SMS Nautilus (1871)

Construction data
Ship type	Gunboat
Ship class	Albatross class
Builder:	Royal Shipyard , Gdansk
Launch :	August 31, 1871
in service:	June 4, 1873
painted:	December 14, 1896
Sister ship	SMS Albatross
Technical specifications
Displacement :	Construction: 713 t Maximum: 786 t
Length:	over everything: 56.95 m
Width:	8.32 m
Draft :	3.75 m
Machinery:	2 coal-fired suitcase boilers 1 horizontal 2-cylinder expansion machine
Number of screws:	1 double-leaf (Ø 3.14 m)
Power:	490 PSi
Top speed:	10.5 kn
Rig
Rigging :	Barkentine , most recently three-masted schooner
Masts:	3
Sail area:	710 m², lastly 415 m²
Crew size:	90–115 men
Armament
originally:	2 - 15 cm and 2 - 12 cm ring cannons
1879:	additionally 2 revolver cannons
Whereabouts
Broken down in 1905

SMS Nautilus was a gunboat of the Imperial Navy . She was the second ship of the Albatross class that was procured for foreign service, especially off the Chinese coast. Two ships were intended as “screw-steam-Avisos” in the fleet foundation plan of the Navy of the North German Confederation of 1867. The Nautilus was known as the Albatross-class gunboat when it was completed in 1872. After a mission off the northern Spanish coast, the gunboat was dispatched to East Asia in 1876. Classified as a cruiser since 1884, the Nautilus , which was last deployed off German East Africa , returned home from her third deployment abroad in 1888.

Still used as a survey ship there, SMS Nautilus was deleted from the fleet list on December 14, 1896. The hull was used as a coal hulk in Kiel and broken up in Swinoujscie in 1905.

History of the Nautilus

SMS Nautilus was launched on August 31, 1871 at the Imperial Shipyard in Danzig . She was the second of the two Albatross- class gunboats . Her sister ship Albatross was also launched in 1871 at the Danzig shipyard. The decision to build the large gunboats was made in 1869 when the two screw-steam Avisos were procured, with the Albatross being referred to as a replacement Crocodil during construction , while the later Nautilus was the Aviso A supplement . The construction of the two ships was delayed by the Franco-Prussian War. The ships commissioned as Avisos came into the service of the fleet as gunboats with wooden hulls in Kraweel construction . When fully equipped, they displaced 786 t, were 56.95 m long and 8.32 m wide. They had an expansion steam engine for 10.5 knots (kn) speed and were rigged as barquentines with 710 m² of sail area. They were armed with two short 15 cm ring cannons and two 12 cm ring cannons.

The test drives of the Nautilus began on November 15, 1872 and were completed on December 12.

First missions

The first commissioning took place on June 4, 1873. The new building, reclassified as a gunboat, served as an "Aviso" for the training squadron. From July 8th to August 15th, the Nautilus made her first trip abroad with the squadron consisting of the corvettes Hertha , Arcona , Vineta and Ariadne , which the German Empire today took part in at the coronation celebrations of Oscar II of Sweden and Norway in Trondheim and Christiania Oslo represented. On August 6th, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm arrived in Christiania as the highest representative of the empire on the yacht Grille . After the maneuver phase of the training squadron, the Nautilus was decommissioned.

The next commissioning took place on March 17, 1874 as a training ship for machine personnel. Together with the Arminius , she dragged the corvette Nymphe , which had run aground on her return from East Asia shortly before her home port, near Langeland .

In mid-August, the Nautilus and her sister ship Albatross received the order to go to the coast of the Basque Country because of the unrest that had broken out in Spain in order to prevent further attacks on German residents. There was u. a. a former captain working as a journalist was shot dead by the Carlists on June 30th. The two gunboats left Kiel on August 8th and arrived in Santander on the 24th . They then ran on the coast to the French border. When they were shot at with rifle fire by the Carlist near Guetaria on the way , they responded with their cannons. With Spanish units loyal to the government and the British gunboat Fly , the German ships tried to prevent arms deliveries (especially from France) to the rebels. In October the gunboats sought shelter in Santander because of the very bad weather, which this port could hardly offer. When an Italian barque ran aground in the port entrance on December 12, almost all of its crew were rescued by the Nautilus . The Foreign Office has now approved the withdrawal of the gunboats, which the navy had long demanded, since the prevailing weather conditions no longer made a sensible use. On the 19th, the Albatross began its journey home, while on the 20th, the Nautilus began its onward journey to La Plata . She had received surplus equipment from the Albatross and had given her a number of sick crew members in exchange for replacements.

