HMS Victoria (1859)
HMS Victoria was a 121-gun screw first-rate ship of the line built for the Royal Navy during the 1850s. She and her sister ship HMS Howe were the only British three-decker ships of the line to be designed from the start for screw propulsion, and were the largest wooden battleships of their time. She was the world's second-largest wooden battleship after Howe. She was also the world's second largest warship until the completion of HMS Warrior, Britain's first ironclad battleship, in 1861. Although the ship was completed in 1860, she was not commissioned until 1864 when Victoria became the flagship of Britain's Mediterranean Fleet. She was paid off in 1867 into the reserve fleet and was sold for scrap in 1893.
Description
Victoria measured on the gundeck and on the keel. She had a beam of, a maximum draught of, and a depth of hold of. The ship had a tonnage of 4,126 tons burthen and displaced. The great size of the Victoria class required that their hulls be reinforced by thick diagonal wrought-iron straps. The armament of the ships consisted of thirty-two shell guns on her lower gun deck, thirty 8-inch shell guns on the middle gun deck and thirty-two 32-pounder (56 cwt) guns on her upper gun deck. Between their forecastle and quarterdeck, they carried twenty-six 32-pounder guns and a single 68-pounder (95 cwt) on a pivot mount. Their crew numbered 1000 officers and ratings.Victoria was powered by a two-cylinder, horizontal single-expansion steam engine that was rated at 1000 nominal horsepower; it used steam from eight fire-tube boilers to drive the single propeller shaft. Her engine was built by Maudslay, Sons and Field and it produced during the ship's sea trials on 5 July 1860 which gave her a maximum speed of. The Victoria-class ships were unique in the RN as the only wooden battleships with boiler rooms fore and aft of the engine room. Each boiler room was fitted with a funnel that could be retracted to reduce drag when under sail.