HMS Minerva (1895)
1895 Eclipse-class cruiser
HMS Minerva was an Eclipse-class protected cruiser built for the Royal Navy in the mid-1890s.
Construction and operational history
The ship was laid down at Chatham Dockyard, Kent, on 4 December 1893, and was floated out on 23 September 1895.
Pre-1914
HMS Minerva served in the Channel Squadron after her launch. She again served in the Channel Squadron from March 1901, including as guard ship at Cowes in early 1902. . At the 1901 Census of England and Wales she was recorded as being at Gibraltar with the Training Squadron. She was used in the spring of 1902 for a series of trials to compare her cylindrical boilers with the Belleville boilers of HMS Hyacinth, with the performance of the boilers being compared at various powers in tests in the English Channel, followed by long sea runs to the Mediterranean Sea and back. While the Belleville water-tube boilers of Hyacinth proved to be more efficient than Minerva's cylindrical boilers, and lighter, but on the long runs to and from the Mediterranean, Hyacinth's boilers proved prone to leaks, and suffered a burst boiler tube. The results of these and similar trials led to the use of Belleville boilers in new construction to be stopped.
She took part in the fleet review held at Spithead on 16 August 1902 for the coronation of King Edward VII, and visited the Aegean Sea with other ships of the Channel squadron and Mediterranean Fleet for combined manoeuvres in September and early October 1902, returning to Chatham on 20 October. Captain Doveton Sturdee was appointed in command on 17 October 1902.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMS Minerva (1895)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.