List of screw corvettes of Germany
A further two vessels, Nixe and Charlotte, were built in the early 1880s specifically to serve as training ships, a role that many of the older corvettes had begun to fill by that time.
Throughout the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, German corvettes went on numerous deployments abroad, frequently to South America, the Mediterranean Sea, China, and the central Pacific Ocean.
While on these cruises, the ships were frequently called to carry out the same responsibilities as front-line warships, protecting Germans during periods of unrest in foreign countries and showing the flag.
Most of the corvettes were sold for scrap between the 1880s and 1920s, but two were lost in accidents; Augusta was sunk by a cyclone in the Gulf of Aden in 1885 and the Bismarck-class ship Gneisenau was wrecked in a storm off Málaga in 1900.
As early as the 1850s, the Prussian Navy began to make preparations for a naval expansion program, starting with the Arcona-class screw frigates in 1854.
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck used a loophole to secure funding for Roon's reforms, and the Nymphe class was ordered without parliamentary approval.
[2] Nymphe was completed in time for the Second Schleswig War with Denmark in 1864, seeing action at the Battle of Jasmund, where she was heavily engaged, but only slightly damaged by a Danish frigate.
[4] In 1862, during the American Civil War, the Confederate States Navy secretly placed an order for a pair of screw corvettes with the Arman Brothers shipyard of Bordeaux, France; these ships were to be named Mississippi and Louisiana.
Before the vessels could be delivered to the Confederate States, the French Emperor Napoleon III intervened in 1864 to prevent neutral France from selling the warships to an active belligerent.
[13][14][15] All three of the ships served extensively on overseas deployments throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, primarily in South America, the Mediterranean Sea, and East Asia.
On these voyages, the ships and their captains performed a number of duties, including protecting German nationals during periods of unrest or open warfare in various countries, negotiating trade agreements with numerous governments, and combating piracy.
This program, which was formulated by the first chief of the Kaiserliche Admiralität (Imperial Admiralty), General Albrecht von Stosch, adopted the same figure of twenty corvettes as Jachmann's earlier plan.
Leipzig was significantly larger than Freya; her increased size allowed for a substantially stronger gun battery, a more powerful propulsion system, and more spacious crew quarters, which proved to be very useful on extended voyages overseas.
She served abroad in this capacity from 1888 to 1893; during this extended deployment, she participated in the campaign to suppress the Abushiri revolt in German East Africa in 1888–1890.
[22][23] Increased demands on the fleet to protect German overseas economic interests in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War necessitated the construction of new corvettes to shoulder the burden.
[29] Bismarck was involved in the seizure of the colony of Kamerun in 1884, and she, Gneisenau, and Stosch were used to secure the protectorate of Wituland in 1885–1886, which later became German East Africa.
The Carola class was an obsolescent design before work even started, however, as other navies began to build more modern unprotected cruisers for colonial duties.
By the end of the 1890s, all of the ships had been removed from front line service and reduced to secondary roles, including training, accommodation, and fisheries protection duties.
Since she was essentially useless as a warship, she was completed as a training ship for naval cadets and apprentice seamen, a role she filled for nearly fifteen years.
After being removed from active service in 1900, she was used as a headquarters ship for the High Seas Fleet from 1906 to 1910, when the Reichstag (Imperial Diet) cut funding for the vessel.
The firm converted her into a lighter in the midst of a severe lack of merchant vessels after World War I, and she was used in that role from 1925 to 1930 under her original name, when she was broken up.
[55] Though Charlotte spent her career as a training ship, she was involved in international incidents while abroad, most notably the Lüders affair in Haiti in 1897 and the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–1903.
She served in these capacities to the outbreak of World War I in July 1914; in October, she was briefly reactivated, the only time in the history of the German navies that a vessel that had been stricken was re-commissioned.
