HMS Raleigh (1873): The Frigate Built to Show the Flag, Not Fight the Line

Laid Down at Chatham for a Different Kind of War

HMS Raleigh was built at Chatham Dockyard to a design by Sir Edward Reed, launched on 1 March 1873 and commissioned on 13 January 1874. She was an unarmoured, iron-hulled screw frigate of some 5,200 tons, one of a small group of large independently designed cruising frigates of the era alongside HMS Inconstant and HMS Shah, related in concept rather than formally sister ships.

At 298 feet in length and carrying twenty-two guns, a full sailing rig and a single-shaft steam engine capable of an impressive 16.2 knots, she was deliberately built without the heavy armour plating of a contemporary ironclad, a design choice that reflected her intended role.

Ships like Raleigh existed not to slug it out in a line of battle but to show the British flag on distant stations around the globe, trading protection for speed and endurance, which suited the Royal Navy's imperial policing duties considerably better than another slow, heavily armoured brawler ever could have.

What Happened When One of Them Was Tested

The bargain in that design was never really tested by Raleigh herself, but it was tested by HMS Shah, and the answer is instructive. On 29 May 1877, off Pacocha on the Peruvian coast, Shah and the corvette Amethyst caught up with the Peruvian turret ship Huascar, which had been seized by Nicolas de Pierola's rebels and had taken to stopping British merchant ships.

What followed was three hours of extremely energetic futility. Shah fired 237 rounds and Amethyst 190. Something like sixty of them hit. Not one of them was armour-piercing, because unarmoured cruising frigates were not expected to fight ironclads, and Huascar's plating shrugged off the lot. In desperation Shah fired a Whitehead torpedo at her, which was the first torpedo ever launched in anger by anybody, anywhere. It did nine knots. Huascar was doing eleven. It never caught her.

Huascar got away in the dark and surrendered to her own government two days later, which the Royal Navy had nothing to do with. The lesson was taken: a fast, unarmoured ship can go anywhere and catch anything, and if what she catches is armoured she cannot do a thing about it. That is precisely the trade Raleigh was built around, and for policing an empire against merchantmen, slavers and rebels it was the right one for nearly forty years. Huascar herself is still afloat, a Chilean museum ship at Talcahuano, having been captured two years later in a war Britain had no part in.

George Tryon and the Detached Squadron

Raleigh's first captain, from 1874 to 1877, was George Tryon, a man fussy enough about his new command to make his own string of alterations to her fitting-out before she had even finished building. He took her on the Detached, or Flying, Squadron cruise that ran from the autumn of 1874 until she finally left the squadron at Bombay in February 1876, an extended world tour calling at Gibraltar, Madeira, Montevideo, the Falkland Islands, the Cape of Good Hope, St Helena, Bombay, Colombo, Trincomalee and Calcutta.

During her travels she also transported Sir Garnet Wolseley to Natal and escorted the Prince of Wales's own voyage to India, exactly the kind of prestige, flag-showing work she had been designed for.

There is a rather sharp irony in Tryon's own later career worth noting here, since he went on to command HMS Victoria and died in her in the infamous 1893 collision with HMS Camperdown, reportedly with the words It is all my fault, a stark contrast to the largely uneventful and well-handled command he exercised over Raleigh nearly two decades earlier.

A Brief Grounding off the Dardanelles

In 1878 Raleigh ran aground near the Rabbit Islands off the Dardanelles, an incident that could easily have ended her career early, but she was refloated within days and sent to Malta for repairs, a minor scare rather than a lasting setback.

Command passed around this time to Captain Charles Jago, and Raleigh spent the next couple of years on further Mediterranean duty, patrolling the waters off newly British-administered Cyprus and, that September, carrying Sir Garnet Wolseley, her old passenger from the Detached Squadron cruise, on a survey of the island he had just been appointed to govern. The following year she served off Alexandria during the unrest that followed Egypt's Cairo riots, before leaving the Mediterranean Fleet at the end of 1879 for relief duties in Australian waters.

Flagship on the Cape and West Africa Station

Raleigh went on to serve twice as flagship on the Cape of Good Hope and West Africa Station, first from 1885 to 1888 and again from 1890 to 1893, years of steady, unglamorous imperial patrol work along one of the Royal Navy's more demanding and disease-prone overseas stations.

Tragedy at Madina Creek

The darkest chapter in Raleigh's career came on 24 February 1894, during an expedition against the slave raider Fodi Silah on the Gambia River, ordered by Rear-Admiral Frederick Bedford from his base at Bathurst. A naval brigade of around 220 to 225 bluejackets landed from Raleigh and other vessels under Captain Edward Gamble was ambushed at Madina Creek.

Eighteen men were killed, including two lieutenants, and a further forty-six to forty-nine were wounded, with at least one officer's body reportedly beheaded and taken as a trophy by the raiders, a grim detail that deserves to be recorded honestly rather than smoothed over for the sake of a lighter narrative.

It stands as a stark reminder that the unglamorous patrol duties these cruising frigates were built for could turn lethal without warning, and that the men who served aboard ships like Raleigh faced real danger even in engagements history has largely forgotten. Fodi Silah himself was eventually driven out of the protectorate by follow-up operations and took refuge across the border in French territory, where he later died, a quieter end than the men he had ambushed ever got.

Future Admirals in the Gunroom

Among the midshipmen who served aboard Raleigh during her career were two officers who would go on to considerably higher rank and fame. Roger Keyes joined her in August 1887, partway through her first spell as Cape and West Africa flagship, while William Fisher served his midshipman's time aboard her during the second commission, from 1890 to 1893. Both went on to become admirals, Fisher eventually commanding a battleship at Jutland and later the Mediterranean Fleet, a reminder that ships like Raleigh doubled as finishing schools for the officers who would lead the Royal Navy into the twentieth century.

Keyes is worth naming twice. The midshipman who joined this ship in 1887 was the same Roger Keyes who, as a vice-admiral in April 1918, planned and led the raid on Zeebrugge, which is the most argued-about British operation of the First World War and which produced a whole shoal of Victoria Crosses, several of them awarded by ballot among the men who had been there. He went on to be an admiral of the fleet and, in 1940, the first Director of Combined Operations.

A Quiet End, and a Case of Mistaken Identity

HMS Raleigh was not wrecked, and it is worth being clear about that, since a very different, much more dramatic story is sometimes attached to her name.

That story in fact belongs to a later, entirely separate ship, the Hawkins-class cruiser HMS Raleigh of 1919, which ran aground off Labrador in August 1922 with the loss of twelve lives and was later deliberately demolished with depth charges under a young captain named Andrew Cunningham, who would go on to become one of the Second World War's most celebrated admirals.

That later ship has an account of her own here: HMS Raleigh (96). She is worth reading alongside this one, because the two ships are almost a matched pair of opposites: the 1873 frigate was fast, unarmoured, went everywhere and came quietly to the breakers after thirty-two years, and the 1919 cruiser helped define a whole new category of warship and then ran herself onto the Labrador coast in fog after barely one.

This earlier Raleigh, the 1873 frigate, met a far less dramatic fate, remaining in reserve and training duties before being sold to Thos. W. Ward of Morecambe for breaking up on 11 July 1905, a quietly unremarkable finish for a ship whose career had, at times, been anything but.