hundreds of people, predominantly men, were left on board as lifeboats were launched with many seats vacant.

Few passengers at first were willing to board the lifeboats and the officers in charge of the evacuation found it difficult to persuade them. The millionaire John Jacob Astor declared: "We are safer here than in that little boat." Some passengers refused flatly to embark. J. Bruce Ismay, realising the urgency of the situation, roamed the starboard boat deck urging passengers and crew to board the boats. A trickle of women, couples and single men were persuaded to board starboard lifeboat No. 7, which became the first lifeboat to be lowered.

Departure of the lifeboats (00:45–02:05)
Further information: Lifeboats of the RMS Titanic


"The Sad Parting", illustration of 1912

At 00:45, lifeboat No. 7 was rowed away from Titanic with 28 passengers on board (despite a capacity of 65). Lifeboat No. 6, on the port side, was the next to be lowered at 00:55. It also had 28 people on board, among them the "unsinkable" Margaret "Molly" Brown. Lightoller realised there was only one seaman on board (Quartermaster Robert Hichens) and called for volunteers. Major Arthur Godfrey Peuchen of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club stepped forward and climbed down a rope into the lifeboat; he was the only adult male passenger whom Lightoller allowed to board during the port side evacuation. Peuchen's role highlighted a key problem during the evacuation: there were hardly any seamen to man the boats. Some had been sent below to open gangway doors to allow more passengers to be evacuated, but they never returned. They were presumably trapped and drowned by the rising water below decks.

Meanwhile, other crewmen fought to maintain vital services as water continued to pour into the ship below decks. The engineers and firemen worked to vent steam from the boilers to prevent them from exploding on contact with the cold water. They re-opened watertight doors in order to set up extra portable pumps in the forward compartments in a futile bid to reduce the torrent, and kept the electrical generators running to maintain lights and power throughout the ship. Steward F. Dent Ray narrowly avoided being swept away when a wooden wall between his quarters and the third-class accommodation on E deck collapsed, leaving him waist-deep in water. Two engineers, Herbert Harvey and Jonathan Shepherd (who had just broken his left leg after falling into a manhole minutes earlier), died in boiler room No. 5 when, at around 00:45, the bunker door separating it from the flooded No. 6 boiler room collapsed and they were swept away by "a wave of green foam" according to leading fireman Frederick Barrett, who barely escaped from the boiler room.

In boiler room No. 4, at around 01:20, water began flooding in from below, possibly indicating that the bottom of the ship had also been holed by the iceberg. The flow of water soon overwhelmed the pumps and forced the firemen and trimmers to evacuate the forward boiler rooms. Further aft, Chief Engineer William Bell, his engineering colleagues, and a handful of volunteer firemen and greasers stayed behind in the unflooded No. 1, 2 and 3 boiler rooms and in the turbine and reciprocating engine rooms. They continued working on the boilers and the electrical generators in order to keep the ship's lights and pumps operable and to power the radio so that distress signals could be sent. They remained at their posts until the very end, thus ensuring that Titanic's electrics functioned until the final minutes of the sinking. None of the ship's 35 engineers and electricians survived. Neither did any of the Titanic's five postal clerks, who were last seen struggling to save the mail bags they had rescued from the flooded mail room. They were caught by the rising water somewhere on D deck.

Many of the third-class passengers were also confronted with the sight of water pouring into their quarters on E, F and G decks. Carl Jansson, one of the relatively small number of third-class survivors, later recalled:

Then I run down to my cabin to bring my other clothes, watch and bag but only had time to take the watch and coat when water with enormous force came into the cabin and I had to rush up to the deck again where I found my friends standing with lifebelts on and with terror painted on their faces. What should I do now, with no lifebelt and no shoes and no cap?

The lifeboats were lowered every few minutes on each side, but most of the boats were greatly under-filled. No. 5 left with 41 aboard, No. 3 had 32 aboard, No. 8 left with 39 and No. 1 left with just 12 out of a capacity of 40. The evacuation did not go smoothly and passengers suffered accidents and injuries as it progressed. One woman fell between lifeboat No. 10 and the side of the ship but someone caught her by the ankle and hauled her back onto the promenade deck, where she made a second successful attempt at boarding. First-class passenger Annie Stengel broke several ribs when an overweight German-American doctor and his brother jumped into No. 5, squashing her and knocking her unconscious. The lifeboats' descent was likewise risky. No. 6 was nearly flooded during the descent by water discharging out of the ship's side, but successfully made it away from the ship. No. 3 came close to disaster when, for a time, one of the davits jammed, threatening to pitch the passengers out of the lifeboat and into the sea

By 01:20, the seriousness of the situation was now apparent to the passengers above decks, who began saying their goodbyes, with husbands escorting their wives and children to the lifeboats. Distress flares were fired every few minutes to attract the attention of any ships nearby and the radio operators repeatedly sent the distress signal CQD. Radio operator Harold Bride suggested to his colleague Jack Phillips that he should use the new SOS signal, as it "may be your last chance to send it". The two radio operators contacted other ships to ask for assistance. Several responded, of which RMS Carpathia was the closest, at 58 miles (93 km) away. She was a much slower vessel than Titanic and, even driven at her maximum speed of 17 kn (20 mph; 31 km/h), would have taken four hours to reach the sinking ship. Another to respond was SS Mount Temple, which set a course and headed for Titanic's position but was stopped en-route by pack ice.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Titanic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_RMS_Titanic

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1912 – The British passenger liner RMS Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic at 2:20 a.m., two hours and forty minutes after hitting an iceberg.
Only 710 of 2,227 passengers and crew on board survive.
Part II


Much nearer was SS Californian, which had warned Titanic of ice a few hours earlier. Apprehensive at his ship being caught in a large field of drift ice, Californian's captain, Stanley Lord, had decided at about 22:00 to halt for the night and wait for daylight to find a way through the ice field. At 23:30, 10 minutes before Titanic hit the iceberg, Californian's sole radio operator, Cyril Evans, shut his set down for the night and went to bed. On the bridge her Third Officer, Charles Groves, saw a large vessel to starboard around 10 to 12 mi (16 to 19 km) away. It made a sudden turn to port and stopped. If the radio operator of Californian had stayed at his post fifteen minutes longer, hundreds of lives might have been saved. A little over an hour later, Second Officer Herbert Stone saw five white rockets exploding above the stopped ship. Unsure what the rockets meant, he called Captain Lord, who was resting in the chartroom, and reported the sighting. Lord did not act on the report, but Stone was perturbed: "A ship is not going to fire rockets at sea for nothing," he told a colleague.


Distress signal sent at about 01:40 by Titanic's radio operator, Jack Phillips, to the Russian ship SS Birma. This was one of Titanic's last intelligible radio messages.
By this time, it was clear to those on Titanic that the ship was indeed sinking and there would not be enough lifeboat places for everyone. Some still clung to the hope that the worst would not happen: Lucien Smith told his wife Eloise, "It is only a matter of form to have women and children first. The ship is thoroughly equipped and everyone on her will be saved." Charlotte Collyer's husband Harvey called to his wife as she was put in a lifeboat, "Go, Lottie! For God's sake, be brave and go! I'll get a seat in another boat!"

