SMS Niobe (1849)
 The Niobe after a painting by Heinrich Sass
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SMS Niobe was a wooden sailing frigate built in Portsmouth for the Royal Navy in 1848/49 . Prussia bought them in 1862 for the nautical training of junior officers in its navy . The ship kept the name Niobe given by the Royal Navy and was used as a training ship in the Imperial Navy until 1890 . At the end of 1890 the Niobe was removed from the list of warships and sold for demolition in 1919.
History of Niobe
The Royal Navy's second Niobe was ordered in March 1846 as the third Diamond- class ship . Only the lead ship Diamond of the 28-gun frigate 6th class actually came into service with the Navy. Launched on September 18, 1849 at Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth , Niobe was transferred directly to the reserve, was not armed and never entered service with the Navy. The Niobe was a cross- framed crawler made of oak with copper fittings, displaced 1300 t, was 43.3 m long and 12.8 m wide and rigged as a full ship for a sail area of 1650 m². She was to be used with a crew of 240 men to secure the sea routes.
Sale to Prussia
After the total losses of the schooner Frauenlob and the sailing corvette Amazone in 1860/61, the Prussian state parliament approved the purchase of suitable training ships abroad in order to quickly ensure the training needs of seafarers. In 1862 the British Admiralty succeeded in buying the frigate Niobe and the sloops Musquito and Rover of the Helena class, none of which had previously been in active service. In the purchase contract for the ships of July 9, 1862, the price for the Niobe was £ 15,892. In terms of design, it was a scaled-down version of the Thetis frigate acquired by Prussia in Great Britain in 1855 .
The transfer of the purchased ships took place in October 1862 with staff taxes for the corvette Arcona and the Thetis returning from East Asia . With the transfer crews, the frigate was taken over for the Prussian Navy on October 21 in Devonport . On November 1, she began her transfer trip to Danzig , where it was decommissioned on January 5, 1863 to be prepared for her task as a cadet training ship in the Royal Shipyard . The transfer commander of the Niobe was the Lieutenant for the Sea, 1st Class, Hassenstein.
The midshipman training ship Niobe
On June 25, 1863, the Niobe was put into service as the third of the new training ships. Like the other two ships, the frigate kept its British name after the legendary Greek figure Niobe . The armament of the frigate consisted of 16 68-pounders and four 30-pounders. From August 1863 she belonged to the training squadron formed for the first time with the two sloops. After association exercises, the ships then began a trip abroad in the Atlantic in the autumn, which was canceled on November 16 in Plymouth due to tensions with Denmark. The Niobe served as a depot ship in Swinoujscie during the German-Danish War .
In the autumn of 1864 the school squadron left Kiel for the Atlantic with all three ships. Because the war with Denmark had just ended, the corvettes Vineta and Victoria accompanied the outgoing school squadron to Plymouth. There the Niobe separated from the briggs and continued their journey to the West Indies, while the two escort corvettes returned to the Baltic Sea and the two young boy training ships sailed into the Mediterranean. At the end of April 1865, the Niobe returned to Kiel after six months. The next big trip abroad led from September 29, 1865 with the two ship boy briggs via Funchal to the Canary Islands . On the trip, the German researcher Ernst Haeckel was a passenger on the ship from Madeira to Tenerife . In the Canary Islands, the Niobe was able to provide assistance to a Spanish frigate and Swedish merchant ships after a heavy storm. On January 26, 1866, the return journey of the Niobe began , which was interrupted from Cádiz from February 21 for six weeks for training trips on site. On May 15, 1866, the ship arrived back in Kiel. In the fall of 1866 the Niobe's great training trip led back to the West Indies. On the return voyage, the commander and some officers and midshipmen from Cherbourg visited the world exhibition in Paris .
On the following departure, a Danish pilot ground the Niobe in the Little Belt . Although it was difficult to bring the training ship down again, the commander Korvettenkapitän Schelle died of the stress on September 24, 1867 and was buried in Langesund, Norway . The first officer, Count Monts , then led the frigate to Plymouth, where the ship went into dock due to sea damage and on October 12th the commander of the ship's boy training ship Musquito , Corvette Captain Berger, took over command. On October 1st, Niobe ceremoniously set the flag of the North German Confederation for the first time . The training ship then went to the USA via West Indian ports. Norfolk could not be entered due to heavy fog, instead New York was visited for a week. On May 27, 1868, the Niobe returned to Kiel. From August 22, 1868 to May 23, 1869 and from September 20, 1869 to May 28, 1870, further trips to the West Indies followed. On the last voyage, the Niobe was also used there together with the station gunboat Meteor because of the unrest in Venezuela . Due to the Franco-Prussian War , the Niobe was decommissioned on July 18, 1870 and was then used as a barracks and then a prisoner ship in Swinoujscie.
On May 11, 1871, the Niobe was put back into service and made her last great voyage across the Atlantic. She ran into the Caribbean via English North Sea ports. After touching the ground off Jamaica, the ship was able to warp free again and suffered only minor damage. In March 1872 she handed over her cadets in Havana to the Gazelle and arrived back in Kiel on May 11, 1872. She then served as a guard ship on the Baltic Sea station.
