HSwMS Sköld
1868 Swedish river monitor
HSwMS Sköld was a small river monitor built for the Swedish Royal Skerry Artillery in the late 1860s. She was equipped with a dual propulsion system, both hand and steam-driven, although the hand-driven portion was removed early in the ship's career due to complaints from the crew. The ship was put into reserve in 1890 and used as a gunnery target in 1907.
Design and description
In 1865 the Navy Minister, Baltzar J. van Platen, persuaded the Riksdag of the Estates to establish the Royal Skerry Artillery as part of the Swedish Army to defend the inner Swedish waters and protect the flanks of Swedish fortresses. This force was to be equipped with ten small monitors to operate in shallow waters that could navigate the Göta Canal system that linked Gothenburg (Swedish: Göteborg) on the west coast to Söderköping on the Baltic Sea.
HSwMS Sköld (Swedish for 'Shield') was the second of these monitors. She was designed by the inventor John Ericsson
and Lieutenant John Christian d'Ailly. The ship measured 31.93 meters (104 ft 9 in) long overall and had a beam of 6.81 meters (22 ft 4 in). She had a draft of 2.31 meters (7 ft 7 in) and displaced 250 metric tons (250 long tons). Her crew initially numbered 40 officers and men, but it was reduced to 29 when the rowing mechanism was removed early in the ship's career.
“HSwMS Sköld” enters the record as 1868 Swedish river monitor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what HSwMS, Sköld and Swedish can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“HSwMS Sköld” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, HSwMS, Sköld and Swedish provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4352743. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1890, 1907 and 1865.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “HSwMS Sköld” 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.