HMS Hood (1859): The Warship That Never Really Went to War

A Sailing Ship Reborn as a Steamer

HMS Hood began life as something quite different from what she eventually became: she was laid down on 13 August 1849 as a conventional 80-gun second-rate sailing ship, at a time when steam propulsion was still a genuinely new and unproven technology for a warship of her size. Her construction was substantially modified partway through the building process to incorporate steam machinery, a fairly common fate for warships caught mid-construction during the rapid technological transition of the mid-nineteenth century, when a ship laid down under one set of assumptions could easily be launched under an entirely different one.

She was launched as HMS Edgar on 4 May 1859, and renamed HMS Hood the following January, emerging as a screw line-of-battle ship displacing 3,308 tons, measuring 198 feet in length, and carrying an impressive 91 guns with a crew of 720, powered by a modest 600 horsepower steam engine.

A Ship That Never Quite Served

HMS Hood's active service record is a genuinely curious one, in that she appears to have suffered from serious design deficiencies significant enough that she may never have been fully commissioned for active fleet service at all, a rather deflating outcome for a ship carrying such an impressive gun armament on paper. Instead of active duty, she spent time in the Second Reserve at Sheerness, and from 1872 to 1883 served the rather more mundane role of barracks accommodation for the Royal Engineers at Chatham, a genuinely unglamorous but not entirely wasted use for a hull whose fighting career had failed to materialise.

A Quiet, Uncertain End

HMS Hood was sold out of the Royal Navy in 1888, and her subsequent fate afterward is not reliably recorded in the sources available, a fittingly understated conclusion for a ship whose entire career had been defined more by what she did not do than by any notable action or achievement. Her name, however, would go on to be carried by two far more famous successors: an 1891 Royal Sovereign-class pre-dreadnought, and above all the legendary battlecruiser HMS Hood of 1918, whose own storied and ultimately tragic career would make the name synonymous with the Royal Navy itself for a generation.