A 2,770 ton screw corvette, designed by Nathaniel Barnaby. The last of a line of 11 “protected cruisers” of the Comus class, she was always intended for service in the Pacific and Australian waters, and so was deliberately designed with a full ‘barque’ sailing rig, since the availability of fuel away from British shores could not be guaranteed. She was some 235 feet in length (between perpendiculars) and 44 feet 6 inch in extreme breadth. Launched by Lady Phipps Hornby on June 24th 1884 and commissioned in 1887, her design was optimised for distant cruising service, with a fouling-resistant coppered steel hull. She had - for their time - relatively powerful engines made in London by J. and G. Rennie, a famous firm of marine and heavy engineers. The engines could develop 3,000 horse power providing a speed of thirteen and three-quarter knots, or under a forced draught, nearly fifteen.

The propeller was driven by those two engines being supplied with steam from no less than six boilers and furnaces. The engines were “double-expansion” reciprocating units arranged “in-tandem” on the shaft, and had a design horsepower some 600 more than other ships of her class. Calliope was fortunate in being the eleventh and last of the class which included Champion, Cleopatra, Carysfort, Conquest, Curacoa, Constance, Cordelia, Canada and Calypso in addition to the class leader Comus, and benefited from a number of improvements as the ships were built over the period 1875 to 1884. Known variously as "C class cruisers", "armoured cruisers" and "protected cruisers" the ships were really a smaller derivative of the Shannon, the first British armoured cruiser of the Royal Navy. Fred T. Jane (author of Jane’s Fighting Ships) ascribes Calliope as Comus class, though most other reference sources seem to call her the second of the Calypso class. All eleven vessels are difficult to distinguish.

The transverse frames were iron, but the hull was designed in steel, that is the skin plating, transverse bulkheads, longitudinal skeleton, and so on. The hull was encased either side in wood, and her bottom was sheathed in a copper alloy to resist the attentions of fouling, and so reduce the need for prolonged stays in dry dock. More precisely, the material was known as "Muntz Metal", a mixture of copper and zinc. The teredo, known as shipworm but technically a mollusc, was an absolute scourge to wooden vessels in the tropics. Her bow, confidently jutting forward like the set and prominent chin of some powerful boxer, carried an enormous brass forging underwater ram, and a similar material was used for her stern and body posts. The bow led into graceful hull lines which were interrupted only by gun port sponsons, to lead to the curved stern overhanging her single large screw.She was provided with four 6 inch breech-loaders on sponsons 2 on each side fore and aft, twelve 5 inch breech-loaders mounted on Vavasseur carriages on the upper deck, six quick-firing Nordenfelt and four Gardner guns. The largest projectile weighed some 100 pounds, and required a 42 pound powder charge. The "6 Inch B.L. Mark I", a 6 inch Bore, Breech Loading gun, was first fitted to H.M.S. Rover in around 1880. The Mk. II was introduced on a large number of ships a little later, including the Comus class. The Mk. II 6” Bore had a length of 26 calibres, weighed 4 tons and a muzzle velocity of 1,672 feet per second for its 100 lb shell. Calliope also carried six torpedoes which could be despatched from a single tube located on each side of the ship.

HMS Calliope left Britain on 1st March 1887 for her first commissioning cruise and the China Station by way of the Cape of Good Hope and Singapore. Her Captain was Henry Coey Kane, an Irishman, the son of the famous scientist Sir Robert Kane. Born 1843, Captain Kane had a distinguished career in the Royal Navy, having been wounded during the Sudan Campaign, and had received consistent praise from their Lordships. Click the image to view a photograph of Kane and his officers on the deck of HMS Calliope. Detached by special request to the Australia Station, the vessel was eventually sent to Samoa to relieve HMS Royalist and continue the Royal Navy’s presence in the deteriorating political climate which, until the hurricane intervened, had seemed destined to pit German and American naval units against each other in what might easily have become the first world war.