HMS Cornwallis was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the Royal Navy. Built to counter a group of fast Russian battleships, Cornwallis and her sister ships were capable of steaming at , making them the fastest battleships in the world. The Duncan-class battleships were armed with a main battery of four guns and they were broadly similar to the s, though of a slightly reduced displacement and thinner armour layout. As such, they reflected a development of the lighter second-class ships of the . Cornwallis was built between her keel laying in July 1899 and her completion in February 1904. After commissioning in 1904, Cornwallis was assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet until 1905, when she was transferred to the Channel Fleet. She stayed there for two years before being moved to the Atlantic Fleet, where she remained until 1909, at which point she returned to the Mediterranean Fleet. In 1912, she was reassigned to the Home Fleet, first to the 4th Battle Squadron and then to the 6th Battle Squadron, where she was stationed at the outbreak of the First World War. The 6th Squadron covered the crossing of the British Expeditionary Force to France in August 1914, and thereafter its ships were transferred to the 3rd Battle Squadron to reinforce the Grand Fleet on the Northern Patrol. In January 1915, Cornwallis was sent to the Mediterranean to take part in the Dardanelles campaign against the Ottoman Empire. She fired the first shots of the campaign on 19 February during a bombardment of Ottoman coastal defences. Over the following two months, she participated in numerous attacks on the forts that failed to destroy them, leading to the decision that a major ground attack would be necessary to neutralise the defences. Cornwallis supported the Landing at Cape Helles on 25 April and shelled Ottoman troops over the following month as the Allied soldiers sought to push further inland. She thereafter served with the Suez Canal Patrol and briefly on the East Indies Station until March 1916, when she returned to the Mediterranean. While on patrol off Malta on 9 January 1917, she was torpedoed and sunk by the German U-boat . Design The six ships of the were ordered in response to the Russian s that had been launched in 1898. The Russian ships were fast second-class battleships, so William Henry White, the British Director of Naval Construction, designed the Duncan class to