Napier's wise recommendations went largely unheeded, perhaps because they were the opinions of the British admiralty's bete noir. No armoured floating batteries would be available for the 1855 Baltic season. The new British fleet commander was Rear Admiral Dundas - no, not he sacked from the Crimea, booted upstairs - though nothing would surprise me from their Lordships, class of 1855 - but a coincidental namesake, whose father had been First Lord of the Admiralty - gosh, an even greater coincidence. The British fleet which set sail once more in March to blockade the Russian Baltic ports totalled 81 vessels. The majority British contingent consisted of 20 ships of the line carrying at least 60 guns (19 screw and one sail), 14 frigates, 12 small steamers, 21 steam gunboats and 15 mortar boats. They would be joined at the beginning of June by a French squadron under Contre (=Rear) Admiral Penaud, composed of 3 ships of the line, 3 frigates and 10 small gunboats.
As Jellicoe and Beatty were to find a couple of generations later, it's all very praiseworthy doing a great job keeping the enemy fleet bottled up, but the public at large wanted to see allied ships destroying the Russian fleet, or at least making their port defences crumble. The British press were not backward with unkindly and rather unfair sarcasm. There was a major difference between our two main fleets, they wrote. The Black Sea Fleet was expected to do everything, but did nothing; the Baltic Fleet was expected to do nothing, and did so. Kronstadt, the fortress guarding the capital St Petersburg, was the name every one knew, and Dundas made a beeline for it. Captain Bartholemew Sulivan (yes, just the one l) was the Fleet Surveying Officer, and he had been sent out earlier to reconnoitre the position at both Kronstadt and Sveabourg. He reported that both fortresses could be taken by the navy without army help. This might have been a true estimate, or it might have been coloured by inter service rivalry - who knows.
What is certain is that Sulivan changed his tune when the fleet got close to Kronstadt. He discovered 34 steam powered gunboats which he hadn't reported before, and he noticed that the entrance to the harbour had been heavily mined. It would be an extremely hazardous task to try to sweep the mines under the eyes of the shore batteries. Ironically, his vessel. the Merlin was the first to set one off - J W Carmichael, artist for the Illustrated London News, was on board and he sketched the blast damage in the Engineer's Mess for posterity. These early mines were not capable of sinking a vessel - the greatest danger was when the curious tried to fish them out of the water. In a shining example of crass irresponsibility, Rear Admiral Seymour and Captain Lewis were quite seriously hurt during a personal initiative minehunt, when one blew up as they were lifting it into their whaler.
