On 27 August 1879, Peruvian Contra Almirante Don Miguel Grau embarked two Lay torpedoes and an operator, and set out in Huáscar to search for Chilean warships. He found the Chilean corvette Abtauo anhored off Antofagasta and attacked. Instead of coming in to ram, as Huáscar had done when sinking the Chilean corvette Esmeralda in an earlier encounter, Grau slewed her broadside on and launched one of his 23ft long (7m) Lay torpedoes. The monster headed for the enemy corvette, to the cheers of the Peruvian onlookers, but before reaching her it turned back and headed directly towards Huáscar, despite all the efforts of the operator to regain control. Luckily a young officer, Teniente Diez Causeco, dived into the water and managed to push the Lay off course so it missed. The errant torpedo was duly recovered and returned in disgrace to Iquique where both were landed.
No doubt this near-fatal malfunction, plus a later failure on 3 January 1881, when the Peruvians had attacked the Huáscar, now in the hands of the Chileans, with another Lay torpedo, was due to the primitive state of electrical technology of the period.
MAKAROV
In the meantime, far away from Latin America, another long-running conflict flared up in the Black Sea, between Imperial Russia and her old enemy the Ottoman Empire, and this time it involved torpedoes. The major Russian player was Captain, later Admiral, Makarov.
On 24 April 1877 Russia declared war on Turkey, claiming the need to protect Christian populations in the Balkans. Captain Makarov arrived at the head of a flotilla at the mouth of the Danube, at the time controlled by the Turks. His ships were armed with towed torpedoes designed by a German, Captain Menzing, with spar torpedoes, and with several Whiteheads. Attacks with Menzing’s towed torpedoes were carried out in May, June and August, and although several torpedoes reached their targets, the electrical firing contacts failed to detonate them. The levers on the Harvey would have not suffered the same problem.
Spar torpedoes were used on three occasions. On the night of 25/26 May 1877, two spar torpedo launches attacked and sank the Turkish monitor Seifi. But following attacks in June failed completely, and in the second attack, on the corvette Idjilalie, Lieutenant Rozhestvensky was lucky to escape with his life. On 27 December 1877 Makarov tried again, this time bringing into action two Whiteheads, one launched from a tube fixed on a raft lashed alongside the Sinope, while the second was secured by ropes beneath the keel of the Tchesma. These strange methods of launching a Whitehead failed to work, one torpedo exploding astern of the target and the second stranding on a beach. Finally, on 25 January 1878 both launch vessels penetrated Batoum harbour and at the short range of 80yds (73m) successfully launched their Whiteheads at the revenue steamer Intikbah, which sank in less than two minutes, taking twenty-three of her crew down with her. The Whitehead had struck its first blow in wartime.
Captain Makarov went on to take part in polar research expeditions, and at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war he was thought of as the most competent Russian naval commander. His death in March 1904 when his flagship Petropavlovsk blew up on a Japanese mine was to plunge the Russian Far East fleet into a deep despair from which it would never recover. Lieutenant Rozhestvensky, for his part, rose to command the Second Baltic Squadron which set off on its journey halfway round the world, to meet its fate at the battle of Tsushima in May 1905.
There was a curious sequel to Makarov’s first attempt with Whiteheads.
WOODS PASHA
The following photograph appears on page 52 of Edwyn Gray’s book, The Devil’s Device, and he describes it as perhaps the earliest photo of Robert Whitehead with his lost 1866 prototype torpedo. Closer inspection will reveal that this is a Whitehead torpedo dating from after the introduction of the contra-rotating propellers, and consequent suppression of the stabilising fins top and bottom, which took place from 1874. The man on the right is too young to be Robert Whitehead in 1877, the most likely date for the photo.
The author suspects that this is in fact a photo of Woods Pasha, the young British officer seconded to the Turkish navy, examining the battered 15in Russian Whitehead launched by Makarov’s men at the Turkish flotilla at Bakoum on 27 December 1877, being the example which ran up on a beach and was captured relatively intact. It was numbered, according to a report in The Times (doubtless written by Woods Pasha himself), either № 250 50 or 255 50. These were part of a batch of Whiteheads supplied to Russia in February 1877. The Turkish flotilla at Bakoum was coincidentally commanded by another Englishman, Hobart Pasha.
In his autobiography Spunyarn, Woods Pasha describes how he opened up the captured Whitehead and examined its mechanism, including the ‘Secret’. He then engaged in negotiations with the Fiume factory, requiring them first to repair the errant torpedo (plus the second example which had lost its warhead); and also to offer a batch of Whiteheads for sale to the Turkish government at a discounted price — all in return for his silence as regards what he had discovered.
Apparently, the battered torpedo was ‘repaired’ — probably by dismantling the internals and mounting them in a new shell with replacement propellers — and was returned to Turkey. There is an entry of such a delivery noted in the factory register in 1878 but with no serial number marked alongside, an omission which occurs nowhere else in the Fiume records. Presumably, it had already appeared in the register under the batch delivered to Russia, and it would have been ‘indiscreet’ to show the Russians’ torpedo redelivered to their enemies the Turks. It seems that the torpedo which had lost its warhead, presumably due to a low-order explosion, was deemed irreparable; probably its air flask had been damaged when the warhead exploded.
For his part, Woods Pasha rose to be in charge of the Turkish navy’s torpedo school, and retired with the rank of admiral.
SPAR TORPEDO SUCCESSES IN THE SINOFRENCH WAR
In 1884 France and China were disputing control of Tonkin, which would later become French Indochina. Admiral Courbet’s fleet attacked the Fujian fleet at Foochow on 23 August. In the action, which resulted in the complete destruction of the Chinese fleet, electrically detonated spar torpedoes were used with success. Torpedo boat № 46 sank the Chinese cruiser Yang Wu, the enemy flagship, while torpedo boat № 45 crippled the sloop Fu Sing, which was later sunk by a spar torpedo carried by an armed pinnace from the French flagship. An attempted Chinese riposte with their own spar torpedoes was driven off in confusion when the French unmasked their searchlights, the first time these projectors had been used in naval warfare.