HMS Devastation: The Warship That Finally Cast Off the Sails

A Genuine Revolution in Design

HMS Devastation was the first of two Devastation-class turret ships built for the Royal Navy, and her arrival marked a genuine watershed moment in naval architecture: she was the first class of ocean-going capital ship in Royal Navy history built without a single mast or sail. Designed by Sir Edward J.

Reed, HMS Devastation dispensed entirely with the rigging that had defined warship silhouettes for centuries, freeing her main armament, mounted atop the hull rather than recessed within it in the older style, to achieve an unusually wide 280-degree arc of fire from her gun turrets, a particularly dramatic improvement over the restricted firing arcs that masts and rigging had always previously imposed.

Specifications

HMS Devastation measured 285 feet between perpendiculars with a beam of 62 feet 3 inches, and carried four 12-inch 25-ton rifled muzzle-loading guns in paired turrets, protected by between 12 and 14 inches of armour, with a further 10 to 12 inches protecting her breastworks and hull.

Her original freeboard of just 4 feet 6 inches proved impractically low in heavy seas and was later increased to 10 feet 9 inches, a telling example of just how much genuine trial and error went into perfecting this entirely new type of warship.

Powered by Penn and Sons trunk engines producing 5,600 horsepower across eight boilers, she was capable of 12 knots in service, reaching 13.84 knots during her sea trials in the middle of 1873, and carried a crew of 329.

A Long and Steady Career

HMS Devastation served across the Mediterranean and in home waters through the 1870s and 1880s, and underwent a significant upgrade between 1891 and 1892, receiving Whitworth 10-inch breech-loading guns and modern triple-expansion engines, a substantial modernisation that kept her notably relevant decades after her revolutionary original design had first entered service.

Captain Frederick Inglefield took command in November 1898, and between 1900 and 1902, HMS Devastation served as guard ship at Gibraltar, before recommissioning in June 1902 as a tender to the torpedo training establishment HMS Vernon.

She took part in the coronation fleet review at Spithead for King Edward VII that August, before a further refit in 1904 saw her assigned to the First Reserve Fleet in Scotland.

Legacy

HMS Devastation was sold for breaking up in 1908, closing out a career of nearly four decades that had begun with a genuine revolution in warship design and ended with quiet reserve duty in Scottish waters.

Her design proved so influential that essentially every capital ship built by any major navy from that point forward followed the same basic pattern she had pioneered: no sails, main armament mounted in turrets above deck, and armour concentrated around the vital machinery and magazines rather than spread thinly across the entire hull.

HMS Devastation's fame even extended into popular culture of the era, with her image appearing on England's Glory matchboxes and her heraldic badge distributed as a collectible album insert by contemporary publishers, an unusual afterlife for what was, at heart, a piece of thoroughly serious naval engineering.