However, the 930-ton single-screw vessel was not powerful enough to keep even the southernmost port of Finland, Hanko, open during severe winters and the icebreaking characteristics of its spoon-shaped bow were not as good as was hoped for.

[3] Sampo was officially commissioned on 15 November 1898 and began assisting ships outside the port of Hanko while the smaller Murtaja was stationed closer to the harbour.

On 9 March 1899, her performance was demonstrated to the director of the Finnish Pilot and Lighthouse Authority when both state-owned icebreakers headed to the sea, Murtaja running in a previously opened channel and Sampo alongside in unbroken ice.

The smaller icebreaker could not stop in time and collided with Sampo, causing damage to her stern structures but fortunately no injuries to the passengers.

[11] In August 1914 Russia joined the First World War and navigating in the Baltic Sea became dangerous due to naval mines and German U-boats.

The Finnish icebreakers were placed under the command of the Baltic Fleet of the Imperial Russian Navy and given the task of assisting naval ships and troop transportations in the Gulf of Finland.

The Russian commissar who was on board at the time was taken into custody and left on ice outside the port of Pori before the icebreaker headed for Gävle to wait for further orders.

[15] Sampo had a significant impact on the outcome of the Civil War when it assisted three convoys to the White-controlled ports in northern Finland.

The ships, passenger steamship Arcturus and cargo steamer Castor, had left Libau on 14 February with the bulk of the troops, 950 Jägers, and some 1,200 tons of coal.

Castor was left outside Gävle while Arcturus was escorted through difficult ice conditions to Vaasa, where it arrived on 25 February in the midst of a large crowd of cheering people.

[15] On 4 April, while heading out from the port of Hanko with German warships, the convoy led by Sampo encountered another Finnish icebreaker, Murtaja, coming from Utö with the steamship Dragsfjärd.

[15] While Sampo had not been damaged in the war, she was docked at the Hietalahti shipyard for extensive maintenance and repairs — when she left to the port of Hanko in mid-February 1919, 69 bottom plates had been replaced.

[17] Another incident occurred on 24 March 1926 when the bow propeller of Sampo hit a stone bank in the port of Helsinki, came loose and dropped to the bottom.

[21] On 6 January 1940 Sampo was assisting a convoy of three merchant ships towards Pori in difficult conditions — the temperature was nearly −30 °C (−22 °F) and fog reduced the visibility to zero.

The icebreaker was proceeding in light ice conditions at 8 knots (15 km/h; 9.2 mph) when she collided with an underwater obstacle and suddenly stopped, throwing the helmsman through the wheelhouse windows and damaging the ship's radio antennas.

[22] The first rescue attempts were made on the following day when two tugboats tried to turn the stern of Sampo towards open water together with the icebreaker's own engine and rudder.

On 8 January Sampo was further damaged when the wind pushed a large ice floe against the side of the icebreaker and the waves began pounding her hull against the rocks.

In the following night Sampo slowly settled in the bottom, listing the partially submerged icebreaker approximately 20 degrees starboard.

[23] Neptun began salvaging the grounded Sampo in May 1940 by emptying the coal storages and melting the ice masses inside the vessel with steam.

The icebreaker was towed to Turku in June because the longer distance to Helsinki was deemed too risky — large stones had wedged between the mangled bottom plating, and had they fallen during the transit, Sampo would have filled with water and sunk.

[24] In 1946, after the war had ended to the Moscow Armistice, the Allied Control Commission ordered Sampo to assist ships in the Soviet port of Leningrad.

[31] One of the last tasks of the old icebreaker was to tow the recently decommissioned full-rigged training ship Suomen Joutsen from Porkkala to Turku, where the three-masted frigate would be converted to a Seamen's School for the Finnish Merchant Navy, on 15–17 January 1960.

In addition the bow propeller shaft of Sampo serves the Finnish winter navigation to this day as part of a sea mark on a small skerry southeast from the island of Utö.

The bow was reinforced with a wide ice belt up to one inch (2.5 cm) thick and all steel structures were dimensioned beyond Lloyd's Register requirements.

The main function of the bow propeller was to reduce friction between the hull and the ice, although the exact details of the icebreaking process were not known at that time.