‘Karteria’ The First Steam Warship In War (1826)Summary
The Greeks, then fighting for Independence, were pioneers in steam warships. In 1825 they ordered ‘Perseverance’ from Brent, Deptford & steam engines from Galloway, Smithfield.
Completed in May 1826 she sailed, reaching Greece in September, & was renamed ‘Karteria’. Built at the instigation of the great English Philhellene Frank Abney Hastings, who inspired the design, helped in the construction & commanded the ship on her passage & in war, the ‘Karteria’ was in many successful battles at Phaleron, Oropos, Volos, Salona, Vasilathi, & was the first ever steam warship in war action.
A 125ft long, 25 wide, 400 ton, 4-masted schooner with two engines run on steam from coal-fired boilers, 16 rpm, 84 horse, driving port/starboard paddle wheels & 6 knots. Originally she was to have one 32 pound gun forward & one aft, & two 68 pounders in the middle, fired in turn with the ship rotating by her paddle wheels. Red hot shot was to be used, which was lethal for enemy sail & wood ships. She traveled under sail & the steam engines were used only in action.
Builders, Finance & Costs In the autumn 1824 Hastings went to England. He promoted his ideas for steamships & naval guns and, when the second Greek loan of £2,000,000 was floated in February 1825, he managed to obtain £10,000 from it & authorization for the building of his steamship the ‘Perseverance’, in March 1825. He offered to pay for her guns himself.
The order went to the Brent family shipyard at Deptford for the hull & outfit. The Brents were old established shipbuilders & enjoyed a fine reputation. Between 1770 & 1803, they had built at least 64 ships, light merchantmen (East India & Hudson Bay Companies) of 800 – 1200 tons & the remainder were warships of 74 guns & smaller (Royal Navy). In the early 1800’s warship orders declined & the Brents turned to innovation & technology. They designed & built three steam powered paddle wheel packet ships, including the ‘London Engineer’ that shuttled passengers between London & Margate. Later the Brents contracted with the famous radical Thomas Cochrane, later Earl of Dundonald, to build a steam warship, the ‘Rising Star ‘ to be used in the Chilean revolution. It arrived in Valpariso in July 1822, too late to be of use to the rebels, but it was the first steamship to cross the Atlantic, & was the first steamship in the Pacific Ocean.
The steam machinery was ordered from Alexander Galloway’s, an important engineering firm in London, Smithfiield. Alexander Galloway was considered one of England’s leading engineers. Well before 1824, they had exported minting machinery to Algiers & a large cotton press to Egypt. They had also built the steam engines of the ‘Rising Star’ & a new steam engine for the ‘London Engineer’. The latter had been bought by Mohamed Ali, the Pacha of Egypt, & sailed to Alexandria, to be there converted to a warship. Galloway’s son Thomas went to Egypt in 1824 to help & stayed on to become the Pacha’s Chief Engineer & named Galloway Bey. After his death in 1836, his brother John Alexander continued his project for a railroad & canal Alexandria, Cairo, Suez, that preceded the Suez Canal for the passage to India.
The hull was quickly & efficiently built, but the steam machinery, promised for August 1825, was subject to continuous postponements & delays. Engine building was then still in its infancy & the “series / mass production” with the order of five more steamships must have had an adverse effect. Influences from other clients are not unusual. In the circumstances Hastings was certainly not happy, but managed quite well. ‘Perseverance’ was finally completed & sailed from London in end May 1826, bound for Greece & under the command of Hastings.
She was rigged as a four-masted schooner, & made way mostly under sail. Her engines, were noisy & slow – sixteen revolutions per minute. For her time, she was however a great success. Design of engines & boilers then was empirical, & nobody could be sure that a new ship would raise enough steam to make any headway. The ‘Perseverance’ did, but with a good share of trouble. In the Mediterranean, her iron riveted boiler burst & there were problems with the engines & paddle wheels. Hastings put into Cagliari, Sardinia, where repairs took three months. It was September before he reached Nauplia & a great welcome from the locals. Some thought the ship would start her paddle wheels & climb to the top of Palamidi, the town’s hill fortress. She was officially delivered to the Greek Government & renamed ‘Karteria’, greek for ‘Perseverance’.
