HMS Karrakatta (1889): The Torpedo Gunboat That Couldn't Catch a Torpedo Boat

Launched as HMS Wizard

HMS Karrakatta began life as HMS Wizard, built by Armstrong Whitworth at Elswick on the Tyne, her keel laid on 17 August 1888 and launched on 27 August 1889.

She was renamed Karrakatta on 2 April 1890, taking her new name from a suburb of Perth in Western Australia, ahead of her planned deployment to the Australia Station, the same day her sister ship HMS Whiting was renamed Boomerang for exactly the same reason, a naming choice that reflected the growing practice of tying colonial-service vessels to the very colonies they were meant to protect.

The name is a small piece of unintentional comedy. Karrakatta is a suburb on the western edge of Perth, and what it is famous for, then and now, is the cemetery: Karrakatta Cemetery opened in 1899 and is the largest in Western Australia, so much so that the name functions in Perth roughly as Highgate does in London. Somebody in the Admiralty picked a place name off a map of Western Australia without asking what was there, and gave it to a warship. Her sister was more fortunate: Boomerang at least sounds like something that comes back.

Designed by Sir William White as one of thirteen Sharpshooter-class torpedo gunboats, she measured 242 feet in length and displaced 735 tons, armed with two 4.7-inch guns, four 3-pounder guns and five 14-inch torpedo tubes, a truly formidable weapons fit for a vessel of her modest size.

Elswick, where she was built, deserves a word because it was the most remarkable armaments works in the world at that date. William Armstrong had begun on the Tyne making hydraulic cranes, moved into artillery in the 1850s, and by the 1880s his works stretched for the best part of a mile along the river and employed something over twenty thousand people, making guns, gun mountings, armour and complete warships from a standing start. Elswick built cruisers to order for anybody who could pay: Japan, Chile, Argentina, Italy, Brazil, China, Norway, Turkey, the United States. Two Elswick-built cruisers fought on opposite sides at the same battle more than once. Karrakatta was a small job for that yard, and the class she belonged to was designed not by Armstrong but by the Admiralty's own Director of Naval Construction, Sir William White, whose reputation would eventually rest on the far more successful battleships and cruisers of the 1890s rather than on this.

A Class That Never Quite Delivered

HMS Karrakatta's class was designed with an ambitious top speed of 21 knots in mind, intended to let these small, heavily armed gunboats run down the very torpedo boats they were built to counter. Even on paper the figure was optimistic: the engines were rated at 3,600 horsepower on forced draught for a trials speed nearer 19 knots, and just 2,500 horsepower, good for about sixteen and a half knots, when run the ordinary way a ship actually goes about its day-to-day business.

In practice, day-to-day service fell further short still, with several vessels struggling to reach even 17 knots, and the class suffered from persistent mechanical troubles and structural weaknesses that left them poorly suited to rough seas.

During fleet manoeuvres in 1890, the rather embarrassing spectacle occurred of several Sharpshooter-class boats being outrun by the very torpedo boats they were meant to intercept, a fairly damning verdict on a design that had promised rather more than it could deliver.

Reputation, once lost, proved hard to recover. When HMS Antelope, one of the class's near-sisters, was being worked up in 1891, The Times dismissed the whole Sharpshooter type as notoriously unsuccessful, and the following year's Annual Manoeuvres did nothing to argue the point: HMS Sharpshooter herself had her fires put out and shipped a full seventy tons of water, while her sister HMS Skipjack narrowly avoided the same fate. By 1893 one naval commentator was blunter still, judging that the majority of the class were complete failures that kept on breaking down, and it was said to be very nearly the universal view among naval officers who had served in them that the boats were unfit for active service, thanks to weak engines and boilers, a rather more colourful verdict than the Admiralty would have liked for a class built in thirteen numbers.

It is worth explaining why the whole idea failed, because the fault was not really the designers'. The Sharpshooters were built to a requirement that the technology of 1888 could not meet: a hull big enough to keep the sea and carry 4.7-inch guns, at a speed that would catch a torpedo boat of a third the size. The horsepower needed to do that could only be got by forced draught, which means sealing the stokeholds and blowing air into them under pressure to burn coal faster, and forced draught in the boilers of that decade meant leaking tubes, burnt furnace plates and frequent breakdowns. The ships made their contract speed for a few hours on trial with picked stokers and clean bottoms, and never came near it again. What solved the problem five years later was a different technology altogether, the water-tube boiler, put into a much smaller hull with no pretension to carrying heavy guns; the result was the destroyer, and the story of how that happened is in the article on HMS Hornet (1893). The torpedo gunboat is the answer that was tried first and did not work, and every navy has a cupboard full of them.

A Decade Protecting Australian Trade

Karrakatta and Boomerang owed their posting to the Australasian Naval Defence Act of 1887, which committed the Australian and New Zealand colonies to fund an Auxiliary Squadron of exactly five fast cruisers and two torpedo gunboats, a formula negotiated two years earlier by Rear Admiral George Tryon after the colonies had spent years resisting the idea of paying for their own seaward defence.