Other couples refused to be separated. Ida Straus, the wife of Macy's department store co-owner and former member of the United States House of Representatives Isidor Straus, told her husband: "We have been living together for many years. Where you go, I go." They sat down in a pair of deck chairs and waited for the end. The industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim changed out of his life vest and sweater into top hat and evening dress and declared his wish to go down with the ship like a gentleman.

At this point, the vast majority of passengers who had boarded lifeboats were from first- and second-class. Few third-class (steerage) passengers had made it up onto the deck, and most were still lost in the maze of corridors or trapped behind barriers and partitions that segregated the accommodation for the steerage passengers from the first- and second-class areas. This segregation was not simply for social reasons, but was a requirement of United States immigration laws, which mandated that third-class passengers be segregated to control immigration and to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. First- and second-class passengers on transatlantic liners disembarked at the main piers on Manhattan Island, but steerage passengers had to go through health checks and processing at Ellis Island. In at least some places, Titanic's crew appear to have actively hindered the steerage passengers' escape. Some of the barriers were locked and guarded by crew members, apparently to prevent the steerage passengers from rushing the lifeboats. Irish survivor Margaret Murphy wrote in May 1912:

Before all the steerage passengers had even a chance of their lives, the Titanic's sailors fastened the doors and companionways leading up from the third-class section ... A crowd of men was trying to get up to a higher deck and were fighting the sailors; all striking and scuffling and swearing. Women and some children were there praying and crying. Then the sailors fastened down the hatchways leading to the third-class section. They said they wanted to keep the air down there so the vessel could stay up longer. It meant all hope was gone for those still down there.

A long and winding route had to be taken to reach topside; the steerage-class accommodation, located on C through G decks, was at the extreme ends of the decks, and so was the farthest away from the lifeboats. By contrast, the first-class accommodation was located on the upper decks and so was nearest. Proximity to the lifeboats thus became a key factor in determining who got into them. To add to the difficulty, many of the steerage passengers did not understand or speak English. It was perhaps no coincidence that English-speaking Irish immigrants were disproportionately represented among the steerage passengers who survived. Many of those who did survive owed their lives to third-class steward John Edward Hart, who organised three trips into the ship's interior to escort groups of third-class passengers up to the boat deck. Others made their way through open barriers or climbed emergency ladders.

Some, perhaps overwhelmed by it all, made no attempt to escape and stayed in their cabins or congregated in prayer in the third-class dining room. Leading Fireman Charles Hendrickson saw crowds of third-class passengers below decks with their trunks and possessions, as if waiting for someone to direct them. Psychologist Wynn Craig Wade attributes this to "stoic passivity" produced by generations of being told what to do by social superiors. August Wennerström, one of the male steerage passengers to survive, commented later that many of his companions had made no effort to save themselves. He wrote:

Hundreds were in a circle [in the third-class dining saloon] with a preacher in the middle, praying, crying, asking God and Mary to help them. They lay there and yelled, never lifting a hand to help themselves. They had lost their own will power and expected God to do all the work for them.

Launching of the last lifeboats (01:30–02:05)


Lifeboat No. 15 was nearly lowered onto lifeboat No. 13 (depicted by Charles Dixon).

By 01:30, Titanic's downward angle in the water was increasing and the ship was now listing slightly more to port, but not more than 5 degrees. The deteriorating situation was reflected in the tone of the messages sent from the ship: "We are putting the women off in the boats" at 01:25, "Engine room getting flooded" at 01:35, and at 01:45, "Engine room full up to boilers." This was Titanic's last intelligible signal, sent as the ship's electrical system began to fail; subsequent messages were jumbled and broken. The two radio operators nonetheless continued sending out distress messages almost to the very end.

The remaining boats were filled much closer to capacity and in an increasing rush. No. 11 was filled with five people more than its rated capacity. As it was lowered, it was nearly flooded by water being pumped out of the ship. No. 13 narrowly avoided the same problem but those aboard were unable to release the ropes from which the boat had been lowered. It drifted astern, directly under No. 15 as it was being lowered. The ropes were cut in time and both boats made it away safely.

The first signs of panic were seen when a group of passengers attempted to rush port-side lifeboat No. 14 as it was being lowered with 40 people aboard. Fifth Officer Lowe, who was in charge of the boat, fired three warning shots in the air to control the crowd without causing injuries. No. 16 was lowered five minutes later. Among those aboard was stewardess Violet Jessop, who would repeat the experience four years later when she survived the sinking of one of Titanic's sister ships, Britannic, in the First World War. Collapsible boat C was launched at 01:40 from a now largely deserted area of the deck, as most of those on deck had moved to the stern of the ship. It was aboard this boat that White Star chairman and managing director J. Bruce Ismay, Titanic's most controversial survivor, made his escape from the ship, an act later condemned as cowardice.

At 01:45, lifeboat No. 2 was lowered. While it was still at deck level, Lightoller had found the boat occupied by men who, he wrote later, "weren't British, nor of the English-speaking race ... [but of] the broad category known to sailors as 'dagoes'." After he evicted them by threatening them with his revolver, he was unable to find enough women and children to fill the boat and lowered it with only 25 people on board out of a possible capacity of 40. John Jacob Astor saw his wife off to safety in No. 4 boat at 01:55 but was refused entry by Lightoller, even though 20 of the 60 seats aboard were unoccupied.

The last boat to be launched was collapsible D, which left at 02:05 with 25 people aboard; two more men jumped on the boat as it was being lowered. The sea had reached the boat deck and the forecastle was deep underwater. First-class passenger Edith Evans gave up her place in the boat, and ultimately died in the disaster. She was one of only four women in first class to perish in the sinking. Captain Smith carried out a final tour of the deck, telling the radio operators and other crew members: "Now it's every man for himself."

As passengers and crew headed to the stern, where Father Thomas Byles was hearing confessions and giving absolutions, Titanic's band played outside the gymnasium. Titanic had two separate bands of musicians. One was a quintet led by Wallace Hartley that played after dinner and at religious services while the other was a trio who played in the reception area and outside the café and restaurant. The two bands had separate music libraries and arrangements and had not played together before the sinking. Around 30 minutes after colliding with the iceberg, the two bands were called by Captain Smith who ordered them to play in the first class lounge. Passengers present remember them playing lively tunes such as "Alexander's Ragtime Band". It is unknown if the two piano players were with the band at this time. The exact time is unknown, but the musicians later moved to the boat deck level where they played before moving outside onto the deck itself.

