SMS Delphin was a of the Prussian Navy (later the Imperial German Navy) that was launched in 1860. A small vessel, armed with only three light guns, Delphin served during the Second Schleswig War of 1864 and the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, part of the conflicts that unified Germany. The ship was present at, but was only lightly engaged in the Battle of Jasmund during the Second Schleswig War. The ship spent much of the rest of her career in the Mediterranean Sea, going on three lengthy deployments there in 1865–1866, 1867–1870, and 1871–1873. During the last tour, she took part in operations off the coast of Spain with an Anglo-German squadron during the Third Carlist War, where she helped to suppress forces rebelling against the Spanish government. For the rest of the 1870s, she served as a survey vessel in the North and Baltic Seas before being decommissioned in August 1881, stricken from the naval register the following month, and subsequently broken up for scrap.
Design
The s came about as a result of a program to strengthen the Prussian Navy in the late 1850s in the aftermath of the dissolution of the and in the midst of rising tensions with Denmark. In 1859, Prince Regent Wilhelm approved a construction program for some fifty-two gunboats to be built over the next fifteen years, of which eight became the Camäleon class. They were similar to the contemporaneous s, but were substantially larger vessels.
Delphin was long, with a beam of and a draft of . She displaced at full load. The ship's crew consisted of 4 officers and 67 enlisted men. She was powered by a single marine steam engine that drove one 3-bladed screw propeller, with steam provided by two coal-fired trunk boilers, which gave her a top speed of at . As built, she was equipped with a three-masted schooner rig. The ship was armed with a battery of one rifled 24-pounder muzzle-loading gun and two rifled 12-pounder muzzle-loading guns.
Service history
Construction through 1866
The keel for Delphin was laid down at the Königliche Werft (Royal Dockyard) in Danzig on 8 September 1859. She was launched a little over a year later, on 15 September 1860. After completing fitting-out, she was transferred to the naval base at Stralsund in September 1861, and while en route conducted speed trials that demonstrated Delphin was capable of a speed higher than her sister ships. Her higher speed led to several overseas deployments later in her career, though like her sisters, she was initially laid up in reserve after completion. In late 1863, tensions began to rise between Prussia and Austria of the German Confederation and Denmark over the latter's November Constitution, which integrated the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg with Denmark, a violation of the London Protocol that had ended the First Schleswig War. On 1 March 1864, after the start of the Second Schleswig War, Delphin was reactivated and stationed in Dänholm off Stralsund. There, she was assigned to the II Flotilla Division. On 14 April, after a minor action off the island of Hiddensee, in which Delphin did not take part, the Prussian gunboat flotilla was reduced to a reserve formation and took no further active part in the war. After the war in 1865, Delphin was tasked with surveying Eckernförde Bay outside Kiel in Holstein, which was now under the administration of the German Confederation. From 1 to 3 March, Delphin served as an ice breaker in Eckernförde Bay.