The ships were ordered as part of a construction program intended to begin replacing the old Jäger-class gunboats that had been built a decade earlier.

Unlike the older ships, Albatross and Nautilus were intended to serve abroad to protect German economic interests overseas.

The two ships spent the majority of their careers overseas, including a cruise to South America in the early 1870s for Albatross.

Design work started for the new class, which were intended for overseas cruising, instead of coastal defense as the earlier vessels had been.

[3][4] They were powered by a pair of horizontal, single-cylinder marine steam engines that drove one 2-bladed screw propeller, which could be retracted while the ships cruised under sail.

The propulsion system was rated to give them a top speed of 10.9 knots (20.2 km/h; 12.5 mph) at 601 metric horsepower (593 ihp), but neither vessel reached those figures in service.

As built, they were equipped with a three-masted barque rig with a total sail area of 710 m2 (7,600 sq ft).

After an overhaul in Germany in the early 1880s, Albatross spent the years from 1882 to 1888 overseas, beginning with a tour of South America that included an observation of the 1882 transit of Venus.

She then moved back to the South Pacific; in 1886, she was involved in a dispute with Spain over control of the Caroline Islands and in 1887, she took the exiled Samoan king Malietoa Laupepa to the German colony of Kamerun in Central Africa.

Nautilus's third and final tour in the Pacific began in 1883 and concluded in 1888; in 1885, she was involved in establishing a protectorate in the Marshall Islands.

Nautilus was struck from the naval register on 14 December 1896 and thereafter reduced to a coal storage hulk based in Kiel.