HMS Karrakatta was completed in February 1891 and arrived in Sydney that September alongside her sister ship HMS Boomerang, formerly HMS Whiting, and the five cruisers named in the Act, HMS Katoomba, Mildura, Ringarooma, Tauranga and Wallaroo, the whole squadron costing £853,977 to acquire and a further £120,000 a year to keep running, a bill the colonies split between them according to population.

The arrangement that sent her to Australia is a good deal more interesting than a funding formula, because it is the beginning of the Royal Australian Navy. The Australian colonies through the 1880s were nervous about Russia and about French and German activity in the Pacific, and entirely unwilling to pay for the Royal Navy squadron that was theoretically protecting them. The compromise struck at the 1887 colonial conference, negotiated largely by Rear Admiral Sir George Tryon, was that the colonies would fund seven additional ships outright and pay towards their running costs, on two conditions: the ships would be manned and commanded by the Royal Navy, and they could not be taken out of Australasian waters without the colonies' consent. That second clause is the important one. For the first time, colonial governments had a veto over the movement of Royal Navy warships, and the principle that Australian money bought Australian control led directly to the Commonwealth Naval Forces of 1901 and to the Royal Australian Navy in 1911. Tryon himself did not live to see it: he was drowned in 1893 when his flagship HMS Victoria was rammed and sunk by HMS Camperdown during a manoeuvre he had ordered himself, an episode described in the article on HMS Iron Duke (1870).

She spent well over a decade on the Australia Station, employed from 1900 onward in the protection of Australia's floating trade, unglamorous but notably useful patrol work safeguarding merchant shipping in Australian waters.

Lieutenant Godfrey Edwin Corbett took command in November 1900, overseeing her final years of colonial service.

Protection of the floating trade is a wonderful period phrase and it meant something quite specific. The Australia Station covered an enormous area, from the Indian Ocean across to Fiji and down to the Southern Ocean, with a handful of ships to cover it, and the work was almost entirely constabulary: showing the flag in island groups where European powers were competing for influence, suppressing what was left of the labour trade in the Pacific, surveying, carrying officials, dealing with wrecks, and being visibly present in ports where British merchants had interests. Australia at the turn of the century imported and exported everything by sea, and the notion that a hostile cruiser might appear off Sydney Heads and stop it was taken seriously enough for the colonies to pay for a squadron. Nothing of the sort ever happened while Karrakatta was there. The one time it did, in 1914, the ship that had to deal with it was Australian, and the German cruiser Emden was destroyed by HMAS Sydney, which the colonies had paid for on the principle Tryon had negotiated twenty-seven years earlier.

A Quiet Retirement

HMS Karrakatta departed the Australia Station on 4 December 1903 and paid off in April 1904, returning home to Britain, where she was sold at Portsmouth in July 1905 for £1,875, a modest sum that reflected her age and the limitations of a design that had never quite lived up to its ambitious original brief.

Several of her surviving Sharpshooter-class sisters went on to serve as minesweepers from 1908 onward, finding a useful second calling that suited their sturdy hulls rather better than the high-speed interception role they had originally been built for. HMS Seagull was still at it a decade on, and it killed her: she was run down by the steamer Corrib in the Firth of Clyde on 30 September 1918 and sank with fifty-three of her people, six weeks before the Armistice. Not a bad second career for a design once written off in print as notoriously unsuccessful, and a hard end to it.

The second career the surviving Sharpshooters found is the best argument anybody has ever made for not scrapping an unsuccessful ship too quickly. From 1908 the Admiralty began converting them to minesweepers, and the reasons were exactly the qualities that had made them useless as torpedo-boat catchers: a strong hull that could tow gear, enough displacement to be steady, machinery that did not need to be driven hard, and shallow enough draught to work inshore. What had been a failure at twenty-one knots was entirely satisfactory at eight. They were among the first purpose-converted minesweepers the Royal Navy had, and in 1914 they were the only ones with any experience of the trade when the Germans began mining British ports in earnest. A design condemned in the press as notoriously unsuccessful in 1891 spent the First World War doing one of the most necessary jobs in home waters.

Sold at Portsmouth for £1,875 after fourteen years is not a distinguished ending, and it is a reasonable summary of the whole type. She could not do the thing she was built for; she was sent to the other side of the world, where nothing much happened, and did fourteen years of useful and entirely unremarkable colonial policing; and she was disposed of for less than the price of a modest house. What she left behind was rather more than that. The squadron she belonged to established the principle that colonies which paid for warships got a say in what those warships did, and the direct result, twenty years later, was a separate Australian navy that fought its own war. And the class she belonged to, having failed comprehensively at the job it was designed for, went on to invent a role that mattered a great deal more. Very few unsuccessful warships manage either.