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The Livadia was an imperial yacht of the House of Romanov built in 1879–1880 to replace a yacht of the same name that had sunk off the coast of Crimea in 1878. The new Livadia, intended for service on the Black Sea, was a radically novel ship conceived by Vice Admiral Andrey Popov, designed by naval architect Erast Gulyaev and built by John Elder & Co. of Govan on Clyde. The Livadia continued Popov's line of circular ships although this time Popov sacrificed geometrical perfection for seagoing capabilities. She had a beam of 153 ft (47 m) against overall length of only 259 ft (79 m). An extreme example of tumblehome architecture, she sported a conventionally shaped superstructure mounted on a wide, flat-bottomed, turbot-shaped submerged hull or pontoon.
The Livadia left Greenock on October 3 with Popov, Tideman, Edward James Reed and William Houston Stewart on board. She safely reached Brest on October 7, where she picked up General Admiral of the Imperial Navy Grand Duke Constantine. On October 8 the Livadia sailed into the Bay of Biscay and was soon caught in a violent storm. According to Reed, sailing straight into the storm to test the ship was Constantine's idea and that no Russian dared to argue. Waves of six to seven meters failed to upset the Livadia: transverse roll did not exceed 3.5 degrees, longitudinal pitch was within 5.5 degrees. Stewart praised the comfort of the Livadia: "I never was in so comfortable a ship at sea in a gale of wind ... the absence of rolling, the easiness of motion, the great comfort on board, and the handiness of steering, were such as I have never seen before in any other ship under similar circumstances of weather and sea".
However, the crew was alarmed by the thunder-like sound of the waves slamming against her flat bottom. Reed and Vogak wrote that at times it sounded as if the ship had hit a hard rock. Around 10 a.m. of the next day the hull cracked, the space between inner and outer bottoms was flooded, and Vogak rushed his ship to a safe anchorage in Ferrol. The divers discovered a five-meter-long dent and numerous cracks in the fore segment of the hull which were ultimately blamed on waves. Popov concurred and admitted his failure "to foresee the effects of shallow draft". He wrote that the damage had dual mechanism: first, when the flat pontoon pitched above the waves, gravity subjected it to an enormous stress, bending the whole structure down. Next, as it plummeted down, the flat bottom hit water head-on, rupturing the rivets and tearing off the crossbeams. Reed noted that the radial framing pattern chosen by the designers resulted in a strong center section and inadequately weak extremities, and that any experienced shipbuilder should have discovered this weakness in advance.
The Livadia could have been quickly repaired in a drydock, but none of world's docks was wide enough for her. The new drydock in Nikolaev, designed by Clark Stanfield specifically for the battleship Novgorod and the other popovkas, had not yet been expanded to fit the Livadia. Moored in Ferrol, Spain, for seven months, she became an easy prey for the journalists. The New York Times ridiculed the Livadia, her designers and her crowned patron: instead of blowing up the Livadia, the "nihilists" designed her, for it was hardly possible to conceive a worse ship. According to the anonymous satirist she was "a yacht on board of which seasickness would be wholly unnecessary", "a Nihilist device that no Nihilist would dream of destroying." Instead of hunting terrorists, "the English and Russian Police should seize the designer of the Livadia and hang him on the spot." In November the newspaper changed its attitude, this time praising the Livadia for her stability on the high seas; the speed attained by "an enormous iron turtle" impressed the reporter who suggested that the Livadia "may possibly lead to considerable changes in the art of ship-building."
According to the New York Times, on December 10 the Russians dispatched 83 men to assist repairs on the Livadia while still entertaining plans to build a 12,000-ton Livadia-style armed ironclad. Repairs proceeded slowly, and the Livadia left Ferrol only on May 7 1881 [O.S. April 26]. The Livadia, captained by Vice Admiral Ivan Shestakov, proceeded with utmost caution, evading rough waves at all costs. She passed the Bosphorus on June 7 1881 [O.S. May 26] and reached Sebastopol on the next day. She made 3,890 miles in 381 hours, consuming more than 2,900 tons of coal. Shestakov reported easy steering, perfect stability and good build quality of the Livadia but advised against using her as a royal yacht until further tests could attest to her safety for Black Sea operations.
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Laid down: 1879 (Official ceremony: March 25, 1880)
Launched: June 25, 1880
Commissioned: September 30, 1880
Decommissioned:
1883 (hulked as Opyt)
1926 (written off)
Fate: Scrapped
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