SMS Rover

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Was Ensign of Prussia (1816) .svg War Ensign of Germany (1867-1892) .svg
Bundesarchiv Bild 134-B0338, Imperial Navy, Gefion and Rover (r.). Jpg
SMS Rover (right) with SMS Gefion
Construction data
Shipyard Royal Dockyard, Pembroke
Launch June 21, 1853
takeover October 19, 1862
Commissioning May 15, 1863
Decommissioning September 30, 1890
Deletion November 18, 1890
Whereabouts Wrecked in 1911
Technical specifications
Measurement
(volume) 		310 GRT
194 NRT
Displacement Construction: 509 t
Maximum: 627 t
length KWL : 34.1 m
over everything: 40.5 m
width 10.3 m
Draft 4.05 - 4.6 m
Armament 10 × smooth 24-pounder
after conversion:
10 × 8 cm L / 23 Rk
Rigging brig
Sail area 1035 m²
Construction Cross- frame crawler construction
speed 12 kn
crew 8 officers and 142 men

SMS Rover was a brig built in Great Britain in 1853 for the Royal Navy by the Royal Dockyard in Pembroke , South Wales . In 1862 the Prussian Navy bought the Rover and in 1863 put itinto serviceas a training ship for ship boys , keeping the old name. In this role she served in the Navy of the North German Confederation from 1867and in the Imperial Navy from 1872. It was decommissioned in 1890 andsoldfor demolition in1911.

History of the Rover

Launched in 1853 at the state shipyard in Pembroke , the rover was the last of the seven sloops of the Helena class with 16 cannons. The ships of this class were rigged as briggs and were therefore also referred to as first class brigs . The Querspant Kraweelbau Rover displaced 627 t, was 40.5 m long and 10.3 m wide. The rovers and their sister ship Musquito were ordered in April 1847. Construction of the rovers began in September 1850. After being launched on June 21, 1851, the ship was transferred to Plymouth in July 1853 . There the musquito and the rovers were in reserve and were not armed or fully equipped.

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 és succeeded in buying the sailing frigate Niobe and the sloops Musquito and Rover of the Helena class from the British Admiralty . The Royal Navy, which was in the process of converting to a fully steam-powered navy, sold the wooden, pure sailing ships cheaply. In the purchase contract for the ships of July 9, 1862, the price for the rovers was £ 11,763.

The transfer of the purchased ships took place in October 1862 with staff taxes of the corvettes Arcona and Thetis returning from East Asia . With the transfer teams, the two briggs Musquito and Rover in Plymouth- Devonport were taken over for the Prussian Navy on October 19 . On October 28, the two ships began their transfer voyage to Gdansk , where they arrived at the end of November and were taken out of service again in December to be prepared for their duties as training ships in the Royal Shipyard . The transfer commander of the rover was Lieutenant at sea, 1st class Struben.

The boy's training ship Rover

On May 15, 1863, the Rover was put into service as the second of the new training ships. Like the other two ships, she kept her British name. The armament was reduced to ten 24 pounders (1867 to only eight guns). From August 1863, the Rover belonged to the training squadron formed for the first time. After association exercises, the three purchases began a trip abroad to the Atlantic in autumn, but this was canceled on November 16 in Plymouth due to tensions with Denmark. The Rover 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 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. The two sailing training ships ran into the Mediterranean via Gibraltar and Palermo to Nauplia . Bad weather conditions delayed the return voyage in Malta and it was not until May 17, 1865 that the Musquito arrived back in Kiel with her sister ship.

In the following years, there were short training trips in the Baltic Sea in the summer and then a winter trip to the south of several months. In 1865/66 the winter journey to Cape Verde took place , in which the Niobe also took part. In 1866/67 the rovers made their winter voyage with the Musquito from October 9, 1866 to early May 1867, to the western Mediterranean. While the Niobe traveled to the West Indies again in the fall of 1867, the two school briggs went to Lisbon , from where they made several shorter trips over the winter before they returned to Kiel on May 3, 1868. The following two years the Rover and the Musquito spent the winter off Portugal and the Atlantic ports of southern Spain. On April 28, 1870, the two briggs arrived back in Kiel. They then sailed to Gdansk and decommissioned there in July because of the Franco-German War . The rover served as a residential ship for reservists, then for prisoners of war. During the war she was moved to Kiel as a barge.

