Maritime History

HMS Scorpion (1863)

HMS Scorpion was an ironclad turret ship built by John Laird Sons & Company, at Birkenhead, England. She was one of two sister ships secretly ordered from the Laird shipyard in 1862 by the Confederate States of America. Her true ownership was concealed by the fiction that she was being built for the government of Ottoman Egypt. In October 1863, a few months after their launch and before they could be completed, the UK Government seized the two ironclads. In 1864 the Admiralty bought them and commissioned them into the Royal Navy: El Tousson as HMS Scorpion and El Monassir as HMS Wivern. Scorpion had a long career as a guard ship at Bermuda, until she was lost in the North Atlantic in 1903.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸Battle of the River Plate
• ▸Blessed Virgin Mary Cathedral, Bogor
• ▸Kerala backwaters

Uncatalogued shelf

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