ABSTRACT
Three years after the aborted naval assault in 1859, Captain Richard S. Hewlett of HMS Excellent wrote to Admiral Sir William Bowles, the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth dockyard, confirming the need to organize a small force of Gun Boats and to exercise them outside the Harbour. Massing gunboats as precision instruments carried its own tactical drawbacks, for even the advanced British Flatiron Rendel gunboats of 1867 were susceptible to the rolling motion of the slightest sea which made them fairly unstable weapons platforms. Sulivan was nevertheless, excited at the prospect of employing the new untried British ironclad batteries in the shallow channel north of Cronstadt; to ward off Russian gunboats while protecting both attempts to blow up a passage in the obstructions and move the British gunboats in close enough to screen the mortar vessels themselves. The last and perhaps most important component of Sullivan’s proposed assault on Cronstadt’s combined defences were thus the new shallow-draught, ironclad batteries.