It was decided not to use pure sailing ships on long journeys. While shipboys training ships were almost entirely limited to the Baltic Sea in their first training phase, the Niobe should be limited to trips in the North and Baltic Seas in the summer months. The long sea voyages of the cadets were to be made on cruiser frigates. After the adoption of the new concept, the first voyage of the Niobe from May 31 to September 21, 1873 still led to Funchal. During the summer voyage in 1874, the Niobe was the first German warship to visit Copenhagen after the German-Danish War of 1864 and the ship's commanding officer and his officers were taken over by the Danish King Christian IX. receive. The training ship then visited Reykjavík to celebrate the settlement of Iceland for 1000 years. In 1875 and 1876 the Niobe visited British North Sea ports during the summer holidays. On the summer trip in 1877, the 15-year-old Prince Heinrich , the grandson of the German emperor , was the most prominent member of the crew. The summer voyage led to Portsmouth and in Cowes , the British Queen Victoria had the officers and cadets of the ship, including her grandson Heinrich, introduced to her.
From 1878 to 1890 the Niobe was used every summer half-year for naval cadet training in the North and Baltic Seas from the beginning of April to the end of September. Through this almost continuous use during her service, in which almost all officers of the Imperial Navy were briefly on duty, she earned the name "Mother of the Navy". From the mid-1880s, oceanographic work was also carried out in the North Sea on the Niobe . In addition, the school frigate also took part in various celebrations during their summer trips. On September 25, 1890, the flag was last lowered on the Niobe and the school frigate was removed from the fleet list in November.
“The last representative of pure sailing shipping was the old frigate Niobe, which sailed as a cadet training ship from 1862 to 1890 and on which all officers who were sea captains or admirals during the war received their first training. The old Niobe was a very fine sailing ship, on which the oldest sailing tradition was maintained. When Niobe occasionally crossed into the port of Portsmouth on a school trip around England with full sails and performed every turn with all three tops at the same time, an English squadron enthusiastically gave her three cheers for this wonderful performance. "
Whereabouts of the frigate
The former Niobe served as a barge in Kiel a. a. temporarily in winter for the crew of the imperial yacht. In 1907 she was named after a gas explosion in the torpedo school ship Blücher as a residential and Lehrhulk to Flensburg - Mürwik to the Torpedo Station laid. There it turned out to be not habitable due to the numerous rats running around. In 1908 she came back to Kiel, only to be finally scrapped in 1919. The figurehead is now in the Mürwik Naval School .
Commanders
Of the commanders of the Niobe , 14 later rose to the ranks of admirals, including
- Corvette Captain Karl Ferdinand Batsch , 1865–67, lastly Vice Admiral
- Lieutenant Alexander Graf von Monts , IO: i. V. 1867, lastly admiral
- Corvette captain / sea captain Adolph Wilhelm Berger , 1867–1869 and 1874, most recently vice admiral
- Sea captain Wilhelm von Wickede , 1875, lastly vice admiral
- Corvette Captain Karl Paschen , 1876, lastly Admiral
- Sea captain Hans von Koester , 1883, first Grand Admiral of the Imperial Navy
literature
- JJ Colledge, Ben Warlow: Ships of the Royal Navy: The Complete Record of all Fighting Ships of the Royal Navy , Chatham Publishing, London (Rev. ed., 2006), ISBN 978-1-86176-281-8 .
- Terrell D. Gottschall: By Order of the Kaiser: Otto Von Diederichs and the Rise of the Imperial German Navy, 1865-1902. Naval Institute Press, 2003.
- Erich Gröner: The German warships 1815-1936. Munich, Lehmann 1937.
- Hans H. Hildebrand / Albert Röhr / Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships: Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present , Koehler's publishing company, Herford, seven volumes
- Rif Winfield: British Warships in the Age of Sail 1817–1863: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates , Seaforth publishing, 2014, ISBN 1-47384-962-4
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Rif Winfield: British Warships in the Age of Sail 1817–1863: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates , p. 187
- ↑ Hildebrand et al. a .: The German Warships , Volume 2, pp. 91f.
- ↑ Hildebrand et al. a .: The German Warships , Volume 1, pp. 90ff.
- ↑ a b c Hildebrand u. a .: The German Warships , Volume 4, p. 142.
- ↑ Hildebrand et al. a., Volume 1, p. 97
- ↑ a b Hildebrand u. a .: The German Warships , Volume 5, p. 14.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Hildebrand u. a., Volume 5, p. 15.
- ↑ Ernst Haeckel: An ascent of the peak in Tenerife. In: Journal of the Society for Geography in Berlin , Volume V, Berlin 1870.
- ↑ a b c d Hildebrand u. a., Volume 5, p. 16.
- ↑ Karl H. Peter : Candidate Naval Officer - Their Training from 1848 to Today (1969)
- ↑ Flensburger Tageblatt : 150 years Flensburger Tageblatt: When Flensburg set the tone , from: April 28, 2015; accessed on: August 6, 2019
- ↑ Hildebrand et al. a., vol. 5, p. 14 and the personal directory of all seven volumes