Part of the enduring folklore of the Titanic sinking is that the musicians played the hymn "Nearer, My God, to Thee" as the ship sank, but this appears to be dubious. The claim surfaced among the earliest reports of the sinking, and the hymn became so closely associated with the Titanic disaster that its opening bars were carved on the grave monument of Titanic's bandmaster, Wallace Hartley, one of those who perished. Violet Jessop said in her 1934 account of the disaster that she had heard the hymn being played. In contrast, Archibald Gracie emphatically denied it in his own account, written soon after the sinking, and Radio Operator Harold Bride said that he had heard the band playing ragtime, then "Autumn", by which he may have meant Archibald Joyce's then-popular waltz "Songe d'Automne" (Autumn Dream). George Orrell, the bandmaster of the rescue ship, Carpathia, who spoke with survivors, related: "The ship's band in any emergency is expected to play to calm the passengers. After Titanic struck the iceberg the band began to play bright music, dance music, comic songs – anything that would prevent the passengers from becoming panic-stricken ... various awe-stricken passengers began to think of the death that faced them and asked the bandmaster to play hymns. The one which appealed to all was 'Nearer My God to Thee'." According to Gracie, who was near the band until that section of deck went under, the tunes played by the band were "cheerful" but he didn't recognise any of them, claiming that if they had played 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' as claimed in the newspaper "I assuredly should have noticed it and regarded it as a tactless warning of immediate death to us all and one likely to create panic." Several survivors who were among the last to leave the ship claimed that the band continued playing until the slope of the deck became too steep for them to stand, Gracie claimed that the band stopped playing at least 30 minutes before the vessel sank. Several witnesses support this account including A. H. Barkworth, a first-class passenger who testified: "I do not wish to detract from the bravery of anybody, but I might mention that when I first came on deck the band was playing a waltz. The next time I passed where the band was stationed, the members had thrown down their instruments and were not to be seen."

Bride heard the band playing as he left the radio cabin, which was by now awash, in the company of the other radio operator, Jack Phillips. He had just had a fight with a man who Bride thought was "a stoker, or someone from below decks", who had attempted to steal Phillips' lifebelt. Bride wrote later: "I did my duty. I hope I finished [the man]. I don't know. We left him on the cabin floor of the radio room, and he was not moving." The two radio operators went in opposite directions, Phillips aft and Bride forward towards collapsible lifeboat B.

Archibald Gracie was also heading aft, but as he made his way towards the stern he found his path blocked by "a mass of humanity several lines deep, covering the boat deck, facing us" – hundreds of steerage passengers, who had finally made it to the deck just as the last lifeboats departed. He gave up on the idea of going aft and jumped into the water to get away from the crowd. Others made no attempt to escape. The ship's designer, Thomas Andrews, was reportedly last seen in the first-class smoking room, having removed his lifebelt, staring at the painting above the fireplace. Captain Smith's fate is unclear as there are conflicting accounts of his death; he either entered the wheelhouse on the bridge and died there when it was engulfed or jumped into the water just before the bridge was submerged and subsequently perished in the water, possibly near Collapsible B.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_RMS_Titanic

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1912 – The British passenger liner RMS Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic at 2:20 a.m., two hours and forty minutes after hitting an iceberg.
Only 710 of 2,227 passengers and crew on board survive.
Part III


Last minutes of sinking (02:15–02:20)

"Nearer, My God, To Thee" – cartoon of 1912

At about 02:15, Titanic's angle in the water began to increase rapidly as water poured into previously unflooded parts of the ship through deck hatches. Her suddenly increasing angle caused what one survivor called a "giant wave" to wash along the ship from the forward end of the boat deck, sweeping many people into the sea. The parties who were trying to lower collapsible boats A and B, including Chief Officer Henry Wilde, First Officer Murdoch, Second Officer Charles Lightoller and Colonel Archibald Gracie, were swept away along with the two boats (boat B floated away upside-down with Harold Bride trapped underneath it, and boat A ended up partly flooded and with its canvas not raised). Bride, Gracie and Lightoller made it onto boat B, but Murdoch and Wilde perished in the water.

Lightoller opted to abandon his post to escape the growing crowds, and dived into the water from the roof of the officers' quarters. He was sucked into the mouth of a ventilation shaft but was blown clear by "a terrific blast of hot air" and emerged next to the capsized lifeboat. The forward funnel collapsed under its own weight, crushing several people as it fell into the water and only narrowly missing the lifeboat. It closely missed Lightoller and created a wave that washed the boat 50 yards clear of the sinking ship. Those still on Titanic felt her structure shuddering as it underwent immense stresses. As first-class passenger Jack Thayer described it:

Occasionally there had been a muffled thud or deadened explosion within the ship. Now, without warning she seemed to start forward, moving forward and into the water at an angle of about fifteen degrees. This movement with the water rushing up toward us was accompanied by a rumbling roar, mixed with more muffled explosions. It was like standing under a steel railway bridge while an express train passes overhead mingled with the noise of a pressed steel factory and wholesale breakage of china.

Eyewitnesses saw Titanic's stern rising high into the air as the ship tilted down in the water. It was said to have reached an angle of 30–45 degrees, "revolving apparently around a centre of gravity just astern of midships", as Lawrence Beesley later put it. Many survivors described a great noise, which some attributed to the boilers exploding. Beesley described it as "partly a groan, partly a rattle, and partly a smash, and it was not a sudden roar as an explosion would be: it went on successively for some seconds, possibly fifteen to twenty". He attributed it to "the engines and machinery coming loose from their bolts and bearings, and falling through the compartments, smashing everything in their way".

After another minute, the ship's lights flickered once and then permanently went out, plunging Titanic into darkness. Jack Thayer recalled seeing "groups of the fifteen hundred people still aboard, clinging in clusters or bunches, like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly as the great afterpart of the ship, two hundred fifty feet of it, rose into the sky."


"Sinking of the Titanic" by Henry Reuterdahl

Titanic's final moments (02:20)
Titanic was subjected to extreme opposing forces – the flooded bow pulling her down while the air in the stern kept her to the surface – which were concentrated at one of the weakest points in the structure, the area of the engine room hatch. Shortly after the lights went out, the ship split apart. The submerged bow may have remained attached to the stern by the keel for a short time, pulling the stern to a high angle before separating and leaving the stern to float for a few minutes longer. The forward part of the stern would have flooded very rapidly, causing it to tilt and then settle briefly until sinking. The ship disappeared from view at 02:20, 2 hours and 40 minutes after striking the iceberg. Thayer reported that it rotated on the surface, "gradually [turning] her deck away from us, as though to hide from our sight the awful spectacle ... Then, with the deadened noise of the bursting of her last few gallant bulkheads, she slid quietly away from us into the sea."

Titanic's surviving officers and some prominent survivors testified that the ship had sunk in one piece, a belief that was affirmed by the British and American inquiries into the disaster. Archibald Gracie, who was on the promenade deck with the band (by the second funnel), stated that "Titanic's decks were intact at the time she sank, and when I sank with her, there was over seven-sixteenths of the ship already under water, and there was no indication then of any impending break of the deck or ship". Ballard argued that many other survivors' accounts indicated that the ship had broken in two as she was sinking. As the engines are now known to have stayed in place along with most of the boilers, the "great noise" heard by witnesses and the momentary settling of the stern were presumably caused by the break-up of the ship rather than the loosening of her fittings or boiler explosions.

