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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, March 19, 2025: Bucoup Malchanceuse

Above, we see the unique cuirasse d’escadre Bouvet of the French Marine Nationale sitting quietly at anchor, likely in the Mediterranean in the 1900s. More a floating castle than a man-o-war, this tumblehome-hulled battlewagon would find herself very unlucky in the Dardanelles some 110 years ago this week.

The “Sample Fleet”

While France and Britain were at peace since 1815, there was still enough lingering animosity between the two traditional enemies that, when the Royal Navy began work on a series of eight new 1st rate warships that would become the Royal Sovereign-class battleship in 1888– vessels that hit 14,000 tons, carried four 13.5-inch guns, and were clad in as much as 18 inches of armor but could still make 17 knots or better– the French knew they needed a response.

This led the French naval ministry to order four, and later a fifth, new and experimental battleship around a series of mandatory specs: 14,000 tons or less, a “diamond” gun arrangement with turreted 12-inch guns fore and aft and 10.8-inch guns amidships, an armor plate topping out at 18 inches, and a speed of at least 17 knots. Dubbed the “flotte d’échantillons” (sample fleet), the idea would be that the ministry would pick and choose what worked best from these one-off prototypes and come up with the best design moving forward.

The first four ships were all designed by four different esteemed French naval architects and built at four different domestic yards at roughly the same time to cut down on the suspense:

• Charles Martel, designed by Charles Ernest Huin, built at Arsenal de Brest 1891-1896
• Jauréguiberry, designed by Amable Lagane, built by F et C de la Méditerranée, La Seyne-sur-Mer 1891-96
• Carnot, designed by Victor Saglio, built at Arsenal de Toulon 1891-1896
• Masséna, designed by Louis de Bussy, built at A et C de la Loire, Saint-Nazaire 1891-1897

Before any of the above Echantillons had entered service, Charles Ernest Huin received the singular honor of drafting a fifth design that would begin construction at Arsenal de Lorient in January 1893. Regarded as a bit of a genius by the French, the 57-year-old Huin had graduated from the École Polytechnique during the Crimean War, sat on the Gavres Commission on artillery development, and became general director of the Gironde Shipyards in Lorient in 1881 where he designed the early battleships Hoche, Brennus, and Marceau before his Charles Martel design, picked as first of the Echantillons to be laid down, drew interest.

Huin’s swansong is our subject.

Meet Bouvet

Although a continuation of the sample fleet concept, our Bouvet would be a testbed for several new technologies. Whereas the other four Echantillons used Lagreafel d’Allest boilers, Bouvet would carry 32 (!) more modern Indret-Bellville boilers arranged on three engines driving three shafts (three of the four sample ships were twin shafters). She went a bit heavier than the preceding battleships, but with 15,000 shp available, she was designed to make 18 knots in theory and could steam 4,000nm on 10 knots with 980 tons of good coal in her bunkers.

While she carried a similar armor plan, Bouvet’s was improved Harvey nickel steel face-hardened armor with a higher tensile strength against incoming projectiles than that used on previous French ships. Further, while she had roughly the same hull type, it was not cut down to the main deck at the stem, and she carried a downsized superstructure with a pair of smaller military masts compared to the previous Echantillons, all of which suffered from dramatic stability issues in any sort of seas.

Her drawings on paper seem elegant.

She also had more modern guns, albeit of the same caliber as the four prior sample ships. Rather than two single Canon de 305 mm/45 (12″) Model 1887s as on Charles Martel, she had updated 305 mm/40 (12″) Model 1893s as her main armament. Capable of firing 770-pound AP shells to 13,000 yards at about one round per minute, these guns would later be mounted in two twin-gun turrets on the follow on the Gaulois, Iena, Suffren, Republique, and Liberte battleship classes.

The secondary battery was a pair of 274 mm/45 (10.8″) Model 1887/1893s in amidship single gun turrets, an experimental model only carried on Bouvet and the sample ship Massena. Her sloping tumblehome hull form was largely to allow these “wing” guns a wider field of fire.

The tertiary armament was downright wild, with eight single 5.5″/45 M1891s, another eight 3.9″/45 M1891s, a dozen single 47mm/40 M1885 3-pounders, five single 37mm/20 M1885 1-pounders, and a pair of Hotchkiss 37mm 5-barreled Gatling-style guns. This was deemed more than enough to tackle incoming waves of enemy torpedo boats.

Speaking of torpedoes, she maintained four separate 17.7-inch torpedo stations, two amidships above water with single tubes on trainable turnstiles, and another two submerged forward with fixed tubes that simply fired 90 degrees outward from the beam. Each station had its own magazine, and Bouvet could carry a dozen M1892 Whitehead-type fish, which had a 1,100-yard range and carried 220 pounds of guncotton.

Modern, she carried four dynamos that allowed for force ventilation belowdecks, electrical lighting, and six high-output searchlights. Heady stuff for 1892.

