HMS Hero (1858): The Ship of the Line That Carried a Future King

A Screw-Propelled Ship of the Line

HMS Hero was a 91-gun screw-propelled second-rate ship of the line, launched in 1858 at a moment when the Royal Navy's traditional wooden sailing warships were being rapidly converted or newly built with steam propulsion, a transitional technology that combined the traditional broadside gun arrangement of the age of sail with the reliability of a steam engine when the wind failed to cooperate. She represented very much a ship of two eras, built along largely traditional lines but fitted with modern machinery that would, within a generation, render the entire concept of the wooden ship of the line obsolete.

Carrying a Future King

HMS Hero's defining moment came in 1860, when she served as the principal vessel carrying the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, during key portions of his celebrated tour of Canada and the United States, the first major overseas tour undertaken by an heir to the British throne. The Prince was formally welcomed aboard HMS Hero near Perce Rock by Canadian dignitaries, and travelled aboard her from Quebec City to Montreal, joined along the way near Trois-Rivieres by members of the Legislative Assembly, before disembarking at Montreal to perform the tour's ceremonial highlight, formally opening the Victoria Bridge.

HMS Hero was not the only vessel involved in the wider royal tour; HMS Styx carried the royal party between Saint John and other Maritime ports, and the steamer Kingston was used for onward travel toward Toronto, where anti-Catholic demonstrations at certain stops prevented the Prince from disembarking at all. But it was HMS Hero that carried him through the tour's most symbolically important stretch, the journey up the St Lawrence to Montreal, making her, for a few weeks in the autumn of 1860, one of the most closely watched ships in the entire Royal Navy.

A Short Career

HMS Hero's active service life proved comparatively brief: she was sold out of the Royal Navy in 1871, just thirteen years after her launch, a fairly typical fate for a wooden screw ship of the line as the Navy moved decisively toward ironclad construction through the 1860s and 1870s, rendering ships like HMS Hero increasingly obsolete almost as soon as they had entered service. Her name, however, lived on: a later HMS Hero, a Conqueror-class turret ship launched in 1885, and later still an H-class destroyer launched in 1936, continued to carry it forward into the twentieth century.