HMS Amphitrite (1898): From Troop Transport to Accidental Ship-Sinker

A Solid Victorian Cruiser

HMS Amphitrite was a Diadem-class protected cruiser built by Vickers, Sons and Maxim at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 8 December 1896 and launched on 5 July 1898, christened by Mrs Vickers, wife of the shipbuilding firm's chairman.

She was one of eight Diadem-class cruisers designed by Sir William White for trade protection, built in pairs at four different yards; her sister at Barrow, laid down alongside her, was HMS Niobe.

The Diadems were controversial from the drawing board, and the reason is instructive. They were a cheaper development of the enormous Powerful class, with almost everything trimmed. Power came down from 25,000 indicated horsepower to about 16,500 and speed with it, the protective deck was thinned from six inches to four, and the single 9.2-inch guns fore and aft were replaced by pairs of 6-inch mounted side by side. That last change is the one that mattered. A ship of eleven thousand tons with nothing heavier than a 6-inch gun anywhere aboard cannot hurt anything her own size, and the naval journalist Fred Jane said so at the time, complaining that every weak point of the Powerfuls had been exaggerated in them.

They were also the end of a line. A protected cruiser has no armour belt along her side at all: her defence is a curved armoured deck laid over the machinery and magazines, sloping down at the edges, on the theory that a shell will either be deflected by it or will burst harmlessly in the coal bunkers above. The Diadems were the last British first class cruisers built to that idea. Everything after them was an armoured cruiser with a proper belt, and within a decade of Amphitrite's launch the battlecruiser had made the whole argument academic. She spent her career as a large, fast, comfortable ship with no real business in a battle line, which is precisely why the Navy used her as a ferry.

Her sister from the next slip has the better claim on posterity. HMS Niobe was handed over on 6 September 1910 to the newly created Royal Canadian Navy and commissioned as HMCS Niobe, the first ship that navy ever had. Two hulls laid down side by side at Barrow: one founded a national navy, and the other spent 1902 carrying replacement crews to Hong Kong.

Niobe's Canadian career is worth following, because it was not a happy one and it very nearly ended before it started. She reached Halifax on 21 October 1910, and the Royal Canadian Navy still marks the date as Niobe Day. Less than a year later, on the night of 30 and 31 July 1911, she ran aground off Cape Sable and was almost lost; the repairs took until the end of 1912 and she never made her designed speed again. She spent the autumn of 1914 on contraband patrol off New York with the Royal Navy's 4th Cruiser Squadron, came back into Halifax on 17 July 1915 thoroughly worn out, and never went to sea again.

She was still lying there as a depot ship on the morning of 6 December 1917, when the French steamer Mont-Blanc, loaded with something like two thousand nine hundred tonnes of TNT, picric acid, guncotton and benzol, collided with the Norwegian steamer Imo in the harbour and caught fire. At five past nine she blew up. It was the largest explosion human beings had ever produced, and it stayed that way until the atomic bomb. Around two thousand people were killed and thousands more injured, a great many of them blinded at their windows watching the fire; the wave went sixty feet above the high-water mark and more than sixteen hundred buildings were destroyed. Niobe's upperworks were wrecked. She stayed where she was, doing her job, until she was sold in 1920 and broken up at Philadelphia.

Two hulls, then, laid down side by side at Barrow in 1896. One of them founded a national navy, ran aground, wore herself out and was still moored in Halifax harbour on the worst morning in that city's history. The other ferried drafts to Hong Kong and was cut up quietly at Milford Haven. It is a fair illustration of how little a ship's design has to do with what actually happens to her.

On a hull 435 feet long and displacing some 11,000 tons, she was a substantial ship for her era, armed originally with sixteen 6-inch guns, fourteen 12-pounders, and torpedo tubes, though after inspection at Chatham in February 1900 she spent a period in the Fleet Reserve before finally being commissioned there on 17 September 1901.

A Ferry Service Around the Empire

Much of Amphitrite's early active career was spent on the unglamorous but important work of relief missions, carrying replacement crews and invalided sailors out to the Mediterranean and China stations, the sort of logistical backbone that kept the far-flung Victorian and Edwardian Royal Navy functioning across an empire that stretched around the globe.

She arrived at Hong Kong on 4 January 1902 and went on to serve extensively in Asian waters through the following years, a working life built around distance and endurance rather than combat.

