HMS Hyacinth (1898): Blockading the Konigsberg in the Rufiji Delta

Built on the Clyde

HMS Hyacinth was laid down by the London and Glasgow Shipbuilding Company at Govan on 27 January 1897, launched on 27 October 1898, christened by Mrs Richmond, wife of Glasgow's Lord Provost, and completed on 3 September 1900, a Highflyer-class protected cruiser displacing 5,650 long tons and measuring 372 feet in length.

She carried eleven 6-inch guns alongside eight 12-pounders and two submerged torpedo tubes, driven by triple expansion engines producing 10,000 indicated horsepower for a top speed of 23 knots, with a crew of 470 officers and ratings.

Protected cruiser is a term worth unpacking, because it sounds reassuring and is not. It means a ship with no armour belt on her sides at all, relying instead on a curved armoured deck running below the waterline over her machinery, so that a shell coming in above water passes through unresisted, explodes among the coal bunkers and the accommodation, and is stopped, in theory, before it reaches the engines. It was a reasonable compromise in the 1890s, when guns were slower and shells less effective, and it was thoroughly obsolete by 1914. The speed matters just as much. Twenty-three knots on trials in 1900 with a clean bottom, fresh boilers and picked stokers is not twenty-three knots fourteen years later in the tropics, and the whole of Hyacinth's First World War comes back to that single fact: she was a fast ship in 1900 and a slow one by the time it counted.

Flagship of the East Indies

HMS Hyacinth joined the Channel Fleet on completion, and took part in the fleet review held at Spithead on 16 August 1902 celebrating King Edward VII's coronation.

From 1903 to 1911 she served as flagship of the East Indies Station, a demanding and far-ranging command covering a vast stretch of ocean and coastline.

In April 1904 she took a leading part in the Fourth Somaliland Expedition against the forces of Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, the so-called 'Mad Mullah'. On the night of 20 to 21 April, Hyacinth and HMS Fox landed a force of over 300 sailors alongside 125 men of the Royal Hampshire Regiment on the Gulluli River, capturing Fort Illig for the loss of three killed and eleven wounded against between sixty and seventy Dervish dead. The landing was led by Hyacinth's own captain, the Honourable Horace Hood, who earned a DSO for the action; twelve years later, as a rear admiral commanding the Third Battlecruiser Squadron at Jutland, he would go down with his flagship HMS Invincible when her magazines exploded, a far grimmer echo of the very profession that had first won him his medal.

The campaign she was fighting in 1904 is worth a note as well, because it went on for another sixteen years. Mohammed Abdullah Hassan fought the British, the Italians and the Ethiopians in the Somali interior for two decades, and the British mounted five separate expeditions against him without ever managing to finish the business; the naval landings and the columns marched into the interior would break up his forces, and he would reappear somewhere else. What finally ended it, in January and February 1920, was not a landing party at all. The newly independent Royal Air Force sent out Unit Z, twelve de Havilland DH.9 bombers, in the first operation anywhere in which aircraft were used as the primary striking force against a colonial rebellion, and the Dervish state collapsed in about three weeks. It cost twenty-seven lives among the ground forces supporting them and no RAF combat deaths at all, and it is the reason air control became imperial policy for the next twenty years. Hyacinth's bluejackets storming Fort Illig in 1904 were the beginning of a story that ended with aeroplanes.

Her Gulf service ended on a considerably darker note. On 24 December 1910, acting on reports of gun-running out of Muscat, a landing party of Royal Marines and bluejackets went ashore at Dubai with the local Sheikh's own permission to search for a hidden weapons cache; they found one, but when the men returned with tools to dig it out, the town opened fire, killing a Royal Marine sergeant and four seamen and wounding several more. HMS Hyacinth answered from offshore with lyddite shellfire into the houses above the beach, inflicting dozens of casualties ashore before the shooting stopped. Rear Admiral Edmond Slade delivered a forty-eight hour ultimatum three days later, the Sheikh complied, and the episode was judged serious enough to earn its own bar, 'Persian Gulf 1909-14', on the Naval General Service Medal.

What has not been said yet is that Hyacinth had already met the Konigsberg once, and let her go. King-Hall took his squadron to Zanzibar in the last days of peace with orders to keep track of any German cruiser he could find, and on 31 July 1914, four days before Britain declared war, he sighted Konigsberg lying outside Dar-es-Salaam. He gave chase. Not one of his ships could catch her: Konigsberg was nine years newer, good for twenty-four knots and clean out of dockyard hands, and Hyacinth, his flagship and nominally the fastest thing he had, simply could not close. The German went off into the Indian Ocean and vanished, and everything that followed, the commerce raiding, the blockade, the eight months in the mangroves and two purpose-built monitors shipped out from England, follows from an afternoon in which an 1898 cruiser could not keep up with a 1905 one.

The immediate cost of that escape was paid seven weeks later by another ship of the same squadron. HMS Pegasus, an elderly third-class protected cruiser, was lying at Zanzibar on 19 September 1914 with her boilers opened up for cleaning and her engines stripped, which is to say she could neither run nor fight. Konigsberg came in out of the morning mist on the 20th, opened fire at a range at which Pegasus's smaller guns could not reply, and disabled her in about eight minutes. Accounts of the casualties differ, the usual figures being somewhere between thirty and forty killed and around fifty-five wounded from a crew of 234. Pegasus was towed towards the shore and sank with her masts standing out of the water. It was a humiliation, and it turned the hunt for Konigsberg from a naval chore into a matter of institutional honour.

