French cruiser Dupuy de Lôme
A postcard of Dupuy de Lôme
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| History | |
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 France
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| Name: | Dupuy de Lôme |
| Namesake: | Henri Dupuy de Lôme |
| Builder: | Brest shipyard |
| Laid down: | 4 July 1888 |
| Launched: | 27 October 1890 |
| Commissioned: | 15 May 1895 |
| Decommissioned: | 20 March 1910 |
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| General characteristics (as completed) | |
| Type: | Armoured cruiser |
| Displacement: | 6,301 tonnes (6,201 long tons) |
| Length: | 114 m (374 ft 0.2 in) (pp) |
| Beam: | 15.7 m (51 ft 6.1 in) |
| Draught: | 7.07 m (23 ft 2.3 in) (mean) |
| Installed power: | 14,000 metric horsepower (13,808 ihp) |
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| Speed: | 20 knots (37 km/h; 23 mph) (designed) |
| Range: | 4,000 nmi (7,400 km; 4,600 mi) at 12.5 knots (23.2 km/h; 14.4 mph) |
| Complement: | 521 |
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Dupuy de Lôme was an armoured cruiser built for the French Navy (Marine Nationale) during the late 1880s and 1890s. She is considered by some to be the world's first armoured cruiser and was intended to attack enemy merchant ships. The ship was named after the naval architect Henri Dupuy de Lôme.Dupuy de Lôme's completion was delayed by almost two years by problems with her boilers, but she was finally commissioned in 1895 and assigned to the Northern Squadron (Escadre du Nord), based at Brest, for most of her career. The ship made a number of visits to foreign ports before she began a lengthy reconstruction in 1902. By the time this was completed in 1906, the cruiser was regarded as obsolete and Dupuy de Lôme was placed in reserve, aside from one assignment in Morocco.
The ship was sold to the Peruvian Navy in 1912, but they never paid the last two installments and the ship remained inactive at Brest during World War I. The French agreed to take the ship back in 1917, keeping the money already paid, and they sold her in 1918 to a Belgian shipping company that converted her into a freighter. Renamed Péruvier, the ship's engines broke down and she had to be towed to her destination where part of her cargo of coal was discovered to be on fire during her maiden voyage as a merchant vessel in 1920. Deemed uneconomical to repair, Péruvier was towed to Antwerp and later scrapped in 1923.
Dupuy de Lôme was designed to fill the commerce-raiding strategy of the Jeune École. Considered by some the first true armoured cruiser, she was superior to existing British and Italian protected cruisers, especially in her relatively thick steel armour. She could control the engagement range with her superior speed and her heavy armament of quick-firing guns, all of which were mounted in gun turrets, in marked contrast to her intended opponents who mounted their guns in lightly protected casemates or pivot mounts.
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Wikipedia