Wanderung 34

HMS Warrior

The Warrior was an 1860 ship, and clearly it represented the transition from the wooden sailing ships of Nelson's day to modern steel warships. The hull and the internal ribs that gave form to the hull were all of iron, and the Warrior even had a double hull to help prevent catastrophic leakage from hull damage. One thing with gears that I just couldn't figure out, turned out to be watertight sliding doors with a geared system for closing or opening them by hand. Just as a stark contrast, the Zuiderdam has an enormous number of doors that are both water and fire proof, and each and every one can be automatically opened or closed from the bridge.

You could see the residual influence of the gun decks from the ship's of Nelson's day, but the Warrior had just one such deck instead of the three gun decks on Nelson's HMS Victory, and that gun deck was in a reinforced iron box. Most of the Warrior's cannons were still smooth bore muzzle loaders just like the Victory's cannons albeit larger. They even "fired" one of the guns for us by putting a percussion cap in the igniter, and then letting a boy and a girl pull the lanyard to set off the cap, which made a surprisingly loug "BANG".

However, at the extreme front and back of the gun deck the Warrior had mounted breech-loading, rifled-bore long range cannons, which were the wave of the future in that they could accurately fire much longer distances. That change ultimately made the side-by-side close-range combat of Nelson's day obsolete, especially when combined with the rotating gun turret that was pioneered on the Union Navy's "Monitor" during the Civil War.

Monika and Linda stayed with Jerry and me for the tour of the top deck and the gun deck of the Warrior, but then they rested while Jerry and I proceeded to take a look a the lower decks. On the deck right below the gun deck we found the living quarters for some of the junior officers and the marines, was well a galley for cooking.

On the lowest deck, Jerry and I found the steam engines, boilers, and coal-stoking areas. The boiler room came complete with small elevators or dumb-waiters for carrying down coal and a small wheelbarrow for ferrying the coal over to each of the stokers who would shovel it in underneath the boilers through small metal doorways. Just like being a fireman on an old-fashioned coal-fired steam locomotive, stoking the boilers on the Warrior was surely hot, dirty, back-breaking work!

The two steam engines in the after part of the deck were absolutely huge. I have just never seen connecting rods the size of a human being and a crankshaft that just had to weigh a ton or more. Although the ship had ten coal-fired boilers, I'm not sure what the horsepower of the engines was and I suspect it was not very much as the Warrior only used the engines in calm seas or to maneuver. Typically when underway on the high seas it was powered by the huge rigging of sails that had apparently not changed since Nelson's day.

To decrease drag, the ship's propeller was raised into the hull when it was under sail power. So when the ship had to convert over to steam power, they had to crank down the rudder into its lowered position and raise the smokestacks to effectively vent the exhaust smoke from the boilers. The terse Naval command to do that conversion was "Up funnel and down screw!", a command that understandably caused much hilarity amongst a ribald crew of sailors isolated at sea for months on end. I had once heard rumors about that command, I now had confirmed it was really used on the Warrior, at least.

Surprisingly, there was a gift shop and even modern bathrooms down in the depths in the aft part of the ship, which Jerry and I told Linda and Monika when we got back up to their deck. But we were all feeling rather weary by that point, so we decided to head back to the Zuiderdam.

But one last thing we did in Portsmouth was to try to locate the Cadbury factory outlet store at one end of the small shopping mall next to the train station. And we did! It was so nice to find another memory of our previous visit to England that had not changed. They even had the same sales on the slightly malformed chocolates from the factory, and this time we bought 2 bags of those to last us a bit longer, plus 2 bags of "All Sorts" assorted licorice and two large Cadbury chocolate bars with fruit and nuts. Score!

We had just enough time to limp back around to the train station and catch the 4:23 train back to Southampton. That train was delayed a bit, so we had over an hour to rest, relax, and use the free on-board Wifi while the train sped back to Southampton. We sat at a table in the middle of the car, and one odd thing that happened was that a British chap sat down right across from us and determinedly tried to chat us up during the journey. I was not sure what his real agenda was, but we just switched to speaking German, which he did not comprehend, and ignored his overly insistent overtures. He regaled our fellow passengers with his life story and his interpersonal travails. Knowing that such behavior is VERY atypical in British society, I suspect there was an ulterior motive, particularly as his 3rd sentence was already about 'How expensive it is to live here'.

The train ride gave us just enough energy to walk an indirect route back to our ship. So we detoured over the the old city gate of Southampton that divides the "Above the Bar" street from "High" street. Back in the Middle Ages, that city gate was in fact barred at sundown, and anybody caught outside just had to wait outside the city walls until the gate was reopened the next morning.

With the help of a map and my old Garmin GPS, we did find out way back to the old gate. Just like I remembered, we found the "Pound Store" on one side of the gate, which still had Toblerone chocolate on sale! But just having bought bags of Cadbury chocolate in Portsmouth we were not too tempted by that. We walked slowly down High Street toward the harbor, stopping off at the shell of the bombed-out old Holyrood church, which is preserved as a WWII memorial just like the bombed-out Nicolaikirche church in Hamburg. War is such a waste.

Jerry and Monika were looking intently for a quiet pub to have a beer, but on High Street all the pubs were sports bars, and since there was a soccer match going on, those pubs were just jam-packed with patrons, many of whom were smoking. That really put us off, so we continued down High Street past the Dolphin Hotel where we had stayed on a previous visit during Ausflug 38.

Turning right at the harbor, we followed the remains of the Medieval city wall a bit and then chanced upon the Old Mill pub that did NOT have large TV screens and had a micro-brewery to boot. boasting that they had the "Best Beer in Southampton". Since they also had space available for us to sit and we could actually get to the bar and order beer, we settled in there quite comfortably with our drinks. For the next hour or so, we used their free Wifi to entertain ourselves.

Monika and Linda cracked on with finding the birth records of Linda's grandmother in Ireland, while Jerry and I just looked on in amazement. Because by cross-checking Irish genealogy sites, emigration manifests, and Ancestry.com records, those two finally DID locate the correct birth records and apparently the correct town or village of origin in Ireland. That was a BIG plus as we intended to drive that way when touring Ireland and find those records if we possibly could.

By now, though, we were all pretty exhausted. After writing down the pertinent info and making copy shots of the critical screens of information, we closed up shop and headed back to the Zuiderdam for the night. Once we were back on board, we dumped our stuff in our cabins and had a final light meal on the Lido deck. Then we immediately turned in for the night as our next stop was the coastal port of Cherbourg, France, and Linda and Jerry had booked an early morning excursion to the D-Day beaches in Normandy there.