Volage-class corvette
Circa 1892 photograph of HMS Volage, lead ship of the class
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| Class overview | |
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| Name: | Volage class |
| Builders: | Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company, Blackwall, London |
| Operators: |
 Royal Navy
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| Preceded by: | Briton class |
| Succeeded by: | Amethyst class |
| Built: | 1867–1871 |
| Completed: | 2 |
| Scrapped: | 2 |
| General characteristics (as built) | |
| Type: | Iron screw corvette |
| Tonnage: | 2,322 bm |
| Displacement: | 3,078 long tons (3,127 t) |
| Length: | 270 ft (82.3 m) (p/p) |
| Beam: | 42 ft 1 in (12.83 m) |
| Draught: | 21 ft 5 in (6.5 m) |
| Installed power: | 4,130 ihp (3,080 kW) |
| Propulsion: |
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| Sail plan: | Ship rig |
| Speed: | 15 knots (28 km/h; 17 mph) |
| Range: | 2,000 nmi (3,700 km; 2,300 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph) |
| Complement: | 340 |
| Armament: |
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The Volage class was a group of two screw corvettes built for the Royal Navy in the late 1860s. Both ships spent the bulk of their active service abroad. Volage spent most of her first commission assigned to the Detached or Flying Squadron circumnavigating the world and then carried a party of astronomers to the Kerguelen Islands to observe the Transit of Venus in 1874. The ship was then assigned as the senior officer's ship in South American waters until she was transferred to the Training Squadron during the 1880s.
Active served as the commodore's ship on the Cape of Good Hope and West Africa Station and her crew served ashore in both the Third Anglo-Ashanti and Zulu Wars. She was assigned to the Training Squadron in 1885 after a period in reserve. The sisters were paid off in 1898–99 and sold for scrap in 1904 and 1906, respectively.
Sir Edward Reed, the Director of Naval Construction, was tasked to provide a combination of seaworthiness and speed for these ships. He gave the ships a high length-to-beam ratio to increase their speed, but this made the design less manoeuvrable. To offset this, the ends of the ships were narrowed to allow the rudder as much authority as possible even though this reduced buoyancy at the ends of the ship and caused the weights to be concentrated in the middle of the ship. The compromise proved to be successful and the design did not have a large turning circle. Admiral G. A. Ballard considered them to be "a definite step forward in the shipbuilder's art." Ballard considered their only real defect to be unsteadiness as gun platforms as their metacentric height was fairly high, which caused them to roll excessively, and they pitched quite a bit in a head sea due to the lack of buoyancy in the narrow bow. Bilge keels were later installed during one of their refits to curb their rolling motion.
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