Brittania Waives the Rules

TFSmith has the following to say about the British merchant marine:

Part of the reason was the rapid obsolescence of the early steamers; by 1860, less than half of those registered in the previous four decades, some 929 in total (excluding river steamers) were actually in service. Some of the best known pioneering steamships – Cunard’s Brittania [sic] of 1840, for example, the line’s first in regular trans-Atlantic service, and retired in 1849 – were already gone, lost, hulked, or sold overseas. A few of these older ships were still available - through purchase or repair - for British naval and mercantile needs in the war, but the mass of the steam merchant fleet in 1861-62 were the thousand or so most modern ships, built within the previous decade and both wooden- and steam-hulled [sic], and both screw and paddle.

These ships, as important as they were to Britain’s trade, were also of tremendous importance to the Royal Navy – the ships themselves were by far the most useful auxiliaries available, for service as troopers, dispatch vessels, and potentially as cruisers themselves to help convoy both merchant and military shipping and thicken the British blockade of the United States. 

This section appears twice: firstly in Chapter 9 Part 1, where it is suggested to be an excerpt from Chapter 18 of Irene Musicant's Contested Waters, and secondly in Chapter 11 Part 2, where it is stated to be an excerpt from Chapter 20 of the same work. Regular readers will be wholly unsurprised that Irene Musicant copied and pasted yet another section of text from one of her chapters into another.

However, there is more wrong in this section than the copying and pasting - more even than the fact that RMS Britannia's name is spelt wrong in both sections, an error which made it into the second version of BROS and which TFSmith committed with surprising frequency for a supposedly educated man. We are told that Britannia retired in 1849: this is a lie. Britannia was sold to the German Confederation, and was made the flagship of its newly-formed Reichsflotte. In 1852, when the Confederation's ambitions were curbed, she was transferred to the Prussian Navy and was eventually broken up in 1880.

This is by no means 'retirement,' and the details are available for all to see on Wikipedia - a source which we well know TFSmith uses. We can, therefore, only conclude that TFSmith lied about the ship's fate because it would be inconvenient to acknowledge how well these ships would convert to military vessels. In fact, all five of the Britannia-class which survived long enough to be sold became warships: Britannia and Acadia with the German Confederation, Caledonia and Hibernia for the Spanish navy, and Cambria with the Italian Navy. The latter was sold only in 1860, serving until 1880, while Hibernia was on active service until lost in 1868.

TFSmith also neglects to note that the replacements for these ships (six America-class vessels) entered service in 1848 and were still in service as of 1862, which rather deflates his point about 'the mass of the steam fleet' having been 'built within the previous decade' - as if the British merchant fleet being up-to-date was a flaw in the first place. This latter points contrasts sharply with his treatment of the Russian fleet in Chapter 14 Part 1:

By 1863, with the old ships that had been kept in commission during the 1854-56 war struck off, the fleets were largely modern steam screw vessels, to the numbers of three steam ships of the line, eight steam frigates, and more than 30 modern steam corvettes and ocean-going gunboats.

Clearly, then, having modern ships is an advantage for the Russian navy, but a disadvantage for the British merchant marine.

There is, however, a more significant point illustrated by this class of ships. Unlike US merchant ships, drafted into service during the Civil War because of the parlous state of the Union navy and the limited capacity of Northern steam shipbuilding, these ships were good enough to serve in the regular peacetime navies of European powers. Both the length of their service and the value placed on them is a credit to their builders, and an indication of how valuable they would have been in wartime. As we are told, the British could potentially use these merchant ships as cruisers - and, given the success of Union commerce raiding efforts, there is a clear need for more cruising warships - as well as on the blockade. With British trade evidently paralysed by the war, these ships would have nothing to do. So how frequently do we see such auxiliary warships in the TL?

Never. In Burnished Rows of Steel, there is not a single mention by name of a blue-water auxiliary warship commissioned into the Royal Navy. By contrast, the Union navy overflows with auxiliary warships, whether named - such as USS California, Panama and Oregon from Chapter 7 Part 2 and USS Vanderbilt, Rhode Island, and Santiago de Cuba from Chapter 9 Part 1 - or enumerated, such as the 12 unnamed merchant commerce raiders operating in the Pacific in Chapter 7 Part 2, or the 8-13 unnamed commerce raiders operating in the Atlantic in Chapter 9 Part 1.

This is yet another of the tricks that TFSmith uses to worsen the British position- commissioning auxiliary warships into the Union Navy by the score, while leaving the more modern and capable British merchant fleet to sit idle. However, TFSmith has a more insidious trick up his sleeve- a trick which we will reveal shortly.