HMS Pegasus (1897)
HMS Pegasus
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| History | |
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 United Kingdom
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| Name: | HMS Pegasus |
| Ordered: | 1893 |
| Builder: | Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company |
| Laid down: | May 1896 at Jarrow |
| Launched: | 4 March 1897 |
| Commissioned: | 17 January 1899 |
| Motto: | "Excelsior" |
| Fate: | Sunk by SMS Königsberg in Zanzibar harbour, 20 September 1914 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Pelorus-class protected cruiser |
| Displacement: |
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| Length: | 300 ft (91.4 m) |
| Beam: | 36 ft 6 in (11.13 m) |
| Draught: | 17 ft (5.2 m) |
| Installed power: | 7,000 ihp (5,220 kW) |
| Propulsion: |
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| Speed: | 20 kn (23 mph; 37 km/h) |
| Complement: | 224 |
| Armament: | |
HMS Pegasus was one of 11 Pelorus-class protected cruisers ordered for the Royal Navy in 1893 under the Spencer Program and based on the earlier Pearl class. The class were fitted with a variety of different boilers, most of which were not entirely satisfactory, and by 1914, four ships had been withdrawn. They had all been condemned in 1904 but were reprieved and remained in service, with scrapping proposed in 1915.
Pegasus was completed in 1898, and in 1899, she was stationed off the southeast coast of America. She was commissioned at Chatham on 21 May 1901 by Commander Edmund Hyde Smith, to serve at the Mediterranean Station. In June 1902 she was in Gibraltar for a coronation fête. She was later stationed at Australia, China, and finally Africa, serving on the Cape of Good Hope Station in 1906.
In 1908, Pegasus rescued the crew of the wrecked French barque President Félix Faure, who had been stranded for sixty days on the Antipodes Islands.
Pegasus remained part of the Cape Station on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War. As the likelihood of war with Germany increased, the commander of the Cape Station, Rear Admiral Herbert King-Hall, deployed his ships in order to counter the threat posed by the German light cruiser Königsberg, based at Dar es Salaam. On 31 July 1914, Pegasus sighted Königsberg leaving Dar es Salaam, but was unable to keep track of the faster German cruiser. King-Hall recognised that Königsberg outclassed Pegasus and intended that Pegasus should operate with the cruiser Astraea while his flagship Hyacinth operated independently to protect the trade routes around the Cape, but on 12 August, the Admiralty ordered Astraea to join Hyacinth off the Cape to escort troop convoys, leaving Pegasus unsupported at Zanzibar. On 23 August Pegasus sailed to the port of Bagomayo in German East Africa with the intention of forcing a truce so that the port would take no further part in the war. When the port authorities refused to agree to such a truce, Pegasus shelled the port's Customs House.
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Wikipedia