War, Reserve, and Reinvention

By 1914, with the First World War underway, Amphitrite was serving with the Ninth Cruiser Squadron out of the Cape Verde islands, patrolling the Eastern Atlantic trade routes between there and Cape Finisterre on the north-west tip of Spain, continuing the kind of patrol and escort work expected of an ageing but still useful cruiser.

She was placed in reserve in June 1915 as newer, more capable ships took over frontline duties, but was given a genuine second act in 1917: converted to a minelayer at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard and recommissioned on 9 August that year with just four 6-inch guns left aboard to make room for a capacity of 354 mines, she went on to lay minefields as part of the Northern Barrage, the vast Allied minefield sown across the North Sea between Orkney and Norway to bottle up German submarines.

The Northern Barrage deserves its own paragraph, because the sheer scale of it is difficult to take in. It ran two hundred and thirty miles from the Orkneys to the Norwegian coast and was more than fifteen miles wide, and something in the order of seventy thousand mines went into it at a cost of eighty million dollars. The British laid the sections at each end, nearest Orkney and nearest Norway, while the Americans filled the middle with their new Mark 6 antenna mine, which trailed a long copper wire upwards from its case so that a submarine touching the wire anywhere along its length would complete a circuit and fire the charge. Three hundred pounds of TNT in each one, and more than fifty thousand of them.

Whether it was worth it is still argued about. The barrage is usually credited with something like six U-boats, which against seventy thousand mines is not an impressive exchange rate, and it was not finished until very late in the war. What it certainly did was make the northern exit from the North Sea a place where a submarine captain had to think hard, which is a different and less measurable kind of result. Clearing it up afterwards took a fleet of minesweepers the best part of the following year. Amphitrite's share of all this was 354 mines at a time, which is why they took twelve of her sixteen 6-inch guns out to make room.

An Unfortunate Collision

Amphitrite’s war took an unusual and unwelcome turn on the afternoon of 7 September 1918. She had just finished laying mines in the Northern Barrage and was heading home escorted by two destroyers, HMS Nessus and her sister HMS Maenad, when the group ran into thick fog.

At around 3pm Nessus turned to port, apparently intending to cross ahead of the larger ship, and the two vessels collided; Amphitrite’s bow tore a hole in Nessus’s engine room.

Maenad took the crippled destroyer under tow and both ships tried to make for shelter, but a gale blew up that evening and forced them to heave to overnight in worsening seas. By mid-morning on 8 September Nessus had lost steam, her pumps had stopped working, and the sea was gaining fast; her crew was taken off safely by the destroyer HMS Paladin, and Nessus finally sank at around half past ten that morning.

Remarkably, given how the story began in thick fog and ended in a gale, there were no casualties on either ship.

A Quiet End

Amphitrite survived the war and was sold to Ward of Milford Haven for breaking up on 12 April 1920, closing out more than two decades of service that had taken her from ferrying crews around the Far East to laying mines in the First World War, with one unfortunate collision along the way standing as the single most dramatic entry in an otherwise solidly workmanlike career.

What became of her sisters is the sharpest comment anybody could make on the design. Of the eight, only two did anything genuinely warlike in the First World War, and both of them did it as minelayers rather than as cruisers. Ariadne had already spent four years as a stokers' training ship when she was converted in 1917 exactly as Amphitrite was; on 26 July that year, off Beachy Head, UC-65 torpedoed and sank her. Diadem and Spartiate spent the war training stokers as well, Spartiate being renamed Fisgard in 1915. Argonaut was in the Ninth Cruiser Squadron alongside Amphitrite in 1914 and then became a hospital ship at Portsmouth and finally an accommodation hulk. Europa went out to Mudros in July 1915 and stayed there.

And Andromeda outlived the lot of them by a distance that is genuinely hard to credit. She became a training ship and was still working as one in 1956, fifty-nine years after she was launched, having outlasted two world wars, the battleship and very nearly the British Empire. Eight expensive first class cruisers, then: one sunk by a submarine while doing a job her designers never imagined, one that founded the Royal Canadian Navy and was blown apart at her moorings, four that spent the war teaching or accommodating people, one that laid mines and was scrapped, and one that was still afloat and useful in the year of Suez. Fred Jane was right about the guns. He could not have guessed at the rest of it.