''Nemesis'' was the first British ocean-going iron warship. She was the largest of a class of six similar vessels ordered by the 'Secret Committee' of the East India Company. ''Nemesis,'' together with her sister ships ''Phlegethon, Pluto, Proserpine, Ariadne,'' and ''Medusa,'' was built by John Laird’s yard at

Birkenhead Birkenhead (; cy, Penbedw) is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, Merseyside, England; historically, it was part of Cheshire until 1974. The town is on the Wirral Peninsula, along the south bank of the River Mersey, opposite Liver ...

and

William Fairbairn & Sons William Fairbairn and Sons, was an engineering works in Manchester, England. History William Fairbairn opened an iron foundry in 1816 and was joined the following year by a Mr. Lillie, and the firm became known as Fairbairn and Lillie Engine Mak ...

Millwall Millwall is a district on the western and southern side of the Isle of Dogs, in east London, England, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It lies to the immediate south of Canary Wharf and Limehouse, north of Greenwich and Deptford, eas ...

. Launched in 1839, the Nemesis was deployed to China – arriving late 1840 – and used to great effect in the

First Opium War The First Opium War (), also known as the Opium War or the Anglo-Sino War was a series of military engagements fought between Britain and the Qing dynasty of China between 1839 and 1842. The immediate issue was the Chinese enforcement of the ...

by Captain

William Hutcheon Hall Admiral Sir William Hutcheon Hall, (c. 1797 – 25 June 1878), was a British Royal Navy officer. He served in the First Anglo-Chinese War and Crimean War. He was one of the first British officers to make a thorough study of steam engines. In ...

and later in 1842 by Captain

Richard Collinson Admiral Sir Richard Collinson (7 November 1811 – 13 September 1883) was an English naval officer and explorer of the Northwest Passage. Early life He was born in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, England, then part of County Durham. He joined the R ...

. The Chinese referred to her as the "devil ship".

Construction

Although commissioned by the Secret Committee of the

East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southea ...

(EIC) in 1839, the vessel did not appear in the EIC's list of ships, leading ''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...

'' to comment:

''"...this vessel is provided with an Admiralty letter of license or letter of marque. If so, it can only be against the Chinese; and for the purpose of smuggling opium she is admirably adapted."''

''Nemesis'' was a gunboat built by British shipbuilding company John Laird's Birkenhead Iron Works in three months. She had a length of , a

beam Beam may refer to: Streams of particles or energy *Light beam, or beam of light, a directional projection of light energy **Laser beam *Particle beam, a stream of charged or neutral particles **Charged particle beam, a spatially localized grou ...

of , a draught of when full of coal and less than 5 ft when laden with less, and a burthen of 660 tons. She was powered by two sixty horsepower Forrester engines. She was armed with two pivot-mounted 32-pounder and four 6-pounder guns. The steam- and sail-powered ship was particularly effective in China because her shallow draught of only five feet allowed her to travel up rivers to pursue and engage other vessels and targets. Her watertight bulkheads were the first to be used in a warship. They enabled her to survive the hull damage she sustained during sea trials and en route to China in 1840. In July 1840, ''Nemesis'' became the first iron ship to sail around the

Cape of Good Hope The Cape of Good Hope ( af, Kaap die Goeie Hoop ) ;''Kaap'' in isolation: pt, Cabo da Boa Esperança is a rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. A common misconception is that the Cape of Good Hope is t ...

, aided by techniques developed the year before by Sir

George Airy Sir George Biddell Airy (; 27 July 18012 January 1892) was an English mathematician and astronomer, and the seventh Astronomer Royal from 1835 to 1881. His many achievements include work on planetary orbits, measuring the mean density of the E ...

, the

Astronomer Royal Astronomer Royal is a senior post in the Royal Households of the United Kingdom. There are two officers, the senior being the Astronomer Royal dating from 22 June 1675; the junior is the Astronomer Royal for Scotland dating from 1834. The post ...

, to adjust a compass for the effect of an iron hull. The adjustments were not particularly effective, with the result that the ship's compass performed poorly throughout its career.

