HMS Albatross (1873)

For other ships with the same name, see HMS Albatross.

HMS Albatross was a 4-gun Fantome-class sloop built for the Royal Navy in the mid-1870s.

HMS Albatross's sister ship, HMS Egeria
History
United Kingdom
Name	HMS Albatross
Namesake	Albatross
Builder	Chatham Royal Dockyard
Laid down	1872
Launched	27 April 1873
Completed	February 1874
Fate	Scrapped, February 1889
General characteristics
Class & type	Fantome-class sloop
Displacement	949 long tons (964 t)
Tons burthen	727 bm
Length	160 ft (48.8 m) (p/p)
Beam	31 ft 4 in (9.6 m)
Draught	14 ft (4.3 m)
Depth	15 ft 6 in (4.7 m)
Installed power	838 ihp (625 kW)
Propulsion	1 shaft 1 × 2-cylinder horizontal compound-expansion steam engine 3 × cylindrical boilers
Sail plan	Barque rig
Speed	10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph)
Range	1,000 nmi (1,900 km; 1,200 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph)
Complement	125
Armament	2 × 7-inch rifled muzzle-loading guns 2 × 6.3-inch 64-pounder rifled muzzle-loading guns

History

In May 1886, she was driven ashore at Hong Kong whilst going to the assistance of the British ship Dafila, which had also driven ashore.^[1] Both vessels were refloated, and HMS Albatross towed Dafila in to Hoikow, China.^[2]

Figurehead

This carving is not a true figurehead but a scroll designed for a sloop’s vertical bow.

In seafaring folklore, the albatross is often seen as a good omen, believed to be the souls of sailors lost at sea. The birds are excellent navigators, using ocean winds to navigate the high seas; by observing an albatross in flight, some sailors were able to adjust the course of their ship to avoid hazardous conditions.^[3]

The albatross, however, may also be seen as a harbinger of misfortune to sailors.^[4] This is largely owed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, in which a sailor kills an albatross, bringing a curse upon the ship and its crew:

'God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—

Why look'st thou so?'—With my cross-bow

I shot the ALBATROSS.

…

And every tongue, through utter drought,

Was withered at the root;

We could not speak, no more than if

We had been choked with soot.

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks

Had I from old and young!

Instead of the cross, the Albatross

About my neck was hung.^[5]

As the poem unfolds, a ghost ship appears to the ancient mariner foretelling the death of his crew. He is cursed and forced to wander the world telling his tale as a warning. He eventually finds redemption after experiencing a moment of reverence for nature.

The carving was still at Chatham Dockyard in 1938 but 11 years later, it had been moved to HMS Ganges, a boys’ training establishment at Shotley, Suffolk. This establishment closed in 1984 and the carving was transferred to the collections of the then Royal Naval Museum.^[6]

The carving can be seen in the Figureheads Gallery at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth.^[7] It can also be viewed alongside other figureheads within the collection on the Bloomberg Connects website and app.