After they went under, the bow and stern took only about 5–6 minutes to sink 3,795 metres (12,451 ft), spilling a trail of heavy machinery, tons of coal and large quantities of debris from Titanic's interior. The two parts of the ship landed about 600 metres (2,000 ft) apart on a gently undulating area of the seabed. The streamlined bow section continued to descend at about the angle it had taken on the surface, striking the seabed prow-first at a shallow angle at an estimated speed of 25–30 mph (40–48 km/h). Its momentum caused it to dig a deep gouge into the seabed and buried the section up to 20 metres (66 ft) deep in sediment before it came to an abrupt halt. The sudden deceleration caused the bow's structure to buckle downwards by several degrees just forward of the bridge. The decks at the rear end of the bow section, which had already been weakened during the break-up, collapsed one atop another.

The stern section seems to have descended almost vertically, probably rotating as it fell. Empty tanks and cofferdams imploded as it descended, tearing open the structure and folding back the steel ribbing of the poop deck. The section landed with such force that it buried itself about 15 metres (49 ft) deep at the rudder. The decks pancaked down on top of each other and the hull plating splayed out to the sides. Debris continued to rain down across the seabed for several hours after the sinking

Passengers and crew in the water (02:20–04:10)

Pocket watch retrieved from the wreck site, stopped showing a time of 2:28

In the immediate aftermath of the sinking, hundreds of passengers and crew were left dying in the icy sea, surrounded by debris from the ship. Titanic's disintegration during her descent to the seabed caused buoyant chunks of debris – timber beams, wooden doors, furniture, panelling and chunks of cork from the bulkheads – to rocket to the surface. These injured and possibly killed some of the swimmers; others used the debris to try to keep themselves afloat.

With a temperature of 28 °F (−2 °C), the water was lethally cold. Second Officer Lightoller described the feeling of "a thousand knives" being driven into his body as he entered the sea. Sudden immersion into freezing water typically causes death within minutes, either from cardiac arrest, uncontrollable breathing of water, or cold incapacitation (not, as commonly believed, from hypothermia); almost all of those in the water died of cardiac arrest or other bodily reactions to freezing water within 15–30 minutes. Only 13 of them were helped into the lifeboats even though these had room for almost 500 more people.

Those in the lifeboats were horrified to hear the sound of what Lawrence Beesley called "every possible emotion of human fear, despair, agony, fierce resentment and blind anger mingled – I am certain of those – with notes of infinite surprise, as though each one were saying, 'How is it possible that this awful thing is happening to me? That I should be caught in this death trap?'" Jack Thayer compared it to the sound of "locusts on a summer night", while George Rheims, who jumped moments before Titanic sank, described it as "a dismal moaning sound which I won't ever forget; it came from those poor people who were floating around, calling for help. It was horrifying, mysterious, supernatural."

The noise of the people in the water screaming, yelling, and crying was a tremendous shock to the occupants of the lifeboats, many of whom had up to that moment believed that everyone had escaped before the ship sank. As Beesley later wrote, the cries "came as a thunderbolt, unexpected, inconceivable, incredible. No one in any of the boats standing off a few hundred yards away can have escaped the paralysing shock of knowing that so short a distance away a tragedy, unbelievable in its magnitude, was being enacted, which we, helpless, could in no way avert or diminish."


Colonel Archibald Gracie, one of the survivors who made it to collapsible lifeboat B. He never recovered from his ordeal and died eight months after the sinking.

Only a few of those in the water survived. Among them were Archibald Gracie, Jack Thayer and Charles Lightoller, who made it to the capsized collapsible boat B. Around 12 crew members climbed on board Collapsible B, and they rescued those they could until some 35 men were clinging precariously to the upturned hull. Realising the risk to the boat of being swamped by the mass of swimmers around them, they paddled slowly away, ignoring the pleas of dozens of swimmers to be allowed on board. In his account, Gracie wrote of the admiration he had for those in the water; "In no instance, I am happy to say, did I hear any word of rebuke from a swimmer because of a refusal to grant assistance... [one refusal] was met with the manly voice of a powerful man... 'All right boys, good luck and God bless you'." Several other swimmers (probably 20 or more) reached Collapsible boat A, which was upright but partly flooded, as its sides had not been properly raised. Its occupants had to sit for hours in a foot of freezing water, and many died of hypothermia during the night.

Farther out, the other eighteen lifeboats – most of which had empty seats – drifted as the occupants debated what, if anything, they should do to rescue the swimmers. Boat No. 4, having remained near the sinking ship, seems to have been closest to the site of the sinking at around 50 metres (160 ft) away; this had enabled two people to drop into the boat and another to be picked up from the water before the ship sank. After the sinking, seven more men were pulled from the water, although two later died. Collapsible D rescued one male passenger who jumped in the water and swam over to the boat immediately after it had been lowered. In all the other boats, the occupants eventually decided against returning, probably out of fear that they would be capsized in the attempt. Some put their objections bluntly; Quartermaster Hichens, commanding lifeboat No. 6, told the women aboard his boat that there was no point returning as there were "only a lot of stiffs there".

After about twenty minutes, the cries began to fade as the swimmers lapsed into unconsciousness and death. Fifth Officer Lowe, in charge of lifeboat No. 14, "waited until the yells and shrieks had subsided for the people to thin out" before mounting an attempt to rescue those in the water. He gathered together five of the lifeboats and transferred the occupants between them to free up space in No. 14. Lowe then took a crew of seven crewmen and one male passenger who volunteered to help, and then rowed back to the site of the sinking. The whole operation took about three-quarters of an hour. By the time No. 14 headed back to the site of the sinking, almost all of those in the water were dead and only a few voices could still be heard.

Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, recalled after the disaster that "the very last cry was that of a man who had been calling loudly: 'My God! My God!' He cried monotonously, in a dull, hopeless way. For an entire hour there had been an awful chorus of shrieks, gradually dying into a hopeless moan, until this last cry that I speak of. Then all was silent." Lowe and his crew found four men still alive, one of whom died shortly afterwards. Otherwise, all they could see were "hundreds of bodies and lifebelts"; the dead "seemed as if they had perished with the cold as their limbs were all cramped up".

In the other boats, there was nothing the survivors could do but await the arrival of rescue ships. The air was bitterly cold and several of the boats had taken on water. The survivors could not find any food or drinkable water in the boats, and most had no lights. The situation was particularly bad aboard collapsible B, which was only kept afloat by a diminishing air pocket in the upturned hull. As dawn approached, the wind rose and the sea became increasingly choppy, forcing those on the collapsible boat to stand up to balance it. Some, exhausted by the ordeal, fell off into the sea and were drowned. It became steadily harder for the rest to keep their balance on the hull, with waves washing across it. Archibald Gracie later wrote of how he and the other survivors sitting on the upturned hull were struck by "the utter helplessness of our position".

Rescue and departure (04:10–09:15)

Collapsible lifeboat D photographed from the deck of Carpathia on the morning of 15 April 1912.