Hunting the Konigsberg

HMS Hyacinth's most significant wartime service came after escorting South African convoys in the opening months of the First World War: in January 1915, she deployed to German East Africa to help blockade the German light cruiser SMS Konigsberg, which had taken refuge deep within the tangled mangrove channels of the Rufiji River delta after a highly successful commerce raiding campaign in the Indian Ocean.

Command of the blockade rotated in and out of Hyacinth's own hands that spring: Rear Admiral Herbert King-Hall shifted his flag to the battleship HMS Goliath when she arrived on 7 March 1915, only to transfer it straight back to Hyacinth when Goliath was ordered away again on 25 March, a reminder of just how thin British resources were stretched even chasing as prestigious a target as a trapped German raider.

On 14 April that year, HMS Hyacinth intercepted the captured British merchantman SS Rubens, by then renamed Kronborg and sailing under a German flag, as she attempted to slip through the blockade carrying vital supplies intended for the trapped raider. Harried into the shallows of Manza Bay, her crew set her ablaze rather than let her fall into British hands, though the Germans still managed to salvage some of her cargo before the blockading force could finish the job, a notably important interception all the same that helped keep Konigsberg bottled up and starved of the resources she needed to break free.

The interception of the Kronborg is a better story than the article allows, and rather less of a victory. She was the German steamer Rubens, disguised as a Danish freighter, and the disguise was thorough: her crew was drawn from the Danish-speaking parts of Schleswig-Holstein and her commander, Christiansen, spoke fluent Danish, so that a British boarding officer would hear the right accents. She was carrying something between 1,600 and 2,000 tons of coal, a thousand rounds of 10.5cm ammunition, five hundred of 8.8cm, three thousand of 6cm, several hundred tons of fresh water and fifty tons of machine oil, which is precisely what a cruiser hiding in a river without a dockyard needs. Hyacinth caught her and drove her into Manza Bay, where her own crew set her alight and abandoned her. And there the triumph rather runs out. She settled in shallow water with her superstructure above the surface and, crucially, with most of her cargo undamaged; the British sailed away satisfied, and over the following weeks the Germans went back and quietly recovered the bulk of it. A good deal of that ammunition was still being fired at British troops years afterwards.

HMS Hyacinth went on to sink the German hospital ship Tabora in the harbour at Dar-es-Salaam on 26 March 1916, continuing to tighten the naval stranglehold on German colonial forces in East Africa as the campaign there dragged on through the dense, disease-ridden terrain that made it one of the most gruelling theatres of the entire war.

The Tabora is a more complicated business than her one-line appearance suggests. She was not an ordinary merchantman; she was a German liner converted to a hospital ship, moored at Dar-es-Salaam with her sides painted with red crosses, and under the Hague Convention that should have made her untouchable. The British were convinced she was being used as a troop or ammunition transport under cover of the Red Cross, and asked formally for permission to send officers aboard to look. The Germans did not reply. On 26 March 1916 Hyacinth, the battleship Vengeance, the cruiser Challenger and the Australian cruiser Pioneer shelled and sank her where she lay. What settles the argument, in most accounts, is what happened next, which was nothing: no German protest, no note to the neutral powers, no statement of any kind, from a government that had made a great deal of noise about British attacks on hospital ships elsewhere. Pioneer's own long war in those waters is described in the article on HMS Pioneer (1899).

Tragedy in the Delta

HMS Hyacinth served as a depot ship supporting aerial reconnaissance operations over the Rufiji delta, and in January 1917 was involved in a particularly tragic incident when Squadron Leader Edwin Moon and Commander Richard Bridgeman crash-landed their aircraft in the delta.

Bridgeman died of exposure before help could reach him, while Moon, who made determined efforts to save his colleague, was later decorated with a bar to his Distinguished Service Order and the Royal Humane Society's silver medal for his rescue attempts, a small but particularly moving human story amid the wider campaign against Konigsberg and her crew.

The End

HMS Hyacinth was paid off in August 1919, her long service, spanning ceremonial fleet reviews, colonial policing and a properly significant East African naval campaign, finally at an end, and was sold for scrap on 11 October 1923, closing out the career of a cruiser whose quiet, patient blockade work in the Rufiji delta had played a real part in finally running the elusive Konigsberg to ground.

It is worth being honest about how the Konigsberg story actually finished, because Hyacinth was not there at the kill and could not have been. No cruiser could get into the Rufiji; the delta is a hundred-odd channels through mangrove with barely a fathom over the bars, and everything that drew more than a few feet had to sit outside and wait. The job was finally done on 11 July 1915 by two shallow-draught monitors, Severn and Mersey, towed all the way from England, directed by aircraft, and the whole of that operation, along with what the Germans did afterwards with Konigsberg's salvaged guns, is set out in the article on HMS Chatham. What Hyacinth did was the unglamorous half: she kept the door shut for eight months, in a climate that killed more men in that campaign than the fighting did, with an obsolete ship and an exhausted crew, so that when the monitors finally arrived the target was still where it had been left. That is the whole trade of blockade, and it is why nobody writes books about it.