In the early 1880s, Navy Minister Kawamura Sumiyoshi was struggling to reconcile his desire for expansion in the face of the growing Chinese Beiyang Fleet with Japan's limited financial resources.

[1] After Chile rejected Kawamura's attempt to buy her in September 1883, he placed an order for two improved versions, the Naniwa class, with Armstrong Whitworth in March 1884 as Japan was not yet capable of building such ships itself.

[2] Compared with the preceding British-built Naniwa-class cruisers, Unebi was an old-fashioned design, fully rigged for auxiliary sail propulsion.

[5] Unebi was fitted with a full barque rig with three masts and had a sail area of 1,120 square meters (12,100 sq ft).

[7] With a mixed crew of Japanese sailors and shipyard employees aboard, Unebi attempted to depart Le Havre for Japan on the 18th, but had to turn back when she ran into a storm that caused her to roll so heavily that her safety was endangered.

A stronger storm caused Unebi to return to Aden, Yemen, where she off-loaded two of her main guns in an effort to improve her stability.

A single reliable clue emerged unexpectedly around ten years after the ship disappeared: In July 1897, reports in the US newspapers New York Tribune and Morning Times revealed that years earlier, villagers had found the wreckage of a Japanese ship washed up on the Pescadores Islands (which had been under Japanese sovereignty since 1895).

Subsequent investigations by the Japanese Navy and police units on the islands revealed that fishermen had indeed found ship wreckage on the beaches around a decade earlier and used it to build wooden huts.

During subsequent examinations of the huts, investigators found, among other things, decorated wooden strips and two cabin doors bearing the weathered lettering Unebi.

However, the Imperial Japanese Navy was reluctant to continue working with French shipyards after the Unebi disaster, and placed its order for the French-designed Chiyoda with John Brown & Company in Scotland.