Dutch Steam Battery Curacao 1865?

[IroncladNut]

Hi guys,

Has anybody ever heard of this ship? It is not listed in Conway's so I'm assuming it was a paper project or never completed conversion. I was looking through the archive of Dutch Warship Plans (I posted the link in another thread on this forum) and I stumbled upon this ship.

It appears to be a cut-down wooden ship fitted with two turrets of unique design... they aren't quite Coles or Erricson type.

I'd be interested to know if they is any more info out there on this ship? Perhaps what ship she was to be converted from?

I've attached a small photo... the high res scans from the website are much too large.


Thanks

[Pieter]

Curacao was never built. In the 1850s the Dutch Navy (not royal yet: 'Nederlandsche zeemacht' ) made plans to rebuild all wooden ships of the line as ironclad floating batteries ('drijvende batterijen') to defend the many rivers and estuaries in NL. This was tried on the ship of the line Admiraal De Ruyter. It turned out that the result was practically useless. The was no way to get her out to sea without a tug and the deep draft of a ship of the line made her impossible to use the on the rivers and estuaries she was supposed to defend. The navy went for new iron hulled ships instead. Ramtorenschepen (medium sized seagoing turret ships) for seagoing use and shallow draft monitors for the rivers and estuaries. They can be found in the archives under 'pantserschepen' (anything before 1880) and 'monitors' respectively. Curacao's design proposal is interesting though as it shows that the navy was trying out new concepts. The order of the steel turret ship Prins Hendrik der Nederlanden at Laird's happened at roughly the same time (1864/5).