![]() In essence the new type were super torpedo boats, larger and faster versions of the problem, armed with rapid firing guns and the odd torpedo. After experimenting with small torpedo cruisers, which were too expensive, and too slow, and torpedo gunboats, moderately fast, well-armed, seaworthy craft the Royal Navy settled on the torpedo boat destroyer in 1892. ![]() They could attack the fleet or, in line with the commerce raiding doctrine of the Jeune Ecole, strike at merchant vessels. ![]() The Royal Navy had to face numerous French torpedo craft based in small harbours all along the southern coast of the English Channel. Finally the 1870s and 1880s produced the 30-60 ton torpedo boat, a cheap craft based on commercial steam launches that, when mass-produced, became a threat to the existing order at sea. The next prototype, HMS Polyphemus, a radical high speed armoured torpedo carrier, solved the problem of deploying a short range weapon in a fleet action by emphasising speed and protection. The first British torpedo craft, HMS Vesuvius was a stealth vessel, designed for a slow, silent approach into enemy harbours at night, to get close enough to use the new weapon. They were anxious to understand the new threat, and to assess its potential as a weapon for attacking enemy warships in harbour. The Royal Navy was among the first to visit Robert Whitehead’s factory at Fiume (then in Austria ) and purchase the right to use his ‘secret’. Just as steam, armour, heavy rifled guns and rotating turrets provided the Royal, (and Union ) Navy with the means to transform sea control into strategic naval power projection, an English engineer quite literally knocked the bottom out of ironclad coast assault forces. ![]() The development of the locomotive torpedo in the mid nineteenth century provided a fundamental challenge for the dominant sea control navy of the era. ![]() Norman Friedman, British Destroyers: From the Earliest Days to the Second World War, Naval Institute Press, 2009. ![]()
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