numbers of warships that were needed elsewhere, far out of proportion to numbers of raiders. On 12 October 1914 d'Eyncourt reiterated the arguments behind his "Atlantic Cruiser" proposal in a memo to the Board of Admiralty, adding that a fast mixed-fuel design with a large steaming radius would be very helpful for operations in remote areas where oil might not be available. By early 1915 the threat had been neutralized or sunk, but the Royal Navy believed that further commerce-raiding operations were likely. On 9 June the board met to consider specifications for a large light cruiser capable of hunting down commerce raiders anywhere in the world. D'Eyncourt was subsequently requested to submit designs for a ship capable of with at least one-fifth power from coal-fired boilers and an armament of at least ten 6-inch guns. He submitted six sketch designs armed with various mixes of 6-, 7.5- and guns using and hulls. Based on several encounters where the raiders had attempted to flee as soon as they had spotted the cruisers, the board believed that the ship's armament needed to be able to reach out to the visible horizon and be powerful enough to cripple the raider with a single hit. It therefore rejected the 6-inch gun as too short-ranged and lacking in power and the 9.2-inch gun as too few could be mounted on the hull; settling on the 7.5-inch gun in a new mount capable of 30° of elevation to maximise its range and carried on the larger of the two hulls proposed. Description The ships had an overall length of , a beam of and a draught of at deep load. They displaced at standard load and at deep load. The shape of the hull was based on that of the large light cruiser with anti-torpedo bulges covering the engine and boiler rooms. Amidships, the hull had 10° of tumblehome, although the forward portion of the forecastle deck flared outwards to improve seakeeping. The ships had a metacentric height of at deep load. D'Eyncourt claimed that they were so subdivided that they could survive the flooding of two adjacent compartments. Their crew numbered 37 officers and 672 ratings. The Hawkins class were equipped with four geared steam turbine sets, each driving one propeller shaft using steam provided by a dozen Yarrow boilers at a pressure of , distributed between three boiler rooms. The fore and aft