Hawkins-class cruiser

The Hawkins class was a group of five heavy cruisers built for the Royal Navy during the First World War and named after Elizabethan sea captains; none of them saw service in that war. They were designed to hunt enemy commerce raiders overseas, which called for a large ship with long endurance, and they carried 7.5-inch guns. Power came from four geared steam turbine sets fed by a dozen Yarrow boilers, mostly oil-fired but with four coal-fired boilers in the middle compartment so that cruising fuel could be found in foreign ports where oil was scarce. Harland and Wolff at Belfast built Cavendish, laid down in June 1916 and launched on 17 January 1918, which was renamed Vindictive and finished as an aircraft carrier. She was later converted back to a cruiser, then a training ship and a repair ship, and was scrapped in 1946. The class supplied the model for the maximum cruiser type defined by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.