Titanic's survivors were rescued around 04:00 on 15 April by the RMS Carpathia, which had steamed through the night at high speed and at considerable risk, as the ship had to dodge numerous icebergs en route. Carpathia's lights were first spotted around 03:30, which greatly cheered the survivors, though it took several more hours for everyone to be brought aboard. The 30 or more men on collapsible B finally managed to board two other lifeboats, but one survivor died just before the transfer was made. Collapsible A was also in trouble and was now nearly awash; many of those aboard (maybe more than half) had died overnight. The remaining survivors – an unknown number of men, estimated to be between 10–11 and more than 20, and one woman – were transferred from A into another lifeboat, leaving behind three bodies in the boat, which was left to drift away. It was recovered a month later by the White Star liner RMS Oceanic with the bodies still aboard.

Those on Carpathia were startled by the scene that greeted them as the sun came up: "fields of ice on which, like points on the landscape, rested innumerable pyramids of ice." Captain Arthur Rostron of Carpathia saw ice all around, including 20 large bergs measuring up to 200 feet (61 m) high and numerous smaller bergs, as well as ice floes and debris from Titanic. It appeared to Carpathia's passengers that their ship was in the middle of a vast white plain of ice, studded with icebergs appearing like hills in the distance.

As the lifeboats were brought alongside Carpathia, the survivors came aboard the ship by various means. Some were strong enough to climb up rope ladders; others were hoisted up in slings, and the children were hoisted in mail sacks. The last lifeboat to reach the ship was Lightoller's boat No. 12, with 74 people aboard a boat designed to carry 65. They were all on Carpathia by 09:00. There were some scenes of joy as families and friends were reunited, but in most cases hopes died as loved ones failed to reappear.

At 09:15, two more ships appeared on the scene – Mount Temple and Californian, which had finally learned of the disaster when her radio operator returned to duty – but by then there were no more survivors to rescue. Carpathia had been bound for Fiume, Austria-Hungary (now Rijeka, Croatia), but as she had neither the stores nor the medical facilities to cater for the survivors, Rostron ordered that a course be calculated to return the ship to New York, where the survivors could be properly looked after. Carpathia departed the area, leaving the other ships to carry out a final, fruitless, two-hour search.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_RMS_Titanic

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1914 – Launch of Imperator Aleksandr III (Emperor Alexander III) was the third, and last, ship of the Imperatritsa Mariya-class dreadnoughts of the Imperial Russian Navy.


Imperator Aleksandr III (Emperor Alexander III) was the third, and last, ship of the Imperatritsa Mariya-class dreadnoughts of the Imperial Russian Navy. She was begun before World War I, completed in 1917 and saw service with the Black Sea Fleet. She was renamed Volia or Volya (Russian: Вóля, Freedom) before her completion and then General Alekseyev (Russian: Генерал Алексеев) in 1920. The ship did not take part in operations during World War I because her sister ships were given a higher priority for completion. She was delivered in 1917, but the disruptions of the February Revolution rendered the Black Sea Fleet ineffective and she saw no combat.

Volia was surrendered to the Germans in 1918, but they were forced to turn her over to the British by the terms of the Armistice. The British turned her over to the White Russians in 1919 and they used her to help evacuate the Crimea in 1920. She was interned in Bizerte by the French and ultimately scrapped by them in 1936 to pay her docking fees. Her guns were put into storage and were later used by the Germans and Finns for coastal artillery during World War II. The Finns and the Soviets continued to use them throughout the Cold War.


Volia at sea

Description
Imperator Aleksandr III was 168 meters (551 ft) long at the waterline. She had a beam of 27.43 meters (90.0 ft) and a draft of 8.36 meters (27.4 ft). Her displacement was 23,600 tonnes (23,200 long tons; 26,000 short tons) at load, 1,000 t (980 long tons; 1,100 short tons) more than her designed displacement of 22,600 t (22,200 long tons; 24,900 short tons). Imperatritsa Mariya had proved to be very bow heavy in service and tended to ship large amounts of water through her forward casemates. Imperator Aleksandr III's forward pair of 130 mm guns were removed before she was completed in an attempt to compensate for her trim.

Imperator Aleksandr III was fitted with four Parsons-type steam turbines imported from John Brown & Company of the United Kingdom. They were designed for a total of 26,000 shaft horsepower (19,000 kW), but produced 27,270 shp (20,340 kW) on trials. 20 mixed-firing triangular Yarrow water-tube boilers powered the turbines with a working pressure of 17.5 atm (257 psi). Her designed speed was 21 knots (39 km/h; 24 mph). Her maximum coal capacity was 1,700 long tons (1,727 t) plus 500 t (490 long tons; 550 short tons) of fuel oil which gave her a range of 1,640 nautical miles (3,040 km; 1,890 mi) at 21 knots (39 km/h; 24 mph). All of her electrical power was generated by three Curtis 360-kilowatt main turbo generators and two 200-kilowatt auxiliary units.

The ship's main armament consisted of a dozen Obukhovskii 12-inch (305 mm) Pattern 1907 52-calibre guns mounted in four triple turrets distributed the length of the ship. Her secondary armament consisted of eighteen 130-millimeter (5.1 in) B7 Pattern 1913 55-calibre guns mounted in casemates. They were arranged in two groups, five guns per side from the forward turret to the rear funnel and the remaining four clustered around the rear turret. She was fitted with four 38-calibre 76.2-millimeter (3.00 in) 'Lender' anti-aircraft guns, two each mounted on the roof of the fore and aft turrets. Four 17.7-inch (450 mm) submerged torpedo tubeswere mounted, two tubes on each broadside abaft the forward magazine.

Service
Imperator Aleksandr III was built by the Russud Shipyard at Nikolayev. She was laid down on 30 October 1911, but this was just a ceremonial event as the design had not yet been finalized or the contract signed. She suffered from a number of delays during construction. First the method of fastening the armour to its supports was changed and the armour plates were locked together by a type of mortise and tenon joint to better distribute the shock of an impact based on the full-scale armour trials conducted using the hulk of the old pre-dreadnought battleship Chesma in 1913. This added almost 500 long tons (508 t) of weight to the ship and raised her cost by 220,000 rubles. Then her priority was reduced after the start of World War I to concentrate efforts on her more advanced sister ships to complete them more quickly. She was not expected to be finished before 1916, but her British-built turbines were also delayed. Imperator Aleksandr III was launched on 15 April 1914, but did not arrive at Sevastopol for fitting out until 17 July 1917, by which time the ship had been renamed Volia (Freedom). She conducted her sea trials over the next several months. By this time the Black Sea Fleet was totally ineffective as a result of the political situation after the February Revolution and Volia did not see any combat.

Volia sailed from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk on 1 May 1918 to avoid capture by advancing German troops. While at Novorossiysk she received an order to scuttle on 19 June 1918, but the majority of the crew (933 versus 640) refused to do so and decided to return to Sevastopol. Upon arrival she was disarmed and only guards were left on board, but the Germans took control on 1 October. The ship made a brief cruise with a German crew on 15 October, but her guns were still inoperable. Less than a month later the Germans were forced to turn her over to the British on 24 November in accordance with the Armistice when a party from the light cruiser HMS Canterbury took charge of her. A month later she was sailed for the port of İzmit, on the Sea of Marmara, by a crew from the pre-dreadnought HMS Agamemnon, which also escorted her.

