Seen in a beautiful painting by Mark Myers, the French ironclad Magenta welcomes a British squadron to Cherbourg in 1865. Salutes send a cloud of sulphurous gunsmoke out from her sides as avisos scurry from the flagship to notify shore and naval units. Magenta and her sister Solférino were the only two-decker ironclads of the broadside type. Their construction reflects constraints imposed by the limited capacity of the French ironworking industry, and by the depletion of Europe's shipbuilding-grade timber. France's inability to produce such large ships in iron dictated armor-on-wood construction, as in La Gloire of 1858. Wooden ships cannot safely exceed about 300 feet in length (~91.5 m) because their hulls tend to sag or "hog" under the stress of cutting through the waves.To mount larger numbers of guns to counter the British Warrior and Black Prince on a length under 300 feet, the French design wiz Dupuy de Lôme opted to stack the guns on two gundecks as in the classic "seventy-fours" of the Napoleonic era. Weight and stability constraints made it necessary to limit the armor belt to only the center portion of the hull. The ships were equipped with an enormous beak, an underwater metal ram, as was fashionable at the time -- and nowhere more so than in France. A single fat funnel rose from the main hatch, between the fore and mainmasts. These ships had a short but prominent raised forecastle and a flush afterdeck, rather than the raised quarterdeck generally seen in their 18th-century ancestors. A command bridge with a small enclosed wheelhouse was placed just abaft the funnel -- farther forward than in the Gloire and her sisters. Later in their careers, a small docking bridge was also provided far aft, under the spanker boom; this was not an original feature, however.
The Magenta was constructed at the Brest Dockyard, the Solférino at Lorient; both ships were commissioned in 1862. Impressive-looking as they undoubtedly were, with their towering sides studded with rows of guns and their lethal-looking rams, these two ships compared poorly with the contemporary British broadside ironclads in seaworthiness and protection. On the other hand, the British ships had issues of their own: unhandiness under sail, extreme length, under-powered engines, hull fouling by marine organisms. Many of these issues related to very great length of the Britishers' hulls, which was occasioned by trying to out-do the number of guns mounted on the Magentas and mount them all on a single gundeck. Other issues had to do with the attraction marine organisms feel for iron hulls, leading to the practice of sheathing them outside with layers of wood and copper plate. What these problems point up is that this was a transitional period. As a result there were many awkward features put forward in an attempt to address functionality issues which technology had not yet addressed; gradually over the next 30-40 years, nearly all of these problems were solved by new technological advances.
Magenta was the unfortunate victim of a magazine explosion, which demolished her utterly on October 21, 1875. A fire began in the wardroom and it proved impossible to flood the magazines, so she blew up. It is safe to speculate that little else was talked of in Toulon for many a moon. Her sister Solférino survived until 1882 as a receiving ship, her timbers too worn out for prolonged ocean voyaging.
