"The ramming of the Forfait by the Jeanne d’Arc, 1875 " Topic

"A number of postings on this blog have dealt with naval ramming accidents in the late 19th Century (see references at end of article). Ram bows had been seen as desirable feature of warships of any size after the successes scored by the Austro-Hungarians at the Battle of Lissa in 1866 and few vessels entered service in any navy between then and 1914 without them. In practice the ram proved a serious danger to vessels' peacetime sisters, in what would be now termed "blue on blue" accidents, and use of the weapon in anger was to prove difficult in the extreme. An example of the latter is that the Peruvian (later Chilean) turret ram Huascar made some ten ramming attacks in the course of her career, only one of which resulted in sinking of an enemy ship.

A now largely-forgotten ramming accident occurred in 1875 when the French armoured corvette Jeanne d'Arc sank the third class cruiser Forfait off the east coast of Corsica. By that time both ships were obsolescent, their hulls constructed of wood and, in the Jeanne d'Arc's case, protected with armoured plate. This latter was a substantial vessel, one of a class of seven launched in 1867/68 when warship design was in a state of flux. Of 3600 tons and with a length of 382 feet, these vessels carried four 7.6-inch guns in open-topped circular armoured barbettes, plus smaller weapons on the broadside. A wrought-iron belt some 8-feet wide and six-inches thick protected the entire waterline and the armour of the barbettes was some four-inches thick. One cannot but wonder how effectively this heavy plating was fastened to the wooden hull, and whether the backing structures could have stood up to heavy gunfire in actions that luckily never came. These vessels had 1600 to 1900-Horsepower single shaft steam-engines which gave them a maximum speed of over eleven knots. As was common at the time they also carried sailing rigs and crews of around 316…"

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Amicalement
Armand

An interesting article! Thanks for sharing. Probably more suited to the ironclads forum, however; I don't know if you can crosspost it.

I'm a big fan of 19th century fleets, with their bewildering array of different technologies. Traditionally, most of the literature available on the period in English has been about the Royal Navy; it's exciting to find new information about other navies being made available now too.

One assertion in made in the article I'm going to object to:

The three-decker Napoleon in background, still in service then [in the 1860s],
would have been suited to service at Trafalgar

Le Napoleon was an 80-gun screw battleship capable of 12 knots under steam power and armed with explosive shells-- one might suspect that Trafalgar would have turned out a little differently had the French possessed such a ship at the time!

Glad you enjoyed it my friend!. (smile)

And you are right… sometimes impossible to crossport on these days!… (smile)

Amicalement
Armand