At first glance the picture of a frigate such as HMS Eurydice, illustrated above on a cigarette card, immediately evokes visions
of single-ship actions of the Napoleonic period. It is therefore all the more
surprising that this ship was still in service in 1878 and that her destruction
was witnessed by the young Winston Churchill who would live on to oversee
development of Britain’s nuclear deterrent. The Eurydice’s story, and that of her successor, HMS Atalanta, are some of the most tragic ever
to occur in peacetime service in the Royal Navy.
This begs the question of “Why were such vessels still in
service when steam was already established as the most reliable and efficient method
of propulsion?”
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| Armoured-cruiser HMS Warspite of 1884 - her sailing rig was removed early in her career and she served thereafter under steam power only |
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| Not only the Royal Navy retained sailing rigs Here is the American protected-cruiser USS Atlanta of 1884 |
The answer is that warships in all navies carried sail as
well as steam power right up to the end of the 19th Century. Boilers
were still inefficient, though improving, and their furnaces were ravenous for
coal. For long distance cruising, away from easy coal supply, retention of sail
made sense, even though the presence of masts and yards was likely to be a
major point of vulnerability in combat. As innovations in boiler and engine
design improved efficiency, and reduced coal demand, the need for sail
decreased. In the 1880s sailing rigs were phased out for major vessels but even
thereafter retention continued to make sense through the 1890s for smaller
craft on remote stations. Typical examples were small, slow gunboats such as
those of the Redbreast class, powerfully
armed with six 4-inch breech-loaders and ideal for colonial service.
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| HMS Sparrow - a Redbreast class gunboat of 1889 |
Training of officers and men in managing sail as well as
steam was therefore of the utmost importance. For many years after steam had replaced sail for all operational
purposes there was a strong body of
opinion remained that mastery of sail, and of “work aloft”, was essential for character-building,
even when this meant training on masts set up on land.
This is the background to the retention of HMS Eurydice as a Royal Navy training ship. She
had been built in 1843 as a very fast 26-gun frigate designed with a very
shallow draught to operate in shallow waters. Wholly sail-dependent, her design
and armament were little different to those of the frigates commanded by
captains such as Pellew and Cochrane some four decades earlier. Over the next
eighteen years she saw service worldwide, including an uneventful assignment to
the White Sea during the Crimean War. She was converted to a stationary
training ship in 1861 and remained in this role until re-commissioned as a
sea-going vessel in 1877.
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| Contemporary illustration of HMS Eurydice capsizing |
Eurydice departed
on a three-month training cruise to the West Indies in the November of that
year, carrying 319 crew and trainees. The cruise appears to have been
uneventful. A fast, 18-day, voyage from Bermuda brought her back to the Isle of
Wight by March 24th 1878 prior to entering Portsmouth. At this point
she was engulfed in a heavy snow storm and capsized and sank. There were only
two survivors as those not brought down in the ship itself died of exposure in the
freezing water. Her captain, Captain Marcus Hare, went down with his ship after
ordering every man to save himself and then clasping his hands in prayer. The wreck was in shallow enough water for the
masts to protrude and it was refloated later in the year. It is not surprising however that this old
wooden vessel was past repair and she was accordingly broken up. The subsequent
enquiry held her officers and crew blameless and found that the disaster had
been caused stress of weather. There was
however some concern expressed on the suitability of Eurydice as a training ship because of known concerns as to her stability.
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| The remains of the Eurydice, as Churchill remembered her over five decades later |
Winston Churchill, who was four at the time, was
at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight and he witnessed the tragedy. It obviously made
a lasting impression on him, as he recounted fifty-two years later in his
memoir “My Early Life”:
“One day when we were out on the cliffs near Ventnor,
we saw a great splendid ship with all her sails set, passing the shore only a
mile or two away… Then all of a sudden there were black clouds and wind and the
first drops of a storm, and we just scrambled home without getting wet through.
The next time I went out on those cliffs there was no splendid ship in full
sail, but three black masts were pointed out to me, sticking up out of the
water in a stark way... The divers went down to bring up the corpses. I was
told and it made a scar on my mind that some of the divers had fainted with
terror at seeing the fish eating the bodies... I seem to have seen some of
these corpses towed very slowly by boats one sunny day. There were many people
on the cliffs to watch, and we all took off our hats in sorrow.”
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| Contemporary illustration of salvage efforts. Note diver (tiny dot) being lowered towards the quarterdeck |
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| Salvage operations in progress |
The poet Gerald Manley Hopkins was sufficiently moved by the
tragedy to write very powerfully on “The
Loss of the Eurydice”. Space precludes copying his poem in full here but the
following verses are especially memorable:
They say who saw one sea-corpse cold
He was all of lovely manly mould,
Every inch a tar,
Of the best we boast our sailors
are.
Look, foot to forelock, how all
things suit! he
Is strung by duty, is strained to
beauty,
And brown-as-dawning-skinned
With brine and shine and whirling
wind.
O his nimble finger, his gnarled
grip!
Leagues, leagues of seamanship
Slumber in these forsaken
Bones, this sinew, and will not
waken.
It is normal – even today – to state solemnly after every
disaster that “Lessons have been learned” though in practice this seldom seems
to happen. This was especially the case in the aftermath of the Eurydice catastrophe. The Admiralty
proceeded to replace her with HMS Juno,
another 26-gun frigate of identical tonnage but slightly less radical
hull-lines, built in 1844. She was renamed HMS Atalanta and she made two successful training cruises to the West
Indies before disappearing at sea in 1880 with the loss of all 281 crew and trainees
while en route from Bermuda to Britain. It was presumed that she sank in a
powerful storm which crossed her route a couple of weeks after she sailed. A gunboat
HMS Avon did however report that near
the Azores “she noticed immense quantities of wreckage floating about... in
fact the sea was strewn with spars etc."
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| HMS Atalanta |
Investigation of the disaster was hampered by lack of
evidence but a former crew member stated that “she rolled 32 degrees, and
Captain Stirling is reported as having been heard to remark that had she rolled
one degree more she must have gone over and foundered. The young sailors were
either too timid to go aloft or were incapacitated by sea-sickness.” The
witness added that many “hid themselves away,” in such circumstances and “could
not be found when wanted by the boatswain's mate."
The most devastating verdict on the disaster was delivered
by The Times. It denounced “the criminal folly of sending some 300 lads who
have never been to sea before in a training ship without a sufficient number of
trained an experienced seamen to take charge of her in exceptional
circumstances. The ship's company of the Atalanta
numbered only about 11 able seamen, and when we consider that young lads are
often afraid to go aloft in a gale to take down sail... a special danger
attaching to the Atalanta becomes
apparent."
Both tragedies – claiming 600 lives in two years – shook public
confidence in the Royal Navy. A new breed of professional was however emerging,
men who understood the demands and opportunities of new technology. Chief among
these officers was to be Sir John Fisher, later Lord Fisher, who would create the
Dreadnought navy that Britain took into
World War 1. It is therefore all the more ironic that one of the officers to
lose his life on HMS Atalanta was his
younger brother, Lieutenant Phillip Fisher.
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| HMS Eurydice under full sail |
Britannia’s Spartan
Six-inch breech loading guns represented the cutting edge of naval technology in the early 1880s. In my novel Britannia’s Spartan they are seen in use on both British and Japanese ships. The splendid woodcut below shows Japanese crews managing just such a weapon in the war of 1895 against China. Click here to read the opening of the novel.
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