On April 15, 1872, the Rover was put back into service and then used for the first time as a training ship for midshipmen in the eastern Baltic Sea and the North Sea. The sister ship Musquito , which had been in service again since the previous year, and the similar new building SMS Undine of the royal shipyard in Gdansk, which came into service for the first time in the previous year , continued to serve as training ships for ship boys. In the summer of 1872 the Navy had three briggs in action for the first time. On October 11, 1872, the Rover was taken out of service again, as the small training ships were no longer used on long journeys and were only to be used during the first phase of training at home. In fact, the rover , which was once again serving as a boy's training ship, was used as early as 1873 for an Atlantic voyage in the fall, on which it called the West Indies and ports in the USA and Canada. The ship remained in service until the fall of 1874. In 1875 the Rover was only in service during the summer half-year, in spring 1876 it was only put into service to be taken to Danzig for a major overhaul.

In 1877 and 1878 as well as in 1880 and 1881, the Rover was used as a ship's boy brig in the Baltic Sea from the beginning of April to the end of October. In 1882 she was only in service from the end of February to May 1, 1882, to train the crew of the future torpedo test ship Blücher . In 1883 and 1884, deployments as a ship's boy brig followed in the summer half-year in the Baltic Sea. Decommissioned on October 15, 1884, the rover was reactivated on November 5, 1884 in order to carry out a training trip to Cape Verde from November 13 with the crew rescued from the loss of the Undine near Skagen , from which the rover on May 8, 1885 returned to Kiel. She then carried out the small trips to the Baltic Sea in the first section of the cabin boy training, and then, as usual, was decommissioned on October 15, 1885.

In 1889 and 1890, SMS Rover was still used in the summer half-year for ship boy training in the Baltic Sea. In 1889 it was used at the same time as the sister ship Musquito . On the Rover , which had visited Stockholm in the last year of service, the flag was last lowered in Kiel on September 30, 1890 and the ship was removed from the fleet list in November.

The final fate of the SMS Rover

The Rover , which was painted in November 1890, was converted into a barge and used as such in the mine depot in Friedrichsort from 1905. In 1911 the remains of the rovers were finally sold for demolition.

The figurehead of the rover is now in the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden .

Commanders

Nine of the rovers commanders later rose to the ranks of admirals, including

literature

  • Erich Gröner , Dieter Jung, Martin Maass: The German warships 1815-1945. Volume 1: Armored ships, ships of the line, battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, gunboats. Bernard & Graefe, Munich et al. 1982, ISBN 3-7637-4800-8 .
  • 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,

Web links

Commons : SMS Rover  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Her sister ship , the Musquito , also built in Pembroke in 1851 , was bought by the Prussian Navy at the same time and was also used as a sailing training ship from 1863.
  2. ^ A b Rif Winfield: British Warships in the Age of Sail 1817–1863: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates , p. 262
  3. ↑ Hildebrand et al. a .: The German Warships , Volume 2, pp. 91f.
  4. ↑ Hildebrand et al. a .: The German Warships , Volume 1, pp. 90ff.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Hildebrand u. a .: The German Warships , Volume 4, p. 142.
  6. ↑ Hildebrand et al. a., Volume 1, p. 97
  7. ↑ a b c d Hildebrand u. a .: The German Warships , Volume 5, pp. 88f.
  8. ↑ Hildebrand et al. a., Volume 4, p. 141.
  9. ↑ Hildebrand et al. a .: The German Warships , Volume 6, pp. 21f.
  10. ↑ a b c d e Hildebrand u. a., Volume 5, p. 89
  11. ↑ Hildebrand et al. a., vol. 5, p. 88 and the personal directory of all seven volumes