SMS Gefion (1843)

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Royal Danish Navy Imperial Fleet Prussian war flag from 1850.svg German EmpireGerman Empire (Reichskriegsflagge)
Gefion (1843) .jpg
Ship data
Ship name Gefion (Eckernförde)
Ship type Sailing frigate
Ship class
Keel laying : 1841
Launching ( ship christening ): September 27, 1843
Builder: New Royal Shipyard Copenhagen
Crew: about 402 men
Building-costs: 262 guilders
Whereabouts: Wrecked in 1891
or sunk in 1914
Sister ships
no
Technical specifications
Displacement : 1390 t
Length: 59 m
Width: 13.5 m
Draft : 5.68 m
Top speed: 15 kn
Rigging: Full ship
Sail area: 1989 m²
Technical data (according to Danish information)
Displacement: 1710 tons
Length: 51.9 m
Width: 12.9 m
Draft: front 5.5 m, aft 5.9 m
Cannons: 48 × 24 pounds
Armament
Cannons: 2 × 60 pounders
26 × long 24 pounders
20 × short 24 pounders

SMS Gefion was a sailing frigate that originally sailed under the Danish flag . In 1849 it fell into Schleswig-Holstein hands during the Federal War against Denmark. The ship came into the former imperial fleet in 1850 . When this fleet was dissolved in 1852, Prussia bought it for its navy.

history

On May 6, 1844, the frigate was put into service. On her first voyage from May 23, she took Crown Prince Friedrich to the Faroe Islands , then went to the Mediterranean and Morocco, and finally took works of art by the late sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen on board in Livorno . On November 16, she returned to Copenhagen with them . In 1846 she visited Funchal in Madeira and Cádiz in Spain , again with the Crown Prince on board .

In mid-May 1848 Gefion was equipped for the Schleswig-Holstein War . She blocked the Elbe estuary with other ships until the end of October 1848 . After the armistice expired in 1849, it belonged to the Danish naval association that was supposed to fight the beach batteries at Eckernförde .

In the battle near Eckernförde on April 5, 1849, the shelling of the coastal batteries near Eckernförde succeeded in forcing the frigate's crew to give up. The ship, like its squadron command, had dropped anchor near the beach after the supposed destruction of the Eckernförde land batteries, but could not leave the bay again when the beach batteries fired because of the unfavorable wind under fire. After the abandonment of the heavily damaged frigate, the ship was initially taken under the then neutral Prussian flag until the ownership issue was finally resolved, but was already renamed SMS Eckernförde . On September 12, 1850, the Danes tried to recapture the ship that had been repaired in the port of Eckernförde. When this did not succeed, an attempt was made to destroy the ship by fire. The ship would have been lost if the crew had obeyed the command of the English captain and abandoned the ship. The first officer Thaulow and the second officer Neynaber refused the order to abandon the ship and were able to save the ship with the support of the entire crew.

In mid-October 1850, a separate agreement between France and Denmark stipulated that the ship should remain German property. In November 1850 it was transferred to the North Sea under the Prussian flag and there on November 30, 1850 off Heligoland under the command of Lieutenant First Class Reichardt, it was added to the fleet of the German Confederation and put back into service under the name SMS Eckernförde . The officers Thaulow and Neynaber were brought before a court-martial for refusing to obey , but were brilliantly acquitted.

In 1852 after the dissolution of the German Navy , the ship was auctioned by Prussia together with the wheel frigate Barbarossa and put into service under its old name Gefion . From 1870, the Gefion was in Kiel as a residential ship . She was removed from the list of warships on April 5, 1880 and decommissioned on May 5. The hull was used as a coal hulk and was scrapped at the Kaiserliche Werft in Kiel in the summer of 1891 . The figurehead of the Gefion is today in the new town hall of Eckernförde; a replica serves in the spa gardens as a fountain figure of the Gefion fountain , on which the original figurehead was located until around 1980. The ship's anchor can also be seen in the spa gardens.

photos

  • The replica of the figurehead in Eckernförde

  • The original of the figurehead in the town hall of Eckernförde

  • The SMS Gefion (left) and the SMS Rover around 1860

literature

  • Erich Gröner , Dieter Jung and Martin Maass: The German Warships 1815–1945 Volume 1 . Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-7637-4800-8 .
  • Gerd Stolz: The Schleswig-Holstein Navy 1848-1852 . Westholsteinische Verlagsanstalt Boyens & Co, Heide in Holstein 1987, ISBN 3-8042-0188-1 .
  • Henrik Christiansen: Flådens skibe 1814-1848 , in: Marinehistorisk Tidsskrift, 3 (1985) pp. 3-13.
  • Contreadmiral a. D. Reinhold Werner: Memories and Pictures from Sea Life Second Edition, A. Hofmann & Comp. Berlin 1881, p. 177 ff.
  • Hans Hildebrand, Albert Röhr, Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships. A mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present day. Biographies. 1st volume, Mundus Verlag, Ratingen o. J. (actually 2nd volume), ISBN 3-88385-028-4

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ August Hermann Friedrich Neynaber alias HFA or HAF called Hermann Neynaber (1822–1899).
  2. ↑ According to other information, the ship was sunk by a torpedo hit off Kolberg (Pomerania) in 1914 ( Slesvigland, Flensburg and Sønderborg, 7th year, No. 3/1986, p. 78 (only with registration and password) accessed on October 20, 2009 ).

Web links

Commons : SMS Gefion  - collection of images, videos and audio files