Warship Wednesday August 21 The Tale of the Lost Confederate Egyptian Dragon
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.
– Christopher Eger
El Monassir/CSS Mississippi foreground being watched by the HMS Majestic while the El Tousson/CSS North Carolina sits at the rear
Above we see the mighty armored steam turret ship of the Sultan of Egypt, the El Monassir as she lies fitting out in England. Laid down in 1862 at Laird, Son & Co., Birkenhead, her North African identity was a ruse as her actual owners was the Confederate States Navy and she was to be the CSS Mississippi.
Built to an innovative amalgam that combined armor plate, a ram, movable armored turrets and steam propulsion with an economical full-rigged three masted sailing suite to enable her to cross the oceans on only the coal in her bunkers, she was an interesting design. Three times the mass of the US Navy’s USS Monitor and with a comparable armor, she carried four 9-inch naval rifles in two twin turrets vs the Monitor’s pair of larger 11-inch (280 mm) smoothbore Dahlgren guns. Yet, she was almost twice as fast as the union ship. Even compared to the 1864-designed Canonicus-class monitors, she was still faster and better armed. Had she been taken over by the Confederacy, the Union navy was in trouble.
But alas, it was not to be. The British government, after the shattering Vicksburg and Gettysburg defeats in the summer of 1863, saw that the tide was turning against the greycoats. With the writing on the wall, they seized El Monassir/CSS Mississippi and her sistership the El Tousson/CSS North Carolina in October. They were completed on the Queen’s dime and put on the Royal Navy List in 1865 as the HMS Wivern and HMS Scorpion respectively.
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The wivern, is a legendary winged creature with a dragon’s head, reptilian body, two legs (sometimes none), and a barbed tail, which may be said to breathe fire or possess a venomous bite.
The ships, even though advanced for their time, were quickly outclassed by later naval developments and hindered by their heavy weight and low freeboard. By the 1880s they were in reserve. The Wivern was sent to Hong Kong where she performed harbor duties such as barracks duty and brig boat until she was scrapped in 1922. She outlived her sister Scorpion who had spent the last three decades of her life as a guard ship in Bermuda before being sunk as a target in 1901.
Still, unless I can find otherwise, I think the El Monassir/CSS Mississippi/HMS Wivern was the last serving Confederate naval ship in the world when she was scrapped, having a lifespan of some 57-years.
Specs;
Displacement: 2,751 tons
Length: 224 ft 6 in (68.43 m) p/p
Beam: 42 ft 4 in (12.90 m)
Draught: 15 ft 6 in (4.72 m) light, 17 ft (5.2 m) deep load
Propulsion: Lairds horizontal direct action; 1,450 ihp. Inoperable by 1910.
Sail plan: Ship-rigged
Speed: 10.5 knots
Complement: 153
Armament: Four 9-inch muzzle-loading rifles (disarmed 1904)
Armour: Belt 4.5 inches, 3 inches at bow, 2 inches at stern
Turret faces 10 inches
Sides 5 inches
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Another interesting ship of the confederate states was the CSS Shenandoah, she continued fighting not knowing the war had ended.
She and her crew was a subject of the book Last Flag Down published in 2008
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Really nice article; I like the unbiased tone regarding strengths vs weaknesses of this ship (and her sister) compared with the Ericsson designs of the Civil War; all too often writers tend to be partisan as concerns which was better, and I have to say, Northerners tend to rate the USN monitors as the most awesomest, armour-smashinest, ship-killinest leviathans which ever sailed, whilst damning this class! Odd, that a ship with collapsible bulwarks gets slated for its purported lack of seaworthiness? I’m studying Laird rams at the moment, modelling several, with a keen interest in the changes of ownership which these vessels underwent. They seem to have been a very popular response to the ‘monitor frenzy’ of the late ACW period, with South American navies being particularly fond of them. The Huascar is well-known (and on my bucket list of warship visits), as is her Peruvian origin and subsequent commissioning into the Chilean Navy. Less well known seem to be the ships ordered by Paraguay just after the Confaderate pair; the Bellona & Minerva. These ships were still fitting out at Lairds in 1865 when, due to the break out of war between Paraguay and the Brazilian-led Triple Alliance, land-locked Paraguay (seemingly with bad relations with Bolivia?) could not get the remaining payments out of the country past the Brazilian blockade on the Rio de la Plata and so defaulted. Brazil them picked up the reat of the tab and gained two excellent little turret warships. Bellona, a twin-turret type similar to a diminutive CSS Mississippi (195 feet long, 1,500 tons and with four 7″ Whitworth rifles) was renamed Lima Barros and Minerva (a single-turret type of slightly smaller dimensions than Bellona and with two 7″ rifles and a very light centreline superstructure) became the Bahia. Both ships were then turned on their former owners and participated in the fierce ship-vs-fort fighting along the Para River. It seems that whenever Laird rams went to war (at least three doing so), they proved themselves capable seaboats and formidable fighting vessels, proof against most of what their enemies could throw against them – the only one to be defeated in battle – the Huascar – surrendering after being blasted at point-blank range by two Chilean ironclads each armed with six 9″ rifles apiece and her captain slain, but still intact and in no danger of foundering. Can I imagine what the Confederate pair would have been like in battle against Union monitors (let alone supported by the Arman rams CSS Stonewall & Sphinx and/or the Scotts-built ironclad frigate Santa Maria/North’s Ship/Danmark)? Yes, and I think you called it; the Union would have been in serious trouble indeed.
hola estimado Andrew, te dejo mi mail que es freddyfj20@gmail.com asi compartimos info sobre turrets ships, huascar esta en mi territorio y conozco generalizada el tema de todos los turret ship.saludos.