HMS Imperieuse (1883): The Cruiser That Came in Over Budget and Under Sail

Built at Portsmouth

HMS Imperieuse was laid down at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard on 10 August 1881, launched on 18 December 1883 and finally completed in September 1886, a long and troubled gestation for an armoured cruiser conceived as an enlarged version of the earlier Nelson-class design.

She was intended to measure 315 feet in length and displace 7,390 tons, but the completed ship came in at 8,500 tons, over a thousand tons heavier than planned, a truly significant design overrun that spoke to just how difficult naval architects of the period found it to accurately predict the weight of a warship still carrying a mix of traditional and experimental technology.

Part of the trouble was her guns: she ended up carrying four 9.2-inch breech-loaders, six 6-inch guns and four torpedo tubes, a formidable broadside that alarmed her own designer, Nathaniel Barnaby, enough that in 1885 he wrote privately to his successor William White warning that armament of this size needed reining in if the ship's stability was to be trusted. The concern went public the following year: in July 1886, newspapers openly questioned whether Imperieuse could remain stable at all, given how much her armour and armament had grown since she was first drawn up on the plans, hardly the sort of publicity the Admiralty wanted just as she was about to enter service. She did at least have one uncontested claim to fame: Imperieuse and her near-sister HMS Warspite were the first ironclads in the Royal Navy built of steel rather than iron.

There is a consequence of that thousand tons that is worth spelling out, and it is the single worst thing about her. An armoured cruiser's belt is a strip of thick plate along her waterline, arranged so that roughly half of it sits above the water and half below, protecting the machinery and the magazines from shells arriving at or near the surface. Put an extra thousand tons into the ship and she floats lower. Imperieuse floated so much lower than intended that her belt disappeared entirely beneath the waterline, which means that in action a shell striking her at the waterline would have passed straight over the top of the armour and into the unprotected hull behind it. The official phrase used ever since is that she and her sister were armoured in name only. To claw back some of the weight, four of her 6-inch guns were taken out again before she was finished. So the Royal Navy spent five years and a great deal of money building a heavily armed armoured cruiser and got a lightly armed unarmoured one.

It is worth being fair to the man who drew her, because the 1880s were an almost impossible decade in which to design a warship. Nathaniel Barnaby had been Director of Naval Construction since 1872, and in that time the fundamentals had all changed at once: iron gave way to steel, muzzle-loading guns gave way to breech-loading, compound engines gave way to triple expansion, the self-propelled torpedo appeared and made everything afloat suddenly vulnerable, and nobody yet agreed what a cruiser was actually for. Designers were working without reliable weight data for materials they had never used, to requirements that changed while the ship was on the slip. Barnaby was also, by 1884, working under a public pounding. That September the campaigning editor W.T. Stead ran a series in the Pall Mall Gazette under the title The Truth About the Navy, arguing in the plainest possible language that Britain's fleet was not fit to defend the Empire; the resulting panic forced the government to find an extra three and a half million pounds, and it made the Admiralty's designs a matter of public argument for the first time. Barnaby retired in 1885 on grounds of ill health. Reading his private letter to William White that same year, warning that the armament of ships like Imperieuse had to be reined in if their stability was to be trusted, one rather sees why.

A Ship That Could Barely Sail

HMS Imperieuse's design troubles extended well beyond her weight problem: she was initially rigged as a brig with two masts, in keeping with the Royal Navy's lingering, if increasingly outdated, expectation that even steam-powered cruisers should retain a genuine sailing capability for long-distance cruising when coal supplies ran low.

Trials quickly revealed the plan simply did not work: HMS Imperieuse proved to have notably poor sailing qualities, and her original rig was replaced by a single military mast amidships shortly after completion, a fairly public admission that the sailing cruiser concept, already on its way out across the rest of the fleet, was entirely unsuited to a ship of her particular design.

The sailing rig looks absurd now and was perfectly logical at the time, which is worth explaining. A warship on a foreign station in the 1880s might be thousands of miles from a coaling station, and coal was expensive, dirty, slow to load and finite; a ship that could shut down her engines and proceed under canvas could stay at sea far longer and go far further. That is why the Navy went on rigging masts and yards in ships with engines for thirty years after steam had plainly won. What killed the practice was arithmetic. Masts, yards, standing rigging and the men to work them are heavy and expensive, they take up deck space that guns want, and in a ship of eight thousand tons with a broad beam and a great deal of top hamper they will not drive her at any useful speed anyway. Her own captain said as much in his report on the 1886 trials: the rig served little purpose, and she would be a better fighting ship without it. He was right, the rig came out, and Imperieuse has the melancholy distinction of being the last armoured ship the Royal Navy ever completed with a full sailing rig. What replaced it was a single military mast, essentially a fat steel tube with armoured fighting tops for light quick-firing guns and searchlights, which is the shape of every warship for the next twenty years.

