SMS Sophie was a member of the Carola class of steam corvettes built for the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) in the 1880s.

Intended for service in the German colonial empire, the ship was designed with a combination of steam and sail power for extended range, and was equipped with a battery of ten 15-centimeter (5.9 in) guns.

Sophie was laid down at the Kaiserliche Werft (Imperial Shipyard) in Danzig in 1880, she was launched in November 1881, and she was completed in August 1882.

Sophie and her sister ships were intended to patrol Germany's colonial empire and safeguard German economic interests around the world.

Sophie was equipped with a three-masted barque rig to supplement her steam engines on extended overseas deployments.

She exited the Mediterranean on 30 December, bound for what was to become the protectorate of Togoland, where significant opposition to German commercial activities was occurring.

While en route, Sophie stopped at the ruins of Groß Friedrichsburg, the capital of the old Brandenburger Gold Coast, which had been founded in the 1680s.

The ship's captain and a landing party went ashore to make sketches of the fortress ruins; they located six old guns, one of which was taken aboard Sophie and later returned to Germany for display.

The captain, Wilhelm Steubenrauch, was under orders to avoid any aggressive action, and to merely show the flag and report on conditions in the area.

Owing to the gravity of the situation, Steubenrauch ignored his orders to avoid combat, and he sent a landing party of 150 men ashore to protect the German trading post in Klein-Popo and arrest the chiefs who remained hostile, who were taken aboard Sophie before she departed.

Sophie was badly damaged in the collision, with a large hole torn into her hull from her weather deck down to below the level of the coal bunker, but her crew quickly contained the flooding.

[7] While in Lisbon, the navy ordered Sophie to leave Stein and join the cruiser squadron in German East Africa, commanded by Kommodore (Commodore) Karl Eduard Heusner.

After exchanging her trainees with trained men from Stein, she departed on 6 November and reached the cruiser squadron in Zanzibar on 14 December.

On 31 May, Sophie stopped in Singapore for more maintenance work, and while there, the squadron received orders to return to East Africa.

The navy had intended to send Sophie to the Pacific, but damage to her engines sustained on the trip back from Aden precluded such a long voyage, so Olga was sent instead.

Sophie went to Mikindani, Kenya and then to Lindi in German East Africa before putting a landing party ashore at the mouth of the Kingani river on 27 October.

Deinhard temporarily came aboard Sophie to direct a blockade of the coast from 28 November to 1 December, from the Mafia Channel to Kiswere.

The 1889 Apia cyclone destroyed the gunboats Adler and Eber in March, so the navy ordered Sophie to leave East Africa to replace them.

Three days after the ship's new commander arrived on 2 April, she departed, but had to stop in Port Louis, Mauritius to repair damage to one of her propellers.

She arrived in Apia on 25 June, where she met the only other German warship in the Pacific, the gunboat Wolf, which had brought Malietoa Laupepa back from exile.

On 25 January, with repairs completed, she began a tour of the Bismarck Archipelago, which concluded with a visit to Sir Charles Hardy Island to punish locals who had robbed and murdered a German merchant.

In early March, she went to East Asian waters, and while en route, joined the fruitless search for a boat lost near the Jaluit Atoll that had been at sea with two dozen people aboard.

After the war ended, Sophie and the other ships were able to leave for Cape Town before proceeding on to German East Africa in April 1892.

On 1 August 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, she was transferred to the island of Helgoland in the German Bight; she remained there until 1916, when she was moved to Emden, still in use as a barracks.