At the same time, on December 11, a brig from Rostock loaded with petroleum visited Getaria as an emergency port on the way from New York to Pasaia . Like the gunboats, the ship that ran aground was shot at by the Carlist at the beginning of September. The crew sought protection from the soldiers loyal to the government in the port city. The abandoned ship drifted away and ran aground outside the stretch of coast ruled by troops loyal to the government. The insurgents seized the brig and its cargo and demanded a salary from the Germans. This behavior generated the desire for a massive reaction in the imperial government and the idea of ​​sending a larger naval force to the Basque coast. First, however, the gunboats were supposed to return to the positions they had just left, which had not received knowledge of the incident before they left. Albatross did not receive the order to repent until January 5, 1875, when she had already reached Christiansand . Nautilus had already received the message on January 1st in Funchal and had already arrived back in Vigo on January 6th, from where it continued on its own to Guetaria. As a third ship, the Admiralty had ordered the corvette Augusta from the West Indies to the north Spanish coast, which the order reached on January 5, 1875 in Montevideo and which arrived on January 29, 1875 in Santander. The Albatross also arrived there on the same day , whose return march in Devonport had been delayed due to necessary repairs to the hull and engine. On the 31st, the Nautilus came to Santander, whose commander, Corvette Captain Otto Zembsch, had already conducted initial negotiations with the Spanish groups on site. In the negotiations that continued, Zembsch succeeded in obtaining adequate compensation for the Rostock brig and its cargo. The Spanish government paid $ 20,000 to prevent any military intervention by the German Reich. The case was formally ended on April 28, 1875 with a solemn exchange of salutes with the three German ships from which Augusta and Albatross had withdrawn to El Ferrol for 14 days . The German naval units then withdrew from the northern Spanish coast: Augusta went back to the American east coast by the end of the year and Albatross went back home. Nautilus moved to Gibraltar to await further developments. It was repaired in Cadiz and visited several Moroccan ports. In mid-October 1875 she returned to Santander to observe the final battle of the rebels in the Basque Country and, if necessary, to intervene immediately in the event of attacks on Germans. The commander was replaced in Santander by Corvette Captain Sattig. After the suppression of the uprising, the Nautilus returned to Kiel on March 3rd . There the future Admiral Victor Valois took over the ship, who had two 4 cm balloon guns set up before leaving for East Asia.

Three long-term assignments abroad

East Asia 1876–1878

On April 5, 1876, SMS Nautilus embarked on the journey to East Asia. On April 19, she received the order in Port Said to go to Constantinople as a second stationary next to the gunboat Meteor because of the threat of war in the Balkans . The Nautilus was relieved of this task when the German tank squadron (see SMS Kaiser ) arrived in the Aegean Sea and the gunboat Comet in Constantinople.

On July 25th, the Nautilus continued its journey to East Asia and reached the station area in Singapore on September 11th . In the following months she worked with the station commander, Count von Monts, on the Vineta . In connection with the search for a suitable base, the gunboat also carried out surveys on the Chinese coast and offshore islands. In mid-April 1877 the ship moved to Nagasaki to have necessary repairs carried out. The Nautilus was only able to leave the shipyard on September 24th . Just eight days later, she got caught in a typhoon off Yokohama , in which she collided with a British steamer and suffered considerable damage. On January 18, 1878, the order to travel home reached the gunboat in Swatau, today Shantou .

When the gunboat reached Port Said on March 16, orders had been given to go to the Palestinian coast first to give Christians support there. It was not possible to continue the voyage home until July, and on September 7, 1878, the ship was decommissioned to be completely overhauled in Kiel. The balloon cannons came off board and were replaced by two 37 mm revolver cannons. In addition, the ship received a new boiler system.

Australia and the South Seas 1879–1881

SMS Nautilus came back into service on May 20, 1879 and sailed to Australia on June 17 to replace the sister ship Albatross . The commander Jeschke suffered heat stroke in the Suez Canal and died; The gunboat continued its departure under the first officer, but then waited from September 5th to 16th for the arrival of the new commander Chüden. After his arrival, the voyage was continued and on November 3rd, Sydney was reached, where the Albatross had already arrived. The crews of the two gunboats were called in by the local charge of the German Reich to set up the German department at the world exhibition in Melbourne .

On November 15, the Nautilus was able to continue its departure and reached Apia on December 11, 1879 . Since November 1, the new Consul General Captain Niembsch has determined the German procedure there. The former commander of the Nautilus took up his first foreign post in the diplomatic service there after retiring from the navy. The longest-serving active officer on the station at that time was the commander of the frigate Bismarck , Korvettenkapitän Karl August Deinhard . After the locals were reassured by the appointment of a new king, the Nautilus was the only ship to remain at the South Seas station. On the way to a visit to New Zealand, the Nautilus visited the Tonga Islands and tried to obtain better conditions for German merchants in the island kingdom. During the gunboat's stay of over three weeks in Auckland on the North Island of New Zealand, the Crown Prince of the Tonga Islands, who was visiting, died there. At the end of May 1880, the commander of the Nautilus transferred the corpse of Crown Prince Tongas to his homeland. This action by the Germans suddenly improved the situation and the Germans' options for action.

