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. Built at Chatham Dockyard and measuring 243 feet in length and just over 3,100 tons, she carried a coal-fired Maudslay engine capable of ten or eleven knots under steam alone, on top of a full set of three masts for when coal, or patience, ran short.

The timing of her launch is almost unkind. In April 1858, the same year Hero went into the water, the French laid down the Gloire, the first seagoing ironclad, and the Admiralty understood immediately what it meant: a wooden ship, however new, however well engined, could not survive being shot at by a ship with iron plate on her side. Construction of wooden ships of the line was stopped outright and eleven ironclads were ordered. HMS Warrior was launched in December 1860, when Hero was two years old and had just carried the Prince of Wales home from America. So the entire wooden steam battlefleet, on which the Royal Navy had spent an enormous amount of money in the 1850s, was made worthless inside about five years by a technology nobody had quite believed in. That is why a ship built to last a generation was sold at thirteen. She was not worn out; she was simply the wrong kind of ship, and had been from before she was finished.

She was built at Chatham, which is worth noting for the symmetry. The Royal Dockyard there had been building warships since the sixteenth century, produced Nelson's Victory and something over five hundred ships in all, and it went on doing so until 1984, when it was closed and seven thousand people lost their jobs in a single town; that story is in the article on HMS Hermione (F58). Hero came off those slipways as a wooden three-masted battleship with a steam engine in her, in a yard that would still be refitting guided missile frigates a hundred and twenty-five years later.

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. She commissioned on 7 March 1859 under Captain George Seymour for service with the Channel Fleet, and spent a spell refitting at Plymouth in the spring of 1860, preparation, as it turned out, for a rather more glamorous assignment than routine Channel patrolling.

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. Hero sailed from Plymouth Sound on 10 July 1860 in company with the frigate HMS Ariadne, and after a rough Atlantic crossing through heavy seas and fog made landfall at St John's, Newfoundland, on the evening of 23 July; with no way to signal ahead of her, the ship's sudden appearance through the Narrows caught the welcoming party by surprise, though the Lieutenant Governor, the colony's judges and councillors, and a band playing God Save the Queen were all on hand regardless.

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.

The bridge he came to open was the point of the whole exercise, and it was one of the great engineering spectacles of the age. The Victoria Bridge carried the Grand Trunk Railway across the St Lawrence at Montreal, a river that freezes solid and then breaks up in ice floes capable of destroying anything in their way, and Robert Stephenson, who had built the tubular Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait, solved it by running the trains through an enormous wrought-iron tube nearly two kilometres long. The sections were made in England and shipped over. Building it took six years, something like 3,040 men, among them children of eight to twelve, and about six and a half million dollars. When it opened it was the longest bridge in the world and was being called the eighth wonder of it. Queen Victoria was invited to do the honours, declined, and sent her nineteen-year-old son instead, which made it the first visit by a royal prince to a British colony in Canada, and put Hero at the centre of the biggest imperial occasion of the year.

From Montreal the tour pressed on without Hero, the Prince continuing into the United States that September, rather delicately, incognito, travelling under the courtesy title Baron Renfrew so as to sidestep the awkwardness of the heir to a monarchy touring a republic in his own name. Over a month and some 2,600 miles, from Detroit on 20 September to Portland, Maine, on 20 October, he charmed crowds on both sides of an increasingly divided country barely six months before it tipped into civil war, before travelling by train back to Portland to rejoin Hero, which carried him home across the Atlantic to England.

The American leg was a more delicate piece of business than the incognito suggests, and it was Queen Victoria's own idea. President Buchanan had written inviting the Prince, and the Queen replied that he would come with pleasure and would travel under his lowest English title, Baron Renfrew, dropping royal rank altogether, so that he could mark her respect for the head of a great and friendly kindred nation without a British heir apparent parading through a republic. Everyone understood the fiction; the crowds were enormous and nobody was fooled. He stayed at the White House, in a room afterwards named for him, and on 5 October he went down the Potomac to Mount Vernon, where he planted horse chestnuts at George Washington's tomb with his own hands and took a parcel of them home to plant at Windsor. A British prince planting a tree at the grave of the man who beat the British is not a small gesture, and it was not meant to be.

The timing gives the whole tour a strange light. He left Portland on 20 October 1860; Lincoln was elected sixteen days later; South Carolina seceded in December, and Fort Sumter was fired on the following April. The crowds that turned out for him in Richmond and Baltimore and New York were, within months, on opposite sides of a war that killed more Americans than every other American war combined. Anglo-American relations then went badly wrong in a hurry: the Trent affair in November 1861 brought the two countries within sight of war, and British-built commerce raiders serving the Confederacy poisoned the relationship for a decade afterwards. Whatever goodwill an amiable nineteen-year-old had banked in the autumn of 1860 was needed, and then some. He came back to the throne forty-one years later with a reputation as a diplomat, and it is not fanciful to trace it to the ship that carried him up the St Lawrence.

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. After the royal tour she returned to unglamorous Channel Fleet duty for a time, before crossing the Atlantic again in January 1862 to join the North America and West Indies Squadron out of Halifax and Bermuda; she came home for good in November 1862, was paid off into reserve, and sat largely idle for close to a decade before finally being sold for scrap in June 1871.

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.

The name has kept going and has taken an unusual turn. A Conqueror-class turret ship carried it from 1885, and an H-class destroyer from 1936, which fought through the Second World War and was later transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy. And then, in the 1970s, HMS Hero went to sea again as a ship that did not exist: the fictional frigate of the BBC series Warship, played in turn by four real Leanders, one of which was HMS Hermione. A name first carried by a wooden ship of the line that took a future king to Canada is now, for most people who recognise it at all, a television programme.