HMS Nile (1888)

HMS Nile was a battleship of the Royal Navy of the Victorian era, a ship of the Trafalgar class, and the only sister-ship of HMS Trafalgar.

She was the last British battleship to be completed with a single citadel; all subsequent capital ships had separate citadels fore and aft. Also, she was the first British battleship to mount a secondary armament of quick-firing guns - guns in which the charge and shell are combined together in a cartridge which is loaded as a single unit. She was originally designed to mount eight 5-inch breech-loaders as her secondary armament, but the marginally smaller 4.7 in guns were substituted in January 1890 when their superiority over the breech-loaders became clear. The quick-firers were able to fire, on tests, ten rounds per gun in one minute and twenty seconds; a rate some four times faster than the breech-loaders they replaced. As it was accepted at the time that hits from any calibre gun of 4 in or more could be expected to disable a torpedo-boat or a destroyer (formerly known as torpedo-boat destroyers), it was apparent that a rate of fire, and an assumed rate of hitting, four times greater, had to relate to a superior anti-torpedo armament.

Service history
She ran her trials in July 1890, in ballast as her guns and mountings had at that time not been delivered. After delivery, she was commissioned at Portsmouth on 30 June 1891 for manoeuvres, following which she joined the Mediterranean Fleet. In January 1898, she came home to become the port guardship at Devonport. In February 1903, she was relegated to the Reserve, where she remained until she was sold on 9 July 1912.