On 29 October 1919 she was sailed back to Sevastopol by a crew from HMS Iron Duke and turned over to the White Russians on 1 November.[8] They renamed her General Alekseyev and carried out shore bombardments with only three of her of twelve guns operable. With the collapse of the White Russian armies in Southern Russia in 1920, the ship helped to evacuate the Whites from the Crimea to Bizerte, where she was interned with the rest of Wrangel's fleet. The French decided not to sell her back to the Soviet Union and she was sold for scrap in the late 1920s to pay her docking costs although she was not actually broken up until 1936.

The ship's guns were placed into storage in Bizerte. In January 1940 France gave them to Finland, after refusing to sell seven to the Finns in the summer of 1939. Of the twelve main guns, eight made it to Finland, while four were seized by Germany when it invaded Norway in April 1940 and captured them on board SS Nina in Narvik harbor. The Germans emplaced all four guns, after rebuilding them to accept German ammunition, in armoured turrets in Batterie Mirus on Guernsey. The Finns used four guns in coastal artillery positions at Isosaari and Mäkiluoto. Two other guns were used to repair Soviet TM-3-12 railway guns abandoned at Hankowhen the Soviets evacuated in 1941. After the war, these were handed over to the Soviet Union, where they were kept operational until the 1990s. The remaining two guns were kept as spares for the others, one of which was used to replace one gun damaged during tests with 'super charges' in the 1970s. One gun turret is now a memorial at Isosaari while the remaining spare barrel is preserved at the Finnish Coast Artillery Museum at Kuivasaari.

Nina also carried some of General Alekseyev's 13 cm guns. Several of these were used at the fort at Tangane on the island of Rugsundøy. They engaged the British light cruiser HMS Kenya, reportedly scoring one hit on the cruiser, during Operation Archery in 1941, but saw no other combat during the war.

Russian battleship Imperator Aleksandr III - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1915 – Launch of HMS Abercrombie and HMS Roberts, both Abercrombie class monitors of the Royal Navy that served in the First World War.


HMS Abercrombie was a First World War Royal Navy Abercrombie-class monitor.

On 3 November 1914, Charles M. Schwab of Bethlehem Steel offered Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, the use of four 14 in (356 mm)/45cal BL MK II twin gun turrets, originally destined for the Greekbattleship Salamis. These turrets could not be delivered to the German builders, due to the British Naval blockade. The Royal Navy immediately designed a class of monitors, designed for shore bombardment, to use the turrets.



HMS Abercrombie was laid down at the Harland and Wolff Ltd. shipyard at Belfast on 12 December 1914. The ship was named Admiral Farragut in honour of the United States Admiral David Farragut, but as the United States was still neutral, the ship was hurriedly renamed HMS M1 on 31 May 1915. She was then named HMS General Abercrombie on 19 June 1915, and then renamed HMS Abercrombie on 21 June 1915.

HMS Abercrombie sailed for the Dardanelles on 24 June 1915, and provided fire support during the Battle of Gallipoli. She remained in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, until returning to England in February 1919. She was decommissioned in May 1919, and was disarmed in June 1920. Sold for breaking up in May 1921, she was retained in reserve until resold on 25 June 1927 to the Thos W Ward shipyard at Inverkeithing for scrapping.




HMS Roberts circa 1918

HMS Roberts was an Abercrombie class monitor of the Royal Navy that served in the First World War.

On 3 November 1914, Charles M. Schwab of Bethlehem Steel offered Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, the use of four 14 in (356 mm)/45cal BL MK II twin gun turrets, originally destined for the Greekship Salamis. These turrets could not be delivered to the German builders, due to the British Naval blockade. The Royal Navy immediately created a class of monitors, designed for shore bombardment, to use the turrets.

Roberts was laid down at the Swan Hunter, Ltd shipyard at Wallsend on 17 December 1914. The ship was named Stonewall Jackson in honour of the CSA General Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, however as the United States was still neutral, the ship was hurriedly renamed HMS M4 on 31 May 1915. She was then named HMS Earl Roberts on 19 June 1915 and again renamed HMS Roberts on 22 June 1915

Roberts sailed for the Dardanelles in June 1915. She remained in the Eastern Mediterranean until returning to England in February 1916. She served as a guard ship at Yarmouth until the end of the War. She decommissioned in May 1919, and was initially sold for breaking up in May 1921, but was retained by the Admiralty for trials.

Around 1925 she was considered for conversion to a mobile airship base with a mooring mast and fueling capabilities, but nothing came of this proposal.[1] In the 1930s, she was used for testing underwater protection for new construction warships. She was finally sold in September 1936 to the Ward shipyard at Preston for breaking up.


The Abercrombie class of monitors served in the Royal Navy during the First World War.

History


The 14-inch (356 mm) gun turret of an Abercrombie-class monitor during World War I. It mounted two 14-inch (356 mm) Mark II guns.

The four ships in this class came about when the contracted supplier of the main armament for the Greek battleship Salamis being built in Germany was unable to supply due to the British blockade. The company – Bethlehem Steel in the United States – instead offered to sell the four 14 in (356 mm) twin gun turrets to the Royal Navy on 3 November 1914.[1] The Royal Navy was using obsolete pre-dreadnought battleships for shore bombardment in support of the army in Belgium, and a design for a shallow-draught warship (known as "Monitors") suitable for shore-bombardment was quickly designed and built to use these turrets. The ships were laid down and launched within six months.

The ships carried a single main gun turret forward of a tripod mast, which was itself in front of a single funnel. A secondary armament of two 12-pounder (76 mm) guns was fitted, with a single 3-pounder (47 mm) anti-aircraft gun and a 2-pounder pom-pom completed the ships armament.

The monitors had a box-like hull, with very bluff bow and stern, and were fitted with anti-torpedo bulges. In order to speed construction, it was intended to use off-the shelf merchant ship engines, giving about 2,000 indicated horsepower (1,500 kW), which were expected to drive the ships to 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph). The rushed design, however, meant that the ships were much slower than expected — Raglan's engines gave 2,310 indicated horsepower (1,720 kW) but the ship could only reach 6 1⁄2 knots (12.0 km/h; 7.5 mph).

During the planning and build, they were to be the Styx-class named after four American figures; General Ulysses S. Grant, General Robert E. Lee, Admiral David Farragut and General Stonewall Jackson. Because the United States was still a neutral power at that time, using these names would have been undiplomatic and so they were simply called M1 through M4 before receiving their final names.

The design included a seaplane for spotting the guns, but it was found that land-based aircraft were more effective; as monitors, they would never operate in the open sea, and storing the seaplane on top of the turret meant it had to be removed to avoid damage, even if not required before the guns could fire.

HMS Abercrombie (1915) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Roberts_(1915)

Abercrombie-class monitor - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1917 - troopship SS Cameronia (1911) was sunk by German U-boat U-33


The SS Cameronia was a twin propeller triple-expansion 15,600 IHP passenger steamship owned by the Glasgow-based Line and built by D. and W. Henderson and Company at Glasgow in 1911. The ship provided a transatlantic service from Glasgow to various destinations.


