Wami (ship)
.jpg) The wami in Dar es Salaam harbor (photo from 1907–1914)
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The Wami was a steam-powered small coastal ship in the colony of German East Africa , named after the river Wami in German East Africa.
history
Since it was not possible to control the coastal waters of German East Africa by sailing vehicles, the colonial department of the Foreign Office ordered two steam boiler-operated customs cruisers for the colony from the Josef Meyer shipyard in Papenburg . With the construction numbers 91 and 92, the two ships were completed in 1894 and named Wami and Kingani .
After their transfer to East Africa, they took up patrol duty. But also mail and passenger transport were part of their tasks. Passengers, mostly civil servants and employees, and mail were transported to and from Zanzibar . When the Maji Maji uprising broke out in August 1905 , the two customs cruisers were also used.
In 1913 the Wami retired from service with the Gouvernement of German East Africa and was leased to the East African Railway Company with the entire flotilla .
After the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the Wami were taken over by the Imperial Navy . On September 26, 1914, the Wami was assigned to the ships of the Delta Department for supplying the small cruiser Königsberg lying in the Rufidji estuary . On June 5, 1915, the Wami made the unsuccessful attempt to torpedo the British fleet off the Rufidji estuary . From October 9th to 10th, 1915 the breakthrough by the blockade fleet and the journey to Dar es Salaam succeeded .
Finally, the Wami was taken apart in Dar es Salaam and loaded onto the Mittellandbahn in April 1916 , on which it was driven to Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika . In Kigoma the ship was rebuilt, equipped with a 3.7 cm ring cannon and put into service again in early May 1916. The ship was then used for reconnaissance and supply trips on the second largest lake in Africa.
On a trip to Katanko on July 29, 1916, the Wami sank herself when she encountered the militarily superior Belgian motorboat Netta . The Belgians lifted the wami and put it into service as a wapi . The further fate of the ship is not known.
literature
- Siegfried Borgschulze: The customs cruisers “Wami” and “Kingani” in German East Africa , In: The Logbook - Journal for Shipbuilding History and Ship Modeling , Publisher: Arbeitskreis Historischer Schiffbau e. V. issue 4/1986, p. 145 ff.
- Erich Gröner , Dieter Jung, Martin Maass: The German warships 1815–1945, Vol. 7: Landing associations II: Landing vehicles in the narrow sense (Part 2), landing ferries, landing support vehicles, transporters; Ships and boats of the army, ships and boats of the Seeflieger / Luftwaffe, colonial vehicles , Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Koblenz 1990, pp. 220–221.
Individual evidence
- ^ Gustav Adolf Fischer: Flottillen, in: Heinrich Schnee (Hrsg.): German Colonial Lexicon . Volume I, Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1920, p. 644 f.
- ^ A b Albert Röhr: German Marine Chronicle. Verlag Gerhard Stalling, Oldenburg / Hamburg 1974, ISBN 3-7979-1845-3 , p. 196 ff.