The ships were originally secretly ordered by the Confederate States Navy in 1863 from Arman Brothers shipyard in Bordeaux, France, purportedly for the Japanese fleet.

Augusta caused a minor diplomatic incident with Costa Rica and the United States in 1868 over an attempt to secure a naval base in the Caribbean Sea, and Victoria joined her there later in the year.

In 1885, Augusta was sent to carry a set of replacement crews for ships that were deployed to the South Pacific, but she sank in a cyclone in the Gulf of Aden with the loss of all aboard.

The French shipbuilder, Arman Brothers of Bordeaux, accepted the secret order, nominally for Japan; the design for the ships was prepared in 1863, the same year construction began on the vessels.

[2][3] The Prussian government expected the Second Schleswig War against Denmark, then ongoing, to last much longer than it did, and so it started to look for warships being built in Britain and France either speculatively or for a buyer that might not be able to pay for them.

When it became known that Napoleon had blocked the sale of Yeddo and Osaka, Prussia purchased the ships and the ex-Confederate ironclad warship Cheops in May 1864 to strengthen its fleet.

[1][4] Augusta was delivered without issue, but by the time Victoria was approaching completion, Denmark had lobbied the French government to prevent delivery of the ship, supported by Great Britain.

[2] The Augusta-class ships were powered by a single horizontal, 2-cylinder marine steam engine that drove a pair of 2-bladed screw propellers that were 4.28 m (14 ft 1 in) in diameter.

They had a storage capacity for 340 t (330 long tons) of coal, which gave them a cruising radius of 2,500 nautical miles (4,600 km; 2,900 mi) at a speed of 12 knots (22 km/h; 14 mph).

[6][7] In December 1867, she embarked on the first of three major overseas cruises under what was now the North German Federal Navy, with the secret objective of securing a naval base in Central America.

Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, abandoned the idea in favor of maintaining good relations with the United States.

The first cruise again went to Central American waters, but also involved a patrol off the coast of Spain to protect German interests amidst unrest in the country during the Third Carlist War.

While touring ports in the Caribbean, she was transferred to the Mediterranean Sea in 1877 during the Russo-Turkish War, which the German government feared might result in riots against Europeans living within the Ottoman Empire.

Later that year, she joined an international fleet in the Adriatic Sea aimed at forcing the Ottoman Empire to comply with the terms of the 1878 Congress of Berlin.

And in late 1880, she steamed to Liberia in western Africa to retaliate for an attack on a German merchant vessel that had become stranded in the country earlier in the year.

Her time in the West Indies station was confined to a tour of South American ports in mid-1881, after which she returned to Liberia to force the government to comply with German demands for restitution.