Flagship on Two Stations

Commissioned specifically for the China Station in March 1888 under Captain William May, she became station flagship the following year, though gunnery drill got off to a shaky start: on 14 January 1889, prize-firing practice off Port Hamilton had to be abandoned altogether when the locks on her breech-blocks fitted so poorly that they kept blowing out under fire, an alarming discovery for a ship whose main selling point was supposed to be her heavy armament.

The breech-block failure deserves rather more alarm than it usually gets, because it was not an isolated embarrassment. The Royal Navy had spent the 1870s and 1880s changing over from muzzle-loading to breech-loading heavy guns, and the transition was genuinely dangerous. In 1879 a muzzle-loader in HMS Thunderer had been double-loaded and burst, killing eleven men. The early breech-loaders that replaced them brought their own troubles: the whole point of a breech mechanism is that it must seal an enormous pressure behind the shell, and if the lock does not fit properly, the gas comes out backwards, into the turret, where the crew is. Locks blowing out during prize-firing off Port Hamilton in January 1889 meant that the flagship of the China Station had four heavy guns she could not safely fire, in a ship whose entire justification was that heavy armament. It was fixed, but the episode is a fair illustration of how much of late Victorian naval technology was being debugged in service, at sea, by the people using it.

Port Hamilton itself is a curiosity worth a sentence. It is a small group of Korean islands, now called Geomundo, and between 1885 and 1887 the Royal Navy did not merely visit it but occupied it outright, without asking the Koreans, in order to stop the Russians getting a warm-water anchorage in those waters. Britain built barracks and a telegraph station and put a garrison ashore, and then withdrew when the Russians gave assurances about Korean territory. It is a very small footnote in the Great Game and a very large one in Korean memory. Imperieuse was firing her guns there two years after the flag came down, which tells you something about how the Royal Navy regarded anchorages it had once used.

Design troubles aside, HMS Imperieuse went on to a solid career: after four years leading the China Station, she later served as flagship of the Pacific Station from 1896 to 1899, a prestigious command that placed her at the head of British naval power across two of the Royal Navy's most far-flung and strategically important overseas deployments.

A New Name, and the End

HMS Imperieuse underwent extensive repairs at Chatham in early 1900, before being renamed Sapphire II in February 1905 and reclassified as a destroyer depot ship at Portland, a considerably less glamorous role than her earlier flagship postings. She reverted to her original name, Imperieuse, in June 1909, and was finally sold on 24 September 1913 to Thos. W. Ward of Morecambe for breaking up, closing out the career of a cruiser whose troubled birth, over budget, over weight and unable to sail properly, had nonetheless given way to a properly respectable and useful career flying the flag on two separate corners of the globe.

The verdict on her ought to be a bit kinder than her reputation. She was a bad ship: overweight, unstable enough to worry her own designer, armoured in name only, and rigged for a form of propulsion that had stopped making sense. But she was also the first British armoured ship built of steel rather than iron, she carried the heavy-gun broadside that pointed the way to the armoured cruisers of the 1890s, and the lessons paid for in her went straight into William White's designs, which were among the best warships anybody built in that century. Somebody has to build the ship that gets it wrong. She then went off and gave more than twenty-five years of service, a decade of it as flagship on two of the most demanding stations in the world, which is a good deal more than most failed designs manage.

The renaming needs explaining because it looks like a demotion and is really a piece of naval bookkeeping. When a ship was reduced to a subsidiary role as a tender or a depot ship, she was often given the name of the establishment she was attached to with a numeral after it, so that the whole outfit could be administered as one unit; hence Imperieuse becoming Sapphire II when she went to Portland to look after destroyers in 1905. It also freed the name Imperieuse for a new ship, which is usually the real motive. In the event nobody used it, and in June 1909 she got her own name back for the last four years of her life. She spent them as a floating barracks and workshop for the small, fast, uncomfortable craft that had made her own generation obsolete, which is a fate that has befallen a great many warships and has never been much fun for anybody aboard.