In 1839 four gunboats were built for the Honourable East India Company by The Birkenhead Iron Works ( Lairds ). They were the first iron vessels to carry armaments. The NEMESIS being 660 tonnes, a length of 184 feet and a beam of 29 feet had 2 pivot mounted 32 pounder and four 6 pounder guns and a rocket launcher. She was the first warship to have watertight bulkheads, she was powered by steam and sail and was built in 3 months.
The Nemesis first saw action in the first Anglo-Chinese war, known as the First Opium War... Her captain was William Hutcheon Hall and she had a crew of 90, The Chinese referred to her as the Devil ship, being flat bottomed she could navigate the shallowest of rivers and mud flats and engage all targets.Later in her service she kept pirates at bay in the Philippines and Indonesia.
Last edited by bert1; 15th Mar 201012:06pm.
God help us, Come yourself, Don't send Jesus, This is no place for children.
Bert, that pic is fantastic, is it the nemesis and who did it. Do you know what was the fate of this steamer. it chased pirates up the irriwadi and helped lord jim but then it disappears...
It is the Nemesis, taken from a Cammell Laird publication 'Our first 150 years' The original painting might be in the Williamson art gallery someone might have info on that. What happened to her? information seems thin on the ground there doesn't appear to be any newspaper reports that she was sank or anything drastic like that, perhaps she just peacefully went to scrap.
God help us, Come yourself, Don't send Jesus, This is no place for children.
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. ~Chief Seattle
thanks Fella's yeah Bert reckon your right. Last I can chase her is when she was helping lord Jim and chasing the Malay pirates.1852 seems to be when the story ends says she was sold and thats that.some ship,
Its not on line but the nemesis story is featured in the latest edition of the merseysider magazine, quite a few good interesting facts are mentioned however there is no mention of when she ended her days and where
The final fate of the Nemesis is still uncertain. She appears in the annual returns of vessels of the Indian Navy (formerly the Bengal Marine) for 1858 and 1860, but in the latter list appears to be no longer armed, suggesting that she had been reduced to the role of transporting troops and supplies. The latest reference to her I've been able to track down is in April 1863, when the General Abstract Account of Naval and Marine Charges of India includes £3,484 for "pay of the Commander and Crews of the steamer Nemesis in Burma".
There are numerous mentions of a steamer Nemesis up to 1894 in the papers I have available, is it the same one (previously a gunboat) or was there others.
There were a number of other steamers named Nemesis, most notably a passenger/cargo vessel owned by P&O which regularly voyaged to India in the late 1800s; she was built in 1857 and broken up in 1891. To add to the confusion there was also a small wooden Government steamer built in India in 1856 that crops up in local records. In the Indian Navy List references for 1858 and 1860, however, the listed tonnage and engine horsepower details seem to match those given in earlier records for the Laird's-built Nemesis, suggesting that they refer to the same vessel. The Nemesis in the 1901 wreck report (ON 82666) was a cargo steamer built in 1880 by Turnbulls of Whitby: she went missing in July 1904 whist on a voyage from Newcastle, New South Wales, to Melbourne.
Stop Press: I have been doing a little more research on the Nemesis and may have discovered a brief reference to her ultimate fate. The issue of Allen’s Indian Mail (a London-produced newspaper that was compiled from the official mails that arrived in this country from India and the Far East) dated 2nd April 1855 carries a small item noting that “The steamer Nemesis has been condemned, and her boilers and machinery are to be taken out and kept for some other vessel”. This would fit with the record of a new Government steamer being built in India in 1856 with the same name, possibly utilising the original Nemesis’s machinery which was presumably fairly new and therefore still serviceable.(Engines and boilers on these early steam vessels had to be regularly replaced because of corrosion, particularly if they operated in the Tropics.)
It was also fit in with what we know about the Nemesis’s much less famous near-sister ship the Phlegethon. She was launched at Laird’s on 30th May 1840 and followed the Nemesis out to China via the Cape (thereby presumably becoming the second iron vessel to sail south of the equator, the Nemesis being the first) to take part in the Anglo-Chinese War of 1841-1843. Like the Nemesis she was subsequently employed in anti-piracy operations in the Malay Straits and Borneo, before eventually being deployed in Burma in the early 1850s. According to Allen’s Indian Mail the Phlegethon was also condemned in 1855 and converted into a receiving vessel for the Bombay and Bengal Marine. So it would seem that these iron steamers had a useful life of about 15 years, at least in tropical waters, before they were no longer considered fit for active service.
The main problem is that the Nemesis and Phlegethon fell under the administration of the Bengal Marine and it appears that all of their records were kept in Calcutta. The only documents that regularly came over to this country were the Annual Returns of expenditure, etc, submitted to Parliament, which means that anyone wishing to research the vessels properly would probably have to visit India to see what if anything survives. Of course, much about her early career can now be read in several accounts available online on Google Books such as here or here, for which I suppose we should be grateful.
well done Marty and Bert history detectives par excellence.It would be wonderful to have a keepsake of some description of these grand old warhorses, looks like they were skinned and either rotted or rusted away. there's probably an old compass or some-such , somewhere,you never know something may turn up one of these days.by the way there is a model of the nemesis in the Hong Kong maritime museum but it doesn't look very detailed from what I can see. what do you reckon about the coincidence of the giant Chinese supermarket being built on the exact site of the original Birkenhead iron works with the connivance of peel?Surely too much of a coincidence, them Chinese have long memories.