SMS Habicht ,
1881 Replacement of the Nautilus in the South Pacific

On June 24, 1880, the 570 t gunboat Hyäne arrived in Apia as the second stationary of the Imperial Navy. The Nautilus was able to relocate to Australia from mid-August to December, where it visited Brisbane , Sydney and Melbourne and participated in the final work on the German exhibition part of the World Exhibition in Melbourne with a work command . When it opened, the Nautilus put a guard of honor and its landing corps took part in a parade for the birthday of the British Crown Prince Edward . The ship that returned to Apia was given the order to travel home on March 25, 1881 and left the main port of Samoas on the 30th. Her replacement, the 1000 t gunboat Habicht , arrived in Apia in mid-April with her sister ship Möwe and the corvette Hertha serving as a midshipman's training ship . The three ships last represented the German Empire at the World Exhibition in Melbourne. Nautilus returned home from Brisbane on May 1st and reached Kiel on September 15th, 1881, where it was decommissioned on September 26th to carry out a basic repair of the ship.

South Africa, East Asia, East Africa 1883–1888

SMS Nautilus only came back into service on October 2, 1883, more than two years later . The gunboat was to serve as a station ship again in the South Seas. The commandant, Korvettenkapitän Aschenborn, fell ill with typhus after leaving Madeira and had to hand over the command to the chief officer. The patient could not be treated in the port of Porto Grande on São Vicente (Cape Verde) , so the trip to Cape Town was continued. Aschenborn recovered at sea and took command of the gunboat again in Cape Town on December 30th. From there, the Nautilus visited Angra Pequena, later Lüderitz Bay , from January 24th to 26th, 1884 and returned to Cape Town on February 4th. The commandant's report to the Foreign Office on the state of German economic activity contributed significantly to the seizure of German South West Africa .

On the 5th, the journey was continued on the basis of new orders to East Asia in order to strengthen the naval forces there during the Franco-Chinese War . The Nautilus , now reclassified as a cruiser , joined the cruiser squadron in Hong Kong on April 6, 1884 . The ship was used in Canton, now Guangzhou , until mid-July , where it replaced the gunboat Wolf , and then moved to Shanghai . A large international fleet was located here, including the German flagship Stosch (Captain of the Sea Paschen ) and the cruiser frigate Prinz Adalbert , as well as the gunboat Albatross of the Austro-Hungarian Navy . The Austrian ship had submitted to the German association before Shanghai. In mid-August, SMS Nautilus moved to Tientsin at the disposal of the German legation in Beijing . The cruiser remained there until the end of March 1885. In winter the ship was rigged and a protective roof was provided. At the beginning of April, the Nautilus moved back to Shanghai and at the end of the month to Korea, where it met the Iltis , the second gunboat of the East Asian station. Unrest broke out in Korea after the murder of the Crown Prince there. At the beginning of July she carried out a number of surveying tasks off Korea. The ship then visited Hong Kong and ran again via Chemulpo to Nagasaki .

There the cruiser received the order to go to the South Seas on September 1, 1885. He left Yokohama on September 13th. At sea, a secret order was opened, who instructed the commander, Lieutenant Commander Rötger, Jaluit to start off where the German Empire had a coaling station, and there, the Marshall Islands and adjacent to the Ralik Chain belonging Brown and Providence islands to be placed under German auspices . The festive ceremony with the raising of the German flag took place on October 15, 1885 in Jaluit. The cruiser went to other islands to hoist the German flag. On Ebon , the commandant imposed a fine on an American mission company that had hindered German traders. From November 7th to 28th, the cruiser returned from Jaluit to Yokohama. From December 23 to March 10, 1886, its upper deck and the ship floor were renewed in a shipyard in Shanghai. The cruiser then made trips between Chinese, Korean and Japanese ports. On July 23, she joined the units of the cruiser squadron in Hong Kong. For the flagship Bismarck , the cruiser Olga and the returned gunboat Wolf , which is responsible for the south Chinese coast, the cruiser Carola arrived in the summer . The Nautilus moved to Tschifu at the end of August . She later went with the squadron to the Taku roadstead to visit the Chinese Navy, where she met the German-built Ting Yuen armored corvette . Like other ships in the squadron, Nautilus had 32 cases of typhus on board and was moving to Nagasaki for treatment. In November 1886 the cruiser squadron went to East Africa to enforce the occupation of the entire Zanzibari coastline on the basis of a treaty negotiated with Great Britain. The commander of the Nautilus thereby became the longest serving German naval officer in East Asia. On May 12, the cruiser received orders in Nagasaki to also go to East Africa. He was supposed to replace the gunboat Hyena there . The cruiser squadron had already left the new protected area and was on its way via Australia and the South Sea possessions to East Asia.