The following are taken from:
- A. Brent’s General Arrangement Plan (National Maritime Museum)
- B. Other sources
A B Length between Perpendiculars 130′–2″ 125′–0″ Length of the keel for Tonnage 111′–6″ Breadth Extreme 25′–0″ 25′–0″ Breadth Moulded 24′–6″ Height between Decks 6′–4″ Length of Engine Room 43′–0″ Burthen in Tons 350 400 Tonnage 233 Breadth two Paddles 41′–6″ Diameter Paddles 13′–10″ Width Paddles 6′–3″ Horse Power 2 × 42 Revolutions / minute 16 Speed (Knots) 6 Consumption (tons / day coal) 7 It is possible that we have here ‘design’ & ‘as built’ data. Here & elsewhere in this paper particulars come from a miscellany of sources, many of them on history, & may differ on the technical data.
The ship was built as a 4 – mast schooner. She had raised forecastle & poop decks & a raised deck midships. The fore & aft well – decks in between had a high bulwarks port & starboard & the ship’s 8 guns were located within, 2 fore & 2 aft, port & starboard. The raised deck midships was in way of the port & starboard paddle wheels & above the engine & boiler rooms. The tall funnel was above the boilers aft, with the engines forward.
Materials used for construction are described by Hastings, in his Memoir of 1828:
The ‘Karteria’ was built with her timbers close & caulked together, & would therefore, have floated without planking. I had several opportunities of remarking the advantage of building thus, to resist shot; nothing less than a eighteen pounder ever came through us; this, ’tis true, might be partly attributed to Turkish bad powder, but those shot that did come through, always made a nice clean round hole without a splinter. However, against shells it would have a disadvantage, as they would be more likely to stick in it. Perhaps if shells became generally used, it will be proper to make the upper works of a ship as slight as is consistent with strength, & iron ribs might perhaps be good. The ‘Karteria’ had another peculiarity in her build – two solid bulkheads enclosing the engine room, & caulked & lined, so as to be water tight, the intention of this was, in the event of one part of the ship being leaky from any cause whatever, the water could not flow into another part of the ship. This arrangement, which is due to the ingenuity of Mr Brent, the builder, once saved this ship from fire, which broke out with great force in the after-part of the engine room, & would have communicated to the shell room very quickly. But for this bulkhead, which kept the fire forward, & gave us time to subdue it. I see no reason why all men of war should not be furnished with similar partitions. The same builder saved another ship (the Rising Star) from sinking, by this contrivance.
The Midship Section shows a carvel build, about 3” thick, on the lower sides, which also corresponds to the difference between the Breadth Extreme (25’ – 0”) & the Breadth Moulded (24’ – 6”) given, & the material is obviously wood. The upper sides are about 4” thick & bottom about 3.5”, while frames on the sides are 10” wide & bottom transverses about 11” wide & apparently wood. The bottom brackets & bottom / side gussets are apparently iron, while the iron ribs mentioned are for the future. This was a limited use of iron & there was no sufficient precedent or experience to do more for the ‘Karteria’.
The ‘Amie McKim’ built in Baltimore in 1833 was the first archetypal clipper. Composite construction was adopted for the early clippers with internal iron frames, beams & pillars, wood for stem & sern posts & planking to which copper plating was fixed. This avoided galvanic action & protected the hull from fouling. Paixhans had advocated iron steamships & his shell cannons in 1822 without success. Hastings must have had similar ideas & while his steamship & his guns went ahead, full iron construction for ships came later. Another interesting feature on the ‘Karteria’ was her two solid bulkheads, enclosing the engine room, & caulked & lined, so as to be watertight & to prevent any possible leak of water from flowing from one part of the ship to another. Transverse watertight bulkheads in wooden ships were introduced by Shanks on the ‘Trial’ in 1790 & used by Bentham on seven experimental vessels in 1794. He had also introduced longitudinal bulkheads. Transverse watertight iron bulkheads in iron steamships were first introduced by Williams on the ‘Garryowen’ in 1833.
