Why steam cruisers still carried sailing rigs

The fully rigged HMS Warspite challenges an easy visual assumption about Victorian steam warships. Royal Navy accounts indicate that sail remained partly because coal supply was unreliable on distant stations, rather than because the machinery itself was necessarily unreliable. A later exchange allows that the low efficiency of contemporary engines also contributed in some cases while machinery was improving. The rig was an awkward and increasingly unsatisfactory answer that reflected the logistics of worldwide deployment. A feature that looks technically obsolete may have been retained to solve a range and supply problem.