page_title: Fort Rinella
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Fort Rinella / History
caption_attribution_description: Armstrong-Cannon on Malta
context_page_description: Rinella Battery is a Victorian battery in Kalkara, Malta. It is commonly referred to as Fort Rinella, although it was never classified as a fort while in use. It contains one of two surviving Armstrong 100-ton guns.
context_section_description: The British built the battery between 1878 and 1886 above the shore east of the mouth of Grand Harbour, between Fort Ricasoli and Fort St. Rocco.
  The battery was built to contain a single Armstrong 100-ton gun: a 450 mm rifled muzzle-loading (RML) gun made by Elswick Ordnance Company, the armaments division of the British manufacturing company Armstrong Whitworth. The battery is one of a pair; however, the gun on the paired Cambridge Battery near Tigné Point, west of Grand Harbour, no longer exists. The British installed a second pair of 100-ton guns to defend Gibraltar, mounting one each in Victoria Battery (1879) and Napier of Magdala Battery (1883), which  did not have Rinella's self-defence capabilities. Only two 100-ton guns survive; one at Rinella Battery, and one at Napier of Magdala Battery.
  The British felt the need for such large guns as a response to the Italians having, in 1873, built the battleships Duilio and Dandolo with 22 inches of steel armour and four 100-ton Armstrong guns per vessel.  By arming both Gibraltar and Malta, the British were seeking to ensure the vital route to India through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, which had opened to traffic in 1869.
  The fort is modest in size as it was designed to operate and protect the single large gun, with its associated gun crew, magazines, bunkers, support machinery and the detachment of troops stationed within the fort to defend the installation.
  The gun was mounted en barbette on a wrought-iron sliding carriage and gun fired over the top of the parapet of the emplacement. This enabled the gun-crew to handle and fire the gun without exposing themselves to enemy fire. The fort was designed to engage enemy warships at ranges up to 7,000 yards. The low profile of the fort and the deeply buried machinery rooms and magazines were intended to enable it to survive counterfire from capital warships.
  The fort has no secondary armament; its fortifications - simply ditches, caponiers, a counter-scarp gallery and firing points - were intended mostly for small arms fire and grenades.
  The massive gun is far too heavy to be laid by hand, and the fort therefore contained a steam powered hydraulic system that traversed, elevated and depressed the gun, operated a pair of hydraulic powered loading and washing systems, and powered the shell lifts that moved the 2,000-pound shells and 450-pound black-powder charges from the magazines into the loading chambers.
  The gun was intended to operate at a rate of fire of a single shell every six minutes. The firing cycle was for the gun to be traversed and depressed until it aligned with one of loading the casemates, with the barrel pushing aside an iron plate that normally closed the aperture in the casemate. The gun was then flushed with water to cool it, clean any debris and deposit from the barrel, and douse any remaining embers from the previous cartridge. The ramming mechanism then inserted and tamped a silk cartridge containing the propellant charge, which was followed by one of the range of shells the gun was adapted to fire. The loaded gun was then traversed and elevated using the hydraulic system, and fired by an electrical firing mechanism. The gun then slewed to the other casemate to repeat the loading process, while the first casemate was recharged from the deeper magazine.
  The two separate loading casemates, each fed by an independent magazine, and the provision of man-powered backup pumps for the hydraulic system, such that a team of 40 men could maintain the hydraulic pressure to operate the gun, would have allowed the fort to continue firing even if substantially damaged.
  Originally the inner faces of the emplacement were revetted with masonry. Subsequent review of the fort's defences after its completion identified this as a weakness, and the stone revetting was removed from most of the emplacement and replaced with plain earthworks, presumably to better absorb the energy of incoming shellfire. The revetting was retained around the loading casemates.
  The 100-ton gun arrived in Malta from Woolwich on 10 Septembe
caption: The 100 Ton Armstrong Gun
exif: {"Image Make": "FUJIFILM", "Image Model": "FinePix F440", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Digital Camera FinePix F440    Ver2.10", "Image DateTime": "2006:09:18 12:54:33", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image Copyright": "", "Image ExifOffset": "294", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 50, 53, 48, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1294", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9707", "Thumbnail YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/170", "EXIF FNumber": "91/10", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "80", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2006:09:18 12:54:33", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2006:09:18 12:54:33", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "13/5", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "37/5", "EXIF ApertureValue": "32/5", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "871/100", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "10", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1600", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1200", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "1146", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "2777", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "2777", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "3", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Custom", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}