The steam engine started as a practical machine with James Watt with his introduction of condensers, double-acting pistons & translation into rotary motion. These were covered by his 4 patents between 1769 & 1785. More than 250 patents were filed by others up to 1825 & covered boilers, furnaces, valves, regulators, fuels & generally progress & development for application in pumps, locomotives & some in ships. A typical steam engine for a ship at the time was low pressure 20lb /in2 at about 15 revolutions per minute & driving paddle wheels on the ship’s sides, middle or aft Boilers were single iron boxes with internal stays, a furnace for burning coal & a tall flue.
The ‘Karteria’ had two steam engines, one port & one starboard, that ran independently. Each was connected to its corresponding paddle wheel & this system gave exceptional manoeuvrability. The engines ran on steam from the boilers burning coal. The engines were located forward of the boilers. Power from each steam engine was 42 horse & with a total of 84 horse speed in calm water was about 6 knots on a consumption rated at about 7 tons/day.
These were early days however & making steam engines for ships & running them had not been generally established. The ‘Karteria’ sailed well, but her machinery & paddle wheels gave constant trouble.. The necessary diversion to Cagliari for repairs was bad for morale & Hastings wanted to dismiss the two Galloway engineers onboard. Running, maintenance & repairs in Greece afterwards was a serious headache for Hastings.
Coal was also problem with high consumption. He had chartered the ‘Tiber’ in London & had one of his officers bring a cargo of coal & other supplies to Greece. Local wood & other fuels were not adequate. It was lucky the ship moved mostly under sail. His skills & perseverance however kept things running when they were needed most, in battle.
Guns, steam & possibly iron, were central in Hastings’s thinking. In his Memorandum to Byron in 1823 his ideas were for two long 32 – pounders fore & aft & two 68 – pounder guns of seven inches bore, one on each side. These were later changed to 4 – 68 pound Carronades (Carron Ironworks, Scotland) of the Government pattern & 4 – 68 pound guns of a new form, seven foot four inch long, fifty eight hundred weight (about three tons)and based on a model prepared by Hastings. They were apparently ordered at the same time as ‘Perseverance’ in March 1825 & sent to Greece via the USA, as the ship had to leave England unarmed. In fact they arrived in Greece on frigate ‘Hellas’ in December 1826. For the ‘Karteria’, that had arrived in September 1826, Hastings had to borrow temporarily guns from the Nafplion fortress & used this time usefully to organize & train his crew.
The original ideas for action were to start with red hot shot, heated by the ship’s furnace coal, & which, while less destructive than shells, had a longer range. Explosive or incendiary shells would follow. These combined with the steamship’s movements, independent of the wind, would be lethal against sailers depending on the wind & with vulnerable sails & wooden hulls. All this was based on variety of innovations of equipment & methods to heat & transfer the shot, to carry & fuse the shells, good locks, protection from recoil & gunners’ good training & discipline, all of which were Hastings specialities.
Samuel Gridley Howe, the ‘Karteria’ American doctor had recorded in his November, 1826 journal:
We have two Englishmen (officers), one German, one Frenchman, & one Greek; The Greek is the eldest son of Tombazi, Captain Hastings is a man who deserves the deepest gratitude & respect from the Greek nation. It is only through his exertion, his activity, & generosity, that this ship was ever got out. She was built under his own eye in London, & carries as much weight of metal as a thirty-six gun frigate; her engine, however, is not the best. Captain Hastings, having on board about forty English & forty Greek sailors, is all ready to join the Greek fleet & engage the enemy.
Elsewhere crew numbers are given as 17 Officers, 22 Petty Officers, 32 Gunners, 110 Seamen & 4 Cooks/Servants, a total of 185. With the ship running partly on sail & partly on steam, it is obvious that specialties were needed & used accordingly. Hastings spoke English, French & Greek & with some effort achieved their respect, loyalty & love. He got the best out of them.
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