Qualla: HMS Enterprise (1864)

HMS Enterprise (1864): Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She was supposed to be a wooden sloop named Circassian. Construction had barely begun at Deptford Dockyard in 1862 when the Admiralty changed its mind, renamed her Enterprise, and ordered her redesigned mid-build with iron upperworks and armour plate. The result was the first composite-construction ship in the Royal Navy - a wooden hull beneath an iron skin, a transitional creature born in a transitional decade. Twenty-five years later, scrapped and being towed past Wales, she met her end on the same Anglesey coast she had once been built to protect.

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HMS Enterprise (1864): A Ship Caught Between Eras

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 1860s were a brutal decade for naval architects. The Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862 had just made every wooden warship in the world obsolete overnight, and the Royal Navy was scrambling. Edward Reed, the Chief Constructor, took the unfinished Camelion-class sloop on her stoc...

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HMS Enterprise (1864): The Cannons That Wouldn't Work

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Enterprise carried four guns when she sailed: two old smoothbore 100-pounder Somersets, and two of the Royal Navy's bright new 110-pounder Armstrong breech-loaders. Much was hoped for the Armstrongs. Almost nothing came of those hopes. Tests in September 1861 had already shown th...

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HMS Enterprise (1864): Mediterranean Service, Quiet Career

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Once commissioned, Enterprise spent the bulk of her active career attached to the Mediterranean Fleet, Malta-based, showing the flag through the years when Britain was negotiating the Suez Canal and the long Eastern Question. She steamed at about ten knots on her 690-horsepower R...

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HMS Enterprise (1864): Wrecked at Aberffraw

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She sat in reserve for fourteen years before being sold for scrap in 1885 for £2,072 - roughly three percent of what she had cost to build. Even her final journey was unlucky. On 6 October 1889, under tow from Plymouth to Liverpool for breaking up, Enterprise was caught in a gale...

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