The Salad Days

Bouvet was ordered 8 April 1892 from Lorient Arsenal at a cost of £1.2 million, or 21 million French francs. Laid down to a completed design by Huin on 16 January 1893, she was launched 27 April 1896, her hull decorated with trees.

Named for the trio of famed 18th/19th century French navigator/admirals Bouvet, our battleship was at least the third to carry the name under the Tricolor, preceded by a steam aviso famously sunk off Haiti in 1871 in a storm just after she fought the German gunboat SMS Meteor off Havana (see: Warship Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020: A German and a Frenchman walk into a Cuban bar…).

Bouvet was completed and was commissioned in June 1898, amid the spectacular naval developments of the Spanish-American War.

She joined the Mediterranean squadron and visited the Italian sovereigns in 1900, before becoming flagship of the entire French fleet for a couple of years. She then participated in several diplomatic voyages to Spain, Italy, Greece, the exotic Ottoman ports, and other spots in the region before taking part in numerous maneuvers and exercises in the Med.

For a time, she was a favorite subject of naval postcards.

Notably, she participated in the large French naval review at Cherbourg in July 1900, suffered a minor collision with the battleship Gaulois in 1903, and assisted in the international response to the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy.

It was a quiet life.

By 1907, she was given an overhaul that included deleting her above-deck torpedo tubes and other minor efforts to help trim her top-heavy design. By the summer of 1908, with better battleships taking their place in the fleet’s 1st and 2nd Battleship Divisions, Bouvet was downgraded an assignment in the 3rd.

In and out of ordinary, her roles increasingly took on a more auxiliary tasking outside of the spotlight, no longer the proud flagship of her early career.

By 1913, the French Navy had a surplus of steel-sheathed, steel-hulled battlewagons, each class generally better than the last in an evolutionary sense, and all more advanced than Bouvet. Going past the Echantillons, they had three 11,000 ton Charlemagnes, the one-off 9,000-ton Henri IV, the 12,725-ton Suffren, two 15,000-ton Republiques, three 14,000-ton Democraties, six 18,000-ton “semi-dreadnought” Dantons, four modern 23,000-ton Courbets mounting a full dozen 12″/50 guns, three brand-new 24,000-ton Bretagnes with ten 13.5″/45s, and a class of five 25,000-ton Normandie class dreadnoughts under construction. With all that– including 13 legit dreadnoughts and six semi-dreadnoughts for the battle line and 10 still functional pre-dreadnoughts for expeditionary use– the need to keep the cranky and grossly obsolete Echantillons on the Navy List any longer was fading.

The four earlier sample ships were soon withdrawn. Charles Martel was placed in reserve in 1912 before being decommissioned outright in early 1914, permanently disarmed to become a floating barracks hulk at Brest. Carnot was placed in reserve in January 1913 and, disarmed, was used as an accommodation ship at Toulon. Massena, suffering an explosion in 1913, was withdrawn from service and hulked, pending scrapping.

Jaureguiberry and Bouvet were transferred to the Division de complément (Supplementary Division) and assigned to fire control development and gunnery training, respectively, surely the last stop before being laid up. These two ships were reportedly left in poor condition, with maintenance funds diverted to newer and more capable battleforce elements. After all, why waste money on ships earmarked for disposal?

War!

The Great War saved Bouvet and fellow sample battleship Jaureguiberry from the scrappers. Ordered to arm up and make ready for combat– with German and Austrian ally Italy thought ready to enter the conflict at any moment and German RADM Souchon’s Mediterranean Squadron at large– the two dated but still useful warships were soon escorting troopships in the Med. These included both French colonial troops heading to the Metropolitan Republic and British/Indian troops likewise headed to the Western Front.

Once Souchon’s squadron, the battlecruiser SMS Goeben and the cruiser Breslau, had fled to the Dardanelles under the protection of Ottoman guns, and Italy gave assurances they had no immediate intention of honoring their pact with Berlin and Vienna, Bouvet soon shifted to Greek waters to join the force gathering there should the German ships attempt to break back out into the Med.

This force soon made the logical transition to supporting the doomed Franco-British Gallipoli campaign in 1915 once the Turks found themselves in the war. By late February 1915, a force of 16 British battleships under VADM John de Robeck and four French ones (Suffren, Bouvet, Charlemagne, and Gaulors) under RADM Emile Guepratte, augmented by a host of cruisers (including a random Russian) and destroyers, began to try to force the straits.

Among the 230 artillery pieces that supported the Dardanelles, defenses were at least 10 aging Krupp 24 cm (9.4-inch) K L/35 fortress guns from a batch of 30 pieces shipped to the country in 1889. They could heave a 474-pound shell via bagged charges out to a range of 8.1 miles.

Relatively obsolete by the Great War, they could still be deadly should an enemy ship obligingly get close enough to find out. Four of these were installed in the masonry fort at Rumeli Mecidiye Tabyası (Fort No. 13) on the European shore of the peninsula, backing up a pair of larger but less capable 28cm L/22s.

Beyond the guns, the Turks had sown almost 400 mines in 10 fields, most laid by the humble little Ottoman minelayer Nusret.

