SMS Amazone (1843)
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| Ship data | ||
| Ship type | Sailing corvette | |
| Ship class | (Single ship) | |
| Keel laying : | 1841 | |
| Launching ( ship christening ): | June 24, 1843 | |
| Builder: |
Carmesins shipyard in Grabow near Stettin |
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| Crew: | about 144 men | |
| Building-costs: | ||
| Whereabouts: | Sunk 14 November 1861 off the Dutch coast | |
| Technical specifications | ||
| Displacement : | 390 t | |
| Length: | 33 m | |
| Width: | 9 m | |
| Draft : | 3.1 m | |
| Design type: | Cross frame crawler made of oak | |
| Rigging: | Full ship | |
| Sail area: | 876 m² | |
| Top speed: | 11 kn | |
| Armament | ||
| Cannons: | 12 × 18 pounders, 4 × short 24 pounders |
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| Commanders | ||
| Edwin Dirckinck-Holmfeld | ||
SMS Amazone was a wooden sailing corvette of the Prussian Navy , which was mainly used as a training ship . Although it carried the Prussian war flag and was equipped with cannons, it was also used to train civilian seamen. Since it was the only seaworthy naval vessel when the Prussian Navy was founded in 1848, it was later referred to as the "grandmother of the fleet".
history
It was completed in Grabow near Stettin in 1843 . In 1844 the first long voyage took them over England , Portugal , Gibraltar , Greece and the Ottoman Empire to the Black Sea . After the end of the voyage, two long 24-pounder guns that had compromised the stability of the ship were removed. In 1845 she sailed to Denmark , England and Spain to Genoa . In 1847 there was an Atlantic crossing with destination New York .
In 1852/1853, the Amazone, together with SMS Gefion and SMS Mercur, formed the so-called training squadron under Commodore Jan Schröder . In South and North America, Rio de Janeiro , Montevideo , Buenos Aires , La Guaira , Puerto Cabello , Barbados , Havana and Norfolk (Virginia) were called. A delegation of officers visited the US capital Washington from Norfolk .
In 1856 she was part of a training squadron in the Atlantic under Prince Adalbert , and in 1857 the corvette visited Scandinavia and England.
On another training trip to Portugal on November 14, 1861 , the Amazon got into a hurricane off the Dutch coast and sank with the entire crew. The information on the number of victims varies. 114 people may have died in the accident; other sources assume 143 (Lieutenant Hermann, five officers , 18 midshipmen and 120 men of crew) dead. The final confirmation of the sinking came only a year later, when in October 1862 a perfectly identified meat bakery of the corvette was driven on Texel . The last time the Amazon was sighted on the day of its presumed sinking by the Prussian brig number two, which was heading for the Hoofden .
After the sinking of the Amazon , rumors circulated that she had been rammed by another ship - possibly on purpose. In 1862 the journal Die Gartenlaube published a novelistic account of this process; this led to the ban on the gazebo in Prussia. The question of the seaworthiness of the ship had been raised both in the press and in the state parliament . This was officially confirmed, but Commodore Schröder criticized the fact that the ship had not been given enough experienced seafarers.
The result of the disaster was a drastic decline in applications for the career of naval officers. In 1862 there were only three applications. In 1864, therefore, more auxiliary officers , i.e. i.e., merchant navy officers .
In 1863, a memorial in the form of a six-meter-high obelisk in Berlin's Invalidenpark was dedicated to the dead , which is mentioned in Theodor Fontane's novel Stine . On bronze plaques 107 names of casualties were engraved. These panels were stolen in 1918/19, replaced in 1924 and stolen again in 1945. The memorial was either removed or destroyed in the summer of 1951 by decision of the SED or the competent authorities of the Soviet sector according to contradicting information.
literature
- Theodor Fontane : Stine
- The downfall of the "Amazon" . In: The Gazebo . Issue 27/28, 1862, pp. 417-420, 433-436 ( full text [ Wikisource ]).
- Sir John Retcliffe : Around the World , Volume V (1880)
- Entry sailing corvette Amazone , in: Hans H. Hildebrand / Albert Röhr / Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships. Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present , 7 volumes in one volume, Ratingen o. J. (approx. 1990), Volume 1, pp. 90-92
Web links
- Numbers and dates. deutsche-schutzgebiete.de
- Status of the ship. militaria-web.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Dirckinck-Holmfeld . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 4, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, p. 1011.
- ↑ Our weekly report . In: Illustrirte Zeitung . No. 6 . J. J. Weber, Leipzig August 5, 1843, p. 83 ( books.google.de ).