Arapiles was 280 feet (85.3m) long at the waterline, had a beam of 52feet 2inches (15.9m) and a draft of 17 feet (5.2m). The ship displaced3,441 long tons (3,496t). She had a single trunk steam engine that drove the propeller using steam provided by six boilers that exhausted through a single funnel. The engine was designed to produce a total of 2,400 indicated horsepower (1,790kW) which gave the ship a speed of 8 knots (15km/h; 9.2mph).[1] For long-distance travel, Arapiles was fitted with three masts and ship rigged.[2]
The ship was armed with two Armstrong10-inch (254mm) and five 8-inch (203mm)rifled muzzle-loading guns as well as ten 68-poundersmoothbore guns.[3] Sources differ on the exact thicknesses and extent of her wrought-iron armor, but agree that it ranged from three to five inches (76 to 127mm) in thickness.[2]
The Spanish government authorized the construction of Arapiles on 10April 1861 as a 4,478-ton wooden screw frigate with a steam engine rated at a nominal 800 horsepower (597kW).[4] It signed a contract for the ship's construction on 15April 1861 with the British firm Green.[4] Green laid her keel at its shipyard at Blackwall in London, England, on 1June 1861.[4] A year later, the Spanish government decided to reorder her an ironclad warship,[4] and her conversion into an ironclad began in August 1862[5] when roughly 200 long tons (203t) of armor was added to her hull.[6] The Spanish government signed a contract for the conversion with Green on 10January 1863,[4] and the ship was launched on 17October 1864.[5][4] One source claims she was completed in 1865,[5] but another notes that her construction encountered numerous delays due to shortages of labor and construction materials, Spain's economic difficulties, and an embargo the United Kingdom placed on Spain during the Chincha Islands War.[4]Arapiles finally was handed over to a Spanish delegation in the United Kingdom on 14 September 1868.[4] Her total construction cost was 6,601,672 pesetas.[4]
Service history
On 6December 1868, Arapiles got underway from the United Kingdom for her delivery voyage to Spain.[4] In 1870 she began an assignment to the Mediterranean Squadron.[4] When Amadeo of Savoy, the future KingAmadeo I of Spain, arrived in Spain at Cartagena on 30December 1870, he visited Arapiles.[4]
After the Kabyle people took advantage of French weakness during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 by beginning an uprising in French Algeria and killing most of the inhabitants of the town of Palestro, some of them Spanish, Arapiles departed Barcelona on 3May 1871 and arrived in Algiers on 4May to defend Spanish interests.[4] Her arrival calmed the fears of the Spanish population of Algeria.[4]
In 1872 Arapiles began a deployment to the Caribbean, relieving the armoured frigate Zaragoza at Havana in the Captaincy General of Cuba,[4] where Spanish Empire forces had been fighting the Cuban Liberation Army in the Ten Years War since 1868. While on an anti-piracy patrol along the coast of Venezuela that year, she ran aground at Puerto Cabello, sustaining serious damage which left her at risk of losing her propeller.[4] She proceeded to Fort-de-France on Martinique for repairs.[4] The propeller was removed and the hole was plugged at Fort-de-France, but otherwise the damage was too great to be repaired in Martinique.[4] The Spanish Navy decided to send her to New York City in the United States for repairs, but the northerly winds that prevailed at that time of year made the passage too dangerous.[4] Instead, Arapiles put into Guantánamo, Cuba, in the autumn of 1872 to await more favorable weather in the spring of 1873.[4]
On 8May 1873 Arapiles finally departed Guantánamo in company with the paddlegunboatIsabel la Católica for the voyage to New York City.[4] She made half the voyage under tow by Isabel la Católica and the other half under sail.[4] The two ships arrived at New York City on 26May 1873,[4] and Arapiles entered drydock at the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn, New York, for repairs. As tensions between Spain and the United States rose in October and November 1873 during the Virginius Affair, a lighter sank and blocked the drydock's gates.[citation needed] When her repairs were complete, Arapiles departed New York City on 23January 1874 to return to Havana, which she reached on 3February 1874.[4]
Arapiles returned to Spain in 1877.[4] A structural inspection concluded that her wooden hull was not strong enough to support the iron plates attached to it when she was converted during construction into an ironclad.[4] Correction of the problem was deemed prohibitively expensive, so Arapiles was decommissioned on 14November 1878[4] and hulked in 1879.[5] Her boilers were installed in the screw frigateVilla de Madrid, and her steam engines and rigging were also removed and placed in storage at the Arsenal de la Carraca[4] in San Fernando.
An order of 6November 1879 directed that Arapiles be converted into a floating battery, but this conversion never took place because of her bad material condition.[4] She was stricken from the naval register in 1881 and scrapped in 1883.[4]
A bas relief on the side of the statue of Richard Green, who died while she was under construction in his shipyard, commemorates Arapiles. The statue stands outside the Poplar Baths in London.[8]
Lledó Calabuig, José (1998). Buques de vapor de la armada española, del vapor de ruedas a la fragata acorazada, 1834-1885 (in Spanish). Agualarga Editores. ISBN8495088754.
Pérez Crespo, Antonio (1990). El cantón murciano (in Spanish). Murcia, Spain: Academia Alfonso X el Sabio.
Rodríguez González, Agustín Ramón; Coello Lillo, José Luis (2003). La fragata en la Armada española. 500 años de historia (in Spanish). IZAR. Construcciones Navales, S.A.
de Saint Hubert, Christian (1984). "Early Spanish Steam Warships, Part II". Warship International. XXI (1): 21–45. ISSN0043-0374.
Silverstone, Paul H. (1984). Directory of the World's Capital Ships. New York: Hippocrene Books. ISBN0-88254-979-0.
"Spanish Ironclads Tetuan, Mendes Nunes and Arapiles". Warship International. XI (2): 407–408. 1974. ISSN0043-0374.
VV.AA (1999). El Buque en la Armada española (in Spanish). Madrid: Editorial Sílex.
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