HMS Magicienne (1890): A Cruiser Built for the Tropics

Built for Warm Waters

HMS Magicienne was laid down on 10 August 1887 at Fairfield's yard in Govan, launched on 12 May 1888 and completed in 1889, one of three Marathon-class second class cruisers built specifically for foreign tropical service.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, she was given a protective sheath of wood and copper over her hull, a deliberate design choice intended to guard against the fouling and corrosion that warm, distant colonial waters could inflict on a ship's bottom far from the dry docks of home, at the cost of a modest increase in displacement to 2,950 tons and a small reduction in speed compared to the standard design.

She carried a substantial armament for her size, six 6-inch guns alongside a range of smaller quick-firing guns and two torpedo tubes, and a crew of 218.

A Career on Two Stations

Her first captain, John P. Pipon, had already had a brief shakedown command for the Annual Manoeuvres of 1889 before HMS Magicienne formally commissioned at Portsmouth on 15 April 1890 for service on the Cape of Good Hope and West Coast of Africa Station.

She moved to the America and West Indies Station in 1891, returned home to Devonport in 1896, and was back on the Cape Station again from 1897, this time for a commission that would prove rather more eventful than her first.

A Front-Row Seat at the Boer War

That second Cape Station posting meant Magicienne, now under Captain William B. Fisher, was still on station when the Boer War broke out in October 1899, and she spent the following year as part of a small blockade squadron off Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa, stopping and searching neutral shipping bound for the port of Lourenço Marques for weapons and supplies destined for the Boers.

Her most dramatic catch came that December, when she seized the German mail steamer Bundesrath and escorted her into Durban as a suspected blockade-runner, the German crew having been spotted rearranging their cargo mid-chase in a manner one contemporary account drily noted was "calculated to give rise to grave suspicions." A nine-day search turned up no contraband, Berlin protested furiously, and Bundesrath sailed free, but not before the affair had become a genuine diplomatic row between Britain and Germany, and helped earn HMS Magicienne the battle honour South Africa.

The Bundesrath affair is worth following through, because it did not end when she was let go. She had left Aden for Delagoa Bay early in December 1899 and Magicienne stopped her on the 28th. The suspicion was not idle: the admiral commanding reported that she had shifted her cargo about while being chased, the partial search turned up sugar, railway sleepers and small trucks, and there were three German officers and twenty men aboard in khaki who freely admitted they were going to the Transvaal.

None of which is contraband, which was rather the problem. She was taken into Durban and searched for nine days and nothing prohibited was found. Berlin protested, London negotiated, and on 5 January the prize court released her mails and her passengers, who were taken on to Delagoa Bay aboard the German gunboat Condor. The ship and her cargo followed a fortnight after that, the court giving no reason beyond the plain one that nothing had been found.

It cost money in the end. Magicienne's squadron had stopped three of the line's steamers in that period, the Bundesrath, the Herzog and the General, and the British government eventually paid the German East African Line twenty thousand pounds for the three of them, with another five thousand to the people whose cargo had been sitting in Durban. That is the shape of blockade work against a neutral: you are within your rights to look, you are liable if you are wrong, and the bill arrives long after the ship has sailed.

The following March she was fitted with Marconi wireless apparatus, one of the earliest Royal Navy ships equipped for active service use, and put to work at anchor in Delagoa Bay relaying messages via landline between the blockading squadron and the Commander-in-Chief some 1,600 kilometres away at Simon's Town, a strikingly modern job for a cruiser designed, barely a decade earlier, chiefly to keep tropical weed off her hull.

The wireless deserves its own note as well. Marconi had only demonstrated ship-to-shore working to the Navy in the 1899 manoeuvres, and here was a set going to sea on active service the following March, in a cruiser laid down in 1887. What she was doing with it was the unglamorous half of the revolution: sitting at anchor in Delagoa Bay as a relay station, taking signals off the blockading ships by wireless and passing them on by landline to Simon's Town, a thousand miles away. The ships on the line could now be told something the same day instead of the same fortnight, and that, rather than any gun, is what changed blockade work.

Paid Off, Not Forgotten

HMS Magicienne returned home and went into reserve at Devonport from 1901, was paid off in 1904 and sold in 1905, a swift enough end once her Boer War service was over, reflecting how quickly even a relatively young cruiser could find herself surplus to requirements as the Royal Navy modernised in the run-up to the Dreadnought era.

Her individual story may have left a thinner paper trail than some of the fleet's more famous capital ships, but between chasing German mail steamers off Mozambique and relaying some of the Navy's earliest wireless traffic, this purpose-built tropical cruiser packed rather more incident into her fifteen years of active service than her workmanlike name might suggest.