SS Cameronia

The Cameronia sailed on her maiden voyage for the Line company on 13 September 1911 on the Glasgow - Mowville - New York City route. In February 1915, the Cameronia was employed in a joint -Cunard company service on the Glasgow - Liverpool - New York route.

On 21 June 1915 while inbound in the mouth of the Mersey the Cameronia was attacked by a U-boat. Captain Kinnaird turned to ram the U-boat which was forced to dive and then broke off her attack.

The Cameronia was torpedoed on 15 April 1917 by the German U-boat U-33 while en route from Marseille, France, to Alexandria, Egypt. She was serving as a troopship at the time and contained approximately 2,650 soldiers on board. The ship sank in 40 minutes, 150 miles east of Malta; taking 210 lives. Other sources report only 140 casualties. Most of the crew and embarked soldiers were picked up by the escorting destroyers HMS Nemesis and HMS Rifleman. The remainder of the survivors had sufficient time to take to lifeboats.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Cameronia_(1911)

SM U-33 (Germany) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1917 - en route from Salonica to Alexandria, the troop ship SS Arcadian was sunk in the Aegean Sea 26 nautical miles (48 km) off Milos by SM UC-74, killing 279 people.


SS Arcadian was a Barrow-in-Furness built passenger liner constructed in 1899 by Vickers, Sons & Maxim Ltd for the Pacific Steam Navigation Company as SS Ortona. In World War I she served with the Royal Navy and was sunk by a U-boat in 1917.


RMS Arcadian as she appeared between 1910 and 1915

Pacific Steam Navigation Company service, 1899–1906
SS Ortona was the last ship that Pacific Steam built for the London-to-Australia route. Launched on 10 July 1899 and registered in Liverpool on 26 October, she left London on her maiden voyage was on 24 November in a joint service with the Orient Steam Navigation Company. She carried 140 first-class, 180 second-class and 300 third-class passengers, a total of 620. In December 1902, Ortona was used to return troops to the UK after the end of the Second Boer War.

Royal Mail Steam Packet Company service, 1906–15


The dining saloon of Arcadian in 1913 after her conversion to a cruise ship


Ortona at Pinkenba Wharf, Brisbane in 1907

On 8 May 1906 Ortona was sold to the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, who used her in a joint operation with the Orient line to Australia. The "All Golds" professional New Zealand Rugby League team, travelled on Ortona from Australia to France via Ceylon in August/September 1907. In April 1909, she was transferred to the Royal Mail West Indies service. In 1910, she was sent to the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast for conversion into a 320-capacity cruise ship with a new gross tonnage of 8,939. She was renamed RMS Arcadian on 21 September 1910 as the RMSP's liners had names beginning with the letter "A", and was registered at Belfast in September of the following year. She started her first world cruise in January 1912, the largest dedicated cruise ship in the world at that time. She was on the first leg of this voyage that Olave St Claire Soames met Lieutenant General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout Movement, leading to their marriage in October of that year.

Admiralty service, 1915–17


Arcadian sinking after being torpedoed. Men can be seen sliding down ropes into the sea

In February 1915, near the start of the First World War, Arcadian was taken up by the Admiralty and converted to an armed merchant cruiser. On 7 April 1915 at Alexandria, General Sir Ian Hamilton came aboard and used Arcadian, together with the battleship Queen Elizabeth, as his headquarters ship during the opening phase of the Gallipoli Campaign. Once Hamilton's staff had transferred to a shore base at Imbros, Arcadian was employed as a troop ship in the Mediterranean.

On 15 April 1917 Arcadian was en route from Thessaloniki (Salonika) to Alexandria with a company of 1,335 troops and crew and escorted by a Japanese Navy destroyer. Shortly after completing a boat drill, while 26 miles north east of the Greek island of Milos, Arcadian was hit by a single torpedo from the German submarine SM UC-74 and sank within six minutes with the loss of 279 lives. A contemporary newspaper article described how four of Arcadian's overcrowded lifeboats were successfully lowered before she sank. Some of the dead were cooks and stokers who were working below decks. The escorting destroyer had two torpedoes launched at her while she was attempting to rescue men from the water; survivors reported that she had lowered three of her own boats while going "at full speed". More survivors, who had been clinging to a raft, were rescued at midnight by the Q-ship HMS Redbreast. Among the dead was the eminent bacteriologist, Sir Marc Armand Ruffer, who was returning to Alexandria after advising on the control of an epidemic among troops based at Thessaloniki.

SS Arcadian - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

SM UC-74 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
15 April 1919 - german submarine beached off Hastings directly in front of the Queens Hotel
german submarine U-118, surrendered on 23 February 1919, would have been transferred to France, but the tow cable snapped during her voyage to France and she went aground at Hastings.


SM U-118 was a type UE II mine laying submarine of the Imperial German Navy and one of 329 submarines serving with that navy during World War I.

U-118 engaged in naval warfare and took part in the First Battle of the Atlantic.


SM U-118 washed ashore at Hastings, Sussex.

Career
SM U-118 was commissioned on 8 May 1918, following her construction at the AG Vulcan Stettin shipyard in Hamburg. She was commanded by Herbert Stohwasser and joined the I Flotilla operating in the eastern Atlantic. After four months without sinking any ships, on 16 September 1918, the SM U-118 scored her first hit. Some 175 miles (282 km) north-west of Cape Villano, the U-118 torpedoed and sank the British steamer Wellington. The following month, on 2 October 1918, she sank her second and last ship, the British tanker Arca at about 40 miles (64 km) north-west of Tory Island. The ending of hostilities on 11 November 1918 led to the subsequent surrender of the Imperial German Navy. The SM U-118 was transferred to France on 23 February 1919.

Beaching at Hastings
U-118 was to be broken up for scrap. In the early hours of 15 April 1919, however, while she was being towed through the English Channel towards Scapa Flow, the dragging hawser broke off in a storm. The submarine ran aground on the beach at Hastings in Sussex at approximately 00:45, directly in front of the Queens Hotel.

Initially, there were attempts to displace the stricken vessel. Three tractors tried to refloat the submarine, and a French destroyer attempted to break the ship apart using her guns. All were unsuccessful, and the closeness of the submarine to the public beach and the Queens Hotel prevented the use of explosives.

The stranded submarine became a popular tourist attraction, and thousands visited Hastings that Easter to see her. She was under the authority of the local coast guard station, and the Admiralty allowed the Town Clerk of Hastings to charge a small fee for visitors to climb on the deck. This went on for two weeks, during which the town gained almost £300 (UK£ 14,400 in 2019) to help fund a welcome for the town's soldiers returning from the war.

Two members of the coast guard, chief boatman William Heard and chief officer W. Moore, showed important visitors around the interior of the submarine. The visits were curtailed in late April, when both coast guard men became severely ill. Rotting food on board was thought to be the cause, but the men's condition persisted and got worse. Moore died in December 1919, followed by Heard in February 1920. An inquest decided that a noxious gas, possibly chlorine released from the submarine's damaged batteries, had caused abscesses on the men's lungs and brain.