On the morning of 18 March 1915, a three-part attack was launched to reduce the Ottoman’s central forts, with the four most powerful British battlewagons (HMS Queen Elizabeth, Lord Nelson, Agamemnon, and Inflexible) kicking off the assault with a heavy two-hour bombardment from 8 miles out, followed by a second prong– the four French ships– boldly sailing to within just 5,000 yards to destroy the fortifications at point blank range, relying on their heavy armor to shrug off any remaining Turkish guns. Meanwhile, the 12 remaining British battleships would line up in a third division in three groups to provide covering fire and then follow the French in.

The problem with that plan was that the first bombardment was nowhere near as effective as the British thought it would be, and Nusret had crept in to sow an 11th minefield that the British and French didn’t know about.

The day would prove very bad for the Allied forces.

Inflexible, Queen Elizabeth, and Agamemnon in the British first line, along with Irresistible and Ocean in the second line, started taking hits, most from the little Rumeli Mecidiye battery but also other guns at Dardanos and Sogandare.

The French, drawn point blank with the forts, got the worst of it, with Suffren, flagship of RADM Guepratte, receiving 14 hits in 14 minutes and set ablaze, effectively out of the fight. Gaulois was hit twice, with one lucky shell plunging and penetrating her hull under the waterline, forcing her to retreat and beach on Tavsan in the Rabbit Islands to keep from sinking, the wounded Charlemagne at her side.

Bouvet received at least eight hits from Rumeli Medjidieh’s 9.4-inch guns, riddling her masts and funnels and putting her forward turret out of action. Not grievously injured, she answered the signal to withdraw and promptly stumbled into one of Nusret’s mines at 13:58 just under her starboard 10.8-inch mount.

Never having an abundance of stability, she quickly started to roll and, with water pouring down her funnels, turned turtle and sank in less than a minute, taking a stunning 660 of her 710 crew down with her.

A handful of waterlogged and shocked survivors were plucked from the water by the battle-damaged Agamemnon.

With Roebuck ordering his ships to withdraw from the failed effort to reduce the forts, Irresistible and Ocean likewise struck Turkish mines and quickly sank within sight of Bouvet’s watery grave. Irresistible sank with the loss of only 12 of her 780 crew and had her survivors rescued by Ocean then, following the holing by that ship, she slowly sank and the combined crews were taken off by the destroyers HMS Jed, Colne, and Chelmer which were able to come alongside. Of note, the British battleships, while similarly dated, were not tumblehome designs, and Ocean only lost a single crewman in the battle.

Epilogue

Both at the time of the sinking and in modern Turkey, the loss of Bouvet was widely celebrated and remembered.

Charles Huin didn’t live long enough to see his penultimate battleship fail so spectacularly. Retiring from the French navy in 1902 after almost 50 years of service as a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur, he was struck by a car and killed on a Paris street at age 76 in December 1912 while on his way to collect his pension from the Ministry.

RADM Guepratte, who commanded the French force on the fateful day that Bouvet was lost, was relegated to a desk job at Bizerte for the rest of the war and then retired. He passed in November 1939, gratefully missing out on the twin humiliations of Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940 and Toulon in November 1942. Post-war, historians rehabilitated his record and came to the conclusion he got a bad rap, and he is generally seen as a naval hero of sorts today in France, with a destroyer (D632) and frigate (F714) named after him. After all, he was ordered by Roebuck and Carden to take his four obsolete battleships right down the Turks’ throat and by all means should have lost all four.

The French Navy went on to recycle the Bouvet name twice- for a Free French auxiliary in WWII and a Cold War era Surcouf-class destroyer (D624) in operation between 1952 and 1981.

For years, it was believed that Bouvet sank only due to the 9.4-inch coastal artillery hits.

The Ottoman battery commander who landed the hits on Bouvet and several of the other ships, Capt. Mehmet Hilmi Şanlıtop, despite winning a series of decorations, including the Iron Cross, was cashiered post-war in the aftermath of the end of the empire. Welcomed into the ranks of the newly formed Turkish Army in 1920, he eventually retired as a colonel of artillery. He wrote a book about his service and passed in 1946. A statue of him stands near the location of the battery today, which is now a museum.

The Rumeli Medjidieh site, disarmed in 1919, today contains a single 9.4-inch Krupp fortress gun, albeit one moved from another fort. The site has bronze statues of Capt. Şanlıtop and his XO, along with Corporal Seyit Ali Cabuk, who famously hand-carried three 474-pound shells up to one of the 9.4s from the magazine to the breech after the shell hoist failed during the latter stages of the Allied attempt to force the Dardanelles on 18 March 1915, the rounds credited with hitting Ocean.

The story of Bouvet’s ultimate loss by mine strike caught up to the public.

The Ottoman minelayer Nusret, retired from naval service in 1955, was sold to commercial concerns and, derelict, sank in 1989.

Raised in 2002, she has been reconstructed on land at the Tarsus Çanakkale Park.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

***

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