The Admiraal van Wassenaar was part of the 1852 program which started the introduction of screw propelled warships to the Dutch navy.

The first captain of the Wassenaar would personally arrange his own quarters to include a comfortable sleeping place, a small saloon, and an anteroom or as he called it 'church'.

[6] On her first trip from Nieuwediep to Plymouth she reached 6.5 knots at full speed, the screw making 52 turns a minute.

[12] After dumping another 40 tons of ballast at Malta, and making an alteration that allowed her to lift the screw out of the water, the captain declared the Wassenaar to have been the best sailer that he had ever set foot on.

When it was getting coppered for its first trip in Vlissingen, the media wrote that the visually perfect ship would make a good steam frigate according to some, but also raised a lot of mixed feelings with others.

She was destined to Lissabon, where she would meet the sailing frigate De Ruyter and the steam corvette Groningen for a cruise in the Mediterranean.

After the prince left with the Groningen, the Wassenaar and De Ruyter stayed in Lisbon to wait for the brig Zeehond, which carried 12 cadets for them.

On 20 September a letter from the Wassenaar indicated that she would leave for Valencia the next day, and then sail to Malta, Port Mahon, Palma and Naples, planning to arriving back in the Netherlands in mid November.

(Now in the Maritime Museum Den Helder) The Wassenaar left Piraeus the day after, and after some shooting exercises near Milo, she arrived in Malta on 3 March, where she spent 2.5 months.

On 18 October the Secretary for the Navy and Rear Admirals Bijl de Vroe and 't Hooft visited the Wassenaar and the Vesuvius.

The Wassenaar met continued headwinds and therefore had to steam for 10 days, though in order to save cost, this was not done at full power.

Therefore, the Wassenaar continued to cruise north of the Galloper and the recently installed light ship on the Hinder bank (at the latitude of Vlissingen).

In a fierce storm that hit Nieuwediep on 1 November the Wassenaar got loose of its anchor chain, and collided with the sail corvette Juno, both ships getting damaged.

After this delay the Wassenaar left for Cherbourg to dock there, but arrived back in Nieuwediep on 21 November due to a problem with the engines.

The occasion was the American Civil War, which caused the Dutch government to send ship to the West Indies.

On 27 July the Wassenaar, with the Dutch Chargé d'affairs on board, sailed to La Guaira, the harbor of Caracas.

Her appearance before the harbor on 30 July led to the quick release of the Dutch merchant ships Honfleur and Sarah.

In February 1872 a projected cruise by the Wassenaar to the Mediterranean was cancelled, and instead she was prepared to participate in handing over the Dutch Coast of Guinea to England.

She was prepared to leave Nieuwediep on 4 March, but by that time 45 sailors were missing, so the Wassenaar waited two days for the police to put most of them on board 'in irons'.

[49] The Wassenaar had to go to Guinea to make some show, because only the Screw corvette Citadel van Antwerpen and the Sloop Het Loo were present there.

'[50] However, the real reason to send the Wassenaar might have been the number of men that could be landed from board, not the obsolete fighting capabilities of the ship.

This was stressed by the widely proclaimed article 17 of the institute's charter that forbade corporal punishment for boys enlisted on the Wassenaar.

In late 1876 secretary for the navy Van Erp Taalman Kip was applauded for his policy in the Dutch representative body.

After a few years the education was changed so that boys were first trained at the Kweekschool voor Zeevaart in Leiden, and then sent to either the Wassenaar or the Anna Paulowna.

There were plans to decommission the Wassenaar in April 1884, to transfer the education to the Anna Paulowna alone, and to move that ship to Vlissingen.

[56] The Wassenaar did require some repairs to decks, rigging and spars, but did not have to be decommissioned because the boys could temporarily be housed in some of the large buildings on the Rijkswerf.

With equipment provided by the Société française des Télégraphes et Téléphones sans fil, a wireless connection was made to the tower of the Bovenkerk in Kampen,[63] a distance of c 70 km primarily over water.

In November 1904 the station on the Wassenaar exchanged telegrams with the HNLMS Hertog Hendrik when she made her maiden voyage to the East Indies.

In all probability the removal of the spars and cutting down the main mast[66] were done with the express purpose of making room for a T-antenna.

The boatswain's call sounded, the officers saluted, the marines presented their arms, and the Wassenaar was no longer a warship.