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, a naming choice that reflected the growing practice of tying colonial-service vessels to the very colonies they were meant to protect.

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.

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.

In practice, the Sharpshooter class fell some way short of that promise, 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.

A Decade Protecting Australian Trade

HMS Karrakatta was completed in February 1891 and arrived in Sydney with the Australia Auxiliary Squadron on 5 September that year, alongside her sister ship HMS Boomerang, formerly HMS Whiting, the pair together costing, along with five cruisers, a total of £853,977 to acquire and a further £120,000 a year to maintain.

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.

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 during the First World War, finding an useful second calling that suited their sturdy hulls rather better than the high-speed interception role they had originally been built for.