China

''Nemesis'' arrived off the coast of China in late 1840, although when she set sail from

Liverpool Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a popul ...

it was publicly intimated that she was bound for

Odessa Odesa (also spelled Odessa) is the third most populous city and municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. The city is also the administrativ ...

to keep the voyage a secret. A British officer wrote that the outbreak of the

"was considered an extremely favourable opportunity for testing the advantages or otherwise of iron steam-vessels." She first saw action in the

Second Battle of Chuenpi The Second Battle of Chuenpi () was fought between British and Chinese forces in the Pearl River Delta, Guangdong province, China, on 7January 1841 during the First Opium War. The British launched an amphibious attack at the Humen strait (Bog ...

on 7January 1841 against the Chinese fleet at the

Bocca Tigris The Humen, also Bocca Tigris or Bogue, is a narrow strait in the Pearl River Delta that separates Shiziyang in the north and Lingdingyang in the south near Humen Town in China's Guangdong Province. It is the site of the Pearl River's discharge ...

forts. In the

Battle of First Bar The Battle of First Bar was fought between British and Chinese forces at First Bar Island and its surrounding area in the Pearl River, Guangdong province, China, on 27 February 1841 during the First Opium War. Background On 21 February 1841 ...

(27 February), ''Nemesis'' sank ''

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

'', an old, but re-armed

East Indiaman East Indiaman was a general name for any sailing ship operating under charter or licence to any of the East India trading companies of the major European trading powers of the 17th through the 19th centuries. The term is used to refer to vesse ...

that the Chinese had purchased. Due to ''Nemesis''s shallow draught, ''Nemesis'' was able to move through shallow water during the

Broadway expedition The Broadway expedition was a British military expedition that explored the Broadway River (present-day Xi River) in Guangdong province, China, on 13–15 March 1841 during the First Opium War. The river was also called the ''Inner Passage'' or ...

on 13–15 March and aided in the capture of Canton on 18 March. Based in Chusan, she also saw action at Taisam in February 1842, in a successful skirmish associated with repulse of a much larger Chinese attack on Ningbo.

Later career

After the First Opium War, ''Nemesis'' was tasked with the suppression of pirates near

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

and the

Philippines The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no), * bik, Republika kan Filipinas * ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas * cbk, República de Filipinas * hil, Republ ...

. She then operated from Bombay, chiefly to Karachi. Around the end of 1846 as a result of mob rioting in Canton which had started in July, she was posted by Sir John Davis to cover the

factory A factory, manufacturing plant or a production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. T ...

there. She was then withdrawn before February 1847, despite protests from traders. In May 1847 she attacked a flotilla of Sooloo pirate prows in the

Brunei river The Brunei River ( ms, Sungai Brunei) is a river which flows through Brunei and empties into the Brunei Bay towards the north-east direction. The Istana Nurul Iman, the official residence of the Sultan of Brunei, stands on its banks. The Brunei ...

Borneo Borneo (; id, Kalimantan) is the third-largest island in the world and the largest in Asia. At the geographic centre of Maritime Southeast Asia, in relation to major Indonesian islands, it is located north of Java, west of Sulawesi, and eas ...

. In early 1853, she helped the company's steamer ''Zenobia'' expel Burmese troops from Bassein province. She sailed from Shanghai on 1 February 1854, bound for Belfast.

Laird Brothers Cammell Laird is a British shipbuilding company. It was formed from the merger of Laird Brothers of Birkenhead and Johnson Cammell & Co of Sheffield at the turn of the twentieth century. The company also built railway rolling stock until 1929, ...

displayed a model of the H.E.I.C. "Nemesis" (1839) at the 1893 Chicago Exhibition.

References

Notes

External links

{{Commons category, Nemesis (ship, 1839), Nemesis
The ''Nemesis'' – Great Britain's Secret Weapon in the Opium Wars, 1839–60
*
Narrative of the Voyages and Services of the Nemesis from 1840 to 1843
' by W. D. Bernard at

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a Virtual volunteering, volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the ...

1839 ships First Opium War ships of the United Kingdom Ships built on the River Mersey Ships of the British East India Company