Although visits inside the submarine had stopped, tourists still came to be photographed alongside or on the U-boat's deck. Finally, between October and December 1919, U-118 was broken up and sold for scrap. The deck gun was left behind, but was removed in 1921. Some of the ship's keel may yet remain buried in the beach sand.

SM U-118 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
Other Events on 15 April


1671 - Launch of french Furieux 56, later 58 guns (designed and built by Rodolphe Gédéon), at Toulon – renamed Brillant in June 1678; deleted 1687 and broken up 1688 or 1689.


1800 – Birth of James Clark Ross, English captain and explorer (d. 1862)

Sir James Clark Ross FRS (15 April 1800 – 3 April 1862) was a British Royal Navy explorer known for his exploration of the Arctic with Sir William Parry and Sir John Ross, his uncle, and in particular, his own expedition to Antarctica.



The Ross expedition was a voyage of scientific exploration of the Antarctic in 1839 to 1843, led by James Clark Ross, with two unusually strong warships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. It explored what is now called the Ross Sea and discovered the Ross Ice Shelf. On the expedition, Ross discovered the Transantarctic Mountains and the volcanoes Erebus and Terror, named after his ships. The young botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker made his name on the expedition.

The expedition inferred the position of the South Magnetic Pole, and made substantial observations of the zoology and botany of the region, resulting in a monograph on the zoology, and a series of four detailed monographs by Hooker on the botany, collectively called Flora Antarctica and published in parts between 1843 and 1859. The expedition was the last major voyage of exploration made wholly under sail.

Among the expedition's biological discoveries was the Ross seal, a species confined to the pack ice of Antarctica.


HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in the Antarctic, by John Wilson Carmichael, 1847

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_Ross
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_expedition


1854 – Launch of French Turenne was a late 100-gun Hercule-class ship of the line of the French Navy, transformed into a Sail and Steam ship

Turenne was a late 100-gun Hercule-class ship of the line of the French Navy, transformed into a Sail and Steam ship.
Soon after her commissioning, Turenne was used as a troopship in the Crimean War. Transformed into a steam and sail ship in 1858 and 1859, she conducted trials in 1860 and served during the French intervention in Mexico.
Put in ordinary from 1862, she was decommissioned in 1867 and used as a coaling hulk in Brest from 1869. She was eventually broken up around 1887.


1/40th-scale model of the 100-gun Hercule, lead ship of Turenne 's class, on display at the Musée national de la Marine.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ship_Turenne_(1854)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercule-class_ship_of_the_line


1912 - The scout cruisers USS Chester (CL 1) and USS Salem (CL 3) sail from Massachusetts to assist RMS Titanic survivors, and escort RMS Carpathia, which carried the survivors of the Titanic, to New York.


1918 - First Marine Aviation Force, under the command of Capt. Alfred A. Cunningham, USMC, is formed at Marine Flying Field, Miami, Fla.


1943 - USS Yorktown (CV 10) is commissioned.

USS Yorktown (CV/CVA/CVS-10) is one of 24 Essex-class aircraft carriers built during World War II for the United States Navy. She was named after the Battle of Yorktown of the American Revolutionary War, and is the fourth U.S. Navy ship to bear the name. Initially to have been named Bonhomme Richard, she was renamed Yorktown while still under construction to commemorate the loss of USS Yorktown (CV-5) during the Battle of Midway in June 1942. Yorktown was commissioned in April 1943, and participated in several campaigns in the Pacific Theater of Operations, earning 11 battle stars and the Presidential Unit Citation.


Yorktown with planes of Carrier Air Group 1

Decommissioned shortly after the end of the war, she was modernized and recommissioned in February 1953 as an attack carrier (CVA), and served with distinction during the Korean War. The ship was later modernized again with a canted deck, eventually becoming an antisubmarine carrier (CVS) and served for many years in the Pacific, including duty in the Vietnam War, during which she earned five battle stars. Late in her career, the carrier served as a recovery ship for the Apollo 8 space mission, and was used in the movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, which recreated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and in the science fiction film The Philadelphia Experiment.


USS Yorktown (CVS-10) at sea off of Hawaii, early 1960s

Yorktown was decommissioned in 1970 and in 1975 became a museum ship at Patriots Point, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, where she was designated a National Historic Landmark.


Panoramic image of Yorktown at Patriots Point

USS Yorktown (CV-10) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

1945 - USS Frost (DE 144) and USS Stanton (DE 247) join to attack and sink German submarine U 880 and then German sub U 1235, north of the Azores.

 

[Uwek]

Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in History
16 April 1748 – Launch of HMS Vanguard, a 70-gun third rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy


HMS Vanguard was a 70-gun third rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched on 16 April 1748. She was built by Philemon Ewer at his East Cowes yard on the Isle of Wight to the draught specified by the 1745 Establishment, at a cost of £8,009. She was the fourth vessel of the Royal Navy to bear the name Vanguard.



She took part in the capture of Louisbourg in 1758 under Admiral Edward Boscawen, and in the capture of Quebec in 1759 under Admiral Charles Saunders.

The following year, she pursued two French frigates along with HMS Diana. The Atlante commanded by Jean Vauquelin, and the Pomone sunk, and the important personnel were taken prisoner. In 1762, under the command of Sir George Rodney she took part in the capture of Martinique.

Vanguard was sold out of the navy in 1774.


Scale: 1:48. A plan showing the body plan, sheer lines, and longitudinal half-breadth proposed (and approved) for a 70-gun Second Rate, two-decker, as prepared by the Master Shipwrights of Chatham Dockyard, Deptford Dockyard, Portsmouth Dockyard, Woolwich Dockyard, and Sheerness Dockyard, and approved by Sir John Norris and other flag officers. Later used for 'Grafton' (1750), 'Somerset' (1748), 'Northumberland' (1750), 'Orford' (1749), 'Swiftsure' (1750), 'Vanguard' (1748), and 'Buckingham' (1751), all 70-gun (later 68-gun) Third Rate, two-deckers


Scale: 1:48. A plan showing the body plan, sheer lines, and longitudinal half-breadth proposed (and approved) for a 70-gun Second Rate, two-decker, resolved on 5 and 8 July, and 5 August 1745 by Sir John Norris and other flag officers and gentlemen appointed to settle a new establishement for building ships of the Royal Navy. Later used for 'Grafton' (1750), 'Somerset' (1748), 'Northumberland' (1750), 'Orford' (1749), 'Swiftsure' (1750), 'Vanguard' (1748), and 'Buckingham' (1751), all 70-gun (later 68-gun) Third Rate, two-deckers. Signed by Joseph Allin/Allen [Master Shipwright, Deptford Dockyard, 1742-1746], John Ward [Master Shipwright Chatham Dockyard, 1732-1752], Pierson Lock [Master Shipwright, Portsmouth Dockyard, 1742-1755 (died)], John Holland [Master Shipwright, Woolwich Dockyard, 1742-1746], and John Pooke [Master Shipwright, Sheerness Dockyard, 1742-1751]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vanguard_(1748)

Collections - National Maritime Museum