Where does the blame lie?
To quote Arthur Hawkey’s book -
”Where, then, in this story of endeavour and disaster, does the blame lie? Captain Coles was a man whose brilliance on this occasion was misconceived. E.J. Reed (later Sir Edward) - who went on to enjoy a notable career as a private ship designer, author and Member of Parliament - cannot be blamed for having been right, although it is probable that he was more right than he first supposed, or he must else have protested officially at the ship’s going to sea.
The same assessment must be made of his superior, Vice Admiral Sir Spencer Robinson, Controller of the Navy. Childers was a politician who mistakenly disregarded his professional advisers, although, when the extent of the public support for Coles is considered, the First Lord’s error of
judgment may be understood.
No evidence survived of the state of the Captain’s trim on the night she went down. but the evidence of Admiral Sir Alexander Milne that the lee edge of the deck was permanently awash does show that the ship was heeling over more that day than was usual.`
Was she lighter, through consumption of fuel and stores, and therefore exerting fewer foot-tons of resistance to the pressure of the wind? And was this because water ballast had not been let into her double bottom provided for this purpose?
These facts can never be known. But the fact that she was being sailed with the lee gunwale in the sea showed either ignorance on the part of Burgoyne and Coles of the widely known danger involved - which is inconceivable; or recklessness, which is unlikely on Burgoyne’s record
.
The answer seems to be that their past experience of the ship - in spite of her type - had given them dangerous confidence in her as an individual vessel; they thought that she was all right.
Which is what the court martial, in effect found.”
______________
D K Brown, in his book "Warrior to
Dreadnought" (Chatham Publishing, 1997), points out that
"The
maximum righting moment for Monarch (the Reed-designed contemporary
to Captain) was at 38° whilst that for Captain was at 20°.
The Captain had a marginally greater metacentric height than Monarch
but the righting moment fell away once the deck edge was immersed and
capsize was inevitable once she had reached 20°."
(Survivor James Ellis is reported to have
have heard a shipmate reporting to Captain Burgoyne as disaster was
imminent that the angle of heel was 18°.)
D K Brown goes on to summarise the mistakes
as follows -
1 - The concept of a fully rigged,
low-freeboard turret ship was wrong. Spencer Robinson and Reed had pointed
this out on numerous occasion. Coles' bad-tempered and unreasonable
utterances confused the mind of the public and ministers making rational
debate impossible.
2 - Failure to define responsibility between Laird's and
the Controller, particularly when Coles' illness prevented him from taking
any part.
3 - Laird's failure to take heed of Reed's clear warning
that the centre of gravity was higher than they thought.
4 - Laird's error in weight estimation which led to her
floating deeper than intended.
_________
DK Brown, in an earlier article "The Design and
Loss of HMS Captain", published in Warship Technology (1989,
the journal of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects) was perhaps a
little more sympathetic towards the naval architects involved by saying -
"To sum up, the danger to Captain was not
forecast; the evidence from the GZ curve* was too novel and understanding
of dynamic effects too limited for the stability data to be interpreted.
An important consequence of the loss was to concentrate the mind of the
naval architect on large angle stability and the theory of capsize; a
continuing debate which can still raise heat!"
(*The GZ curve is a graph showing how much the centre of
gravity of a ship moves away from the centre line as a ship heels.)
_______________
For a simple explanation, perhaps we should leave the
last word to Arthur Hawkey who writes in his book -
"Although the analogy is not scientifically
correct, the part a ship's sides play in its stability may be likened to
the rockers of a rocking chair. For high sides and great stability, i.e.
the ability to recover, the analogy is a chair with long, well curved
rockers. Such a chair can be rocked through a considerable angle and is
difficult to turn over.
But if we consider another rocking chair with
shorter and only slightly curved rockers, different characteristics are
found. This chair is more difficult to rock but, after the initial
resistance, it reaches the point of no return more quickly. A similar
peculiarity is displayed by a ship with low sides."
And an even later thought from someone
described as "an old naval hand" -
Ahoy all!!
I have read all this with the greatest interest and it takes me back to
my fairly early days in the RN, when I became aware of how fiercely DG
Ships (the Admiralty department responsible for ship design) protected
their exclusivity. There was no way any civilian yard was going to
design an HM Ship.
They made it clear that, in their
view, only they knew about stability in really rough weather and I
recall their claim that all HM Ships could survive a roll of more than
90 degrees - in fact water would come down the funnel before the ship
would turn turtle.
I remember being comforted by this
thought in a wooden hulled minesweeper in Force 11 in the Norwegian Sea,
two typhoons in a cruiser and a hurricane in a destroyer! I think the
fate of HMS Captain continued to influence DG Ships' approach to ship
design well into the last century.
Anon.
HMS Captain
1870