SMS Möwe 1881 in Sydney

On the way, the Nautilus called the Sulu Archipelago to check whether the dispute between the Spanish colonial authorities and the local rulers was also endangering other Europeans. On August 15, 1887, the cruiser reached Zanzibar, where it met the remaining station cruiser Möwe . The hyena to be relieved had left East Africa a month ago. Both cruisers carried out a large number of survey trips along the coast of the protected area. An outstanding event was the three-week trip with the founder of the colony, Dr. Carl Peters , from December 4th to 26th, 1887 along the coast from Saadani to Mombasa , on which Lamu in the Sultanate of Witu was also headed for, where the commandant was also supposed to clarify conflicts between the Sultan of Witu and the German Witu Society . In March 1888, the cruiser took part in the funeral ceremony of the late Sultan of Zanzibar Barghasch ibn Said and the accession of his successor to the throne. Corvette captain Carl van Hoven , who was seriously ill with fever, had to give up his command in June 1888 and started his journey home. But the order to travel home also reached the cruiser on August 9th in Durban . The voyage home was started under her first officer and the ship reached Kiel on December 7th. Neither the ship nor the Admiralty had timely knowledge of the “Arab uprising” in the colony.

On December 19, 1888, the Nautilus was taken out of service in Kiel and was rebuilt during the subsequent docking time.

Use as a survey ship and whereabouts

In Kiel, the Nautilus was converted into a survey ship. The armament was expanded and the rigging changed into a three-masted schooner. This reduced the sail area to 415 m². From 1890 to 1893 she was used as a survey ship in the western Baltic Sea during the summer months. The need was given by the frequent arrival of ships of the annual maneuvering squadrons. On October 7, 1893, SMS Nautilus was taken out of service for the last time. An investigation in the naval shipyard in Kiel showed that the ship was unusable for further operations. On December 14, 1896, the former gunboat was finally deleted from the list of warships.

The hull, used as a coal store in Kiel, was sold to Swinoujscie (today Świnoujście ) in Pomerania in 1905 and broken up.

Commanders

June - September 1873	KK Johann Heinrich Pirner	1834-1908	last vice admiral
March - April 1874	KL Friedrich von Levetzow	1843-1902	KzS
April - July 1874	KL Eduard Braunschweig	1836- ??	KK
July 1874 - November 1875	KK Otto Zembsch	1841-1911	KzS
November 1875 - April 1874	KK Victor Sattig	1843-1883	KzS
April 1874 - September 1878	KK Victor Valois	1841-1924	admiral
May - August 1879	KL / KK Heinrich Jeschke †	1832-1879	KK
August / September 1879	LzS Fritz Dräger (IO, iV)	1850-1917	KzS
September 1879 - September 1881	KL / KK Hermann Chüden	1847- ??	KzS
October 1883 - August 1885	KK Richard Aschenborn	1848-1935	Vice admiral
November / December 1883	KL Johannes Hirschberg (IO, IV)	1849-1893	KK
August 1885 - August 1886	KK Fritz Rötger	1848-1913	Rear admiral
August 1886 - June 1888	KL / KK Curt van Hoven sp. Kalau from the court	1850-1936	Rear admiral
June - December 1888	KL Bernhard Wahrendorff (IO, IV)	1853-1940	KzS
April - October 1890	KK Max von Halfern	1848- ??	KzS
April - September 1891	KL Wilhelm Kindt	1854-1927	Vice admiral
April - October 1892, April - October 1893	KK Reinhold Jachmann	1852-1902	KK

literature

• Erich Gröner : All German warships from 1815-1936. BoD - Books on Demand, 2010, ISBN 3-86195-391-9 .
• Hans H. Hildebrand, Albert Röhr, Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships: Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present . Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford, seven volumes

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hildebrand et al. a .: The German Warships , Volume 1, p. 82
2. ↑ ^{a b} Groener: All German Warships , p. 52
3. ↑ Hildebrand et al. a .: The German Warships , Volume 3, p. 71
4. ↑ ^{a b} Hildebrand u. a .: The German Warships , Volume 5, p. 10
5. ↑ Hildebrand et al. a .: The German Warships , Volume 1, p. 83
6. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Hildebrand u. a., Volume 5, p. 11
7. ^ Otto Zembsch joined the consular service in 1879
8. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Hildebrand u. a., Volume 5, p. 12
9. ↑ Hildebrand et al. a., Volume 3, p. 34
10. ↑ The Austrian Navy had two gunboats built, which were also named Albatross and Nautilus . With a maximum displacement of 570 t, these boats were smaller than their German namesake and were put into service in 1874.
11. ↑ Hildebrand et al. a .: The German Warships , Volume 5, p. 135