Japanese cruiser Tatsuta (1894)
Tatsuta in 1908 at Yokosuka
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| History | |
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 Empire of Japan
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| Name: | Tatsuta |
| Ordered: | 1891 Fiscal Year |
| Builder: | Armstrong Whitworth, UK |
| Laid down: | 7 April 1893 |
| Launched: | 6 April 1894 |
| Completed: | 31 July 1894 |
| Decommissioned: | 1 April 1916 |
| Reclassified: | 9 December 1916 |
| Struck: | 26 March 1926 |
| Fate: | Scrapped 6 April 1926 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | none |
| Type: | Unprotected cruiser |
| Displacement: | 650 long tons (660 t) |
| Length: | 77.1 m (253.0 ft) |
| Beam: | 8.38 m (27.5 ft) |
| Draft: | 2.9 m (9.5 ft) |
| Propulsion: | 2-shaft reciprocating VTE, 5,069 ihp (3,780 kW), 200 tons coal |
| Speed: | 21 knots (24 mph; 39 km/h) |
| Complement: | 100 |
| Armament: |
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Tatsuta (龍田?) was an unprotected cruiser of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The name Tatsuta comes from the Tatsuta River, near Nara. Tatsuta was used by the Imperial Japanese Navy primarily as an aviso (dispatch boat) used for scouting, reconnaissance and delivery of priority messages.
Tatsuta was ordered from Armstrong Whitworth in Elswick, Newcastle upon Tyne, England as a large torpedo boat under the 1891 Fiscal Year budget as a replacement for the ill-fated Chishima.
Tatsuta had a steel hull and retained a full barque rigging with two masts for auxiliary sail propulsion in addition to her steam engine. She was armed with two QF 4.7 inch Gun Mk I–IVs guns, four QF 3 pounder Hotchkiss guns, five 2.5-pounder guns and five torpedo tubes, mounted on the deck.
Rushed through production due to the impending First Sino-Japanese War, Tatsuta was en route to Japan when hostilities commenced, and she was impounded in the port of Aden on 28 August 1894 by British authorities, as the United Kingdom took an official position of neutrality in that conflict. She was not allowed to reach Japan until 19 March 1895, after the war was over. On 21 March 1896, Tatsuta was re-classified as a dispatch vessel. In 1900, she was assigned to assist in escorting transports supporting Japanese naval landing forces which occupied the port city of Tianjin in northern China during the Boxer Rebellion, as part of the Japanese contribution to the Eight-Nation Alliance. In 1902, she underwent overhaul at Kure Naval Arsenal, where she became the first vessel in the Japanese navy to have her locomotive-type cylindrical boilers were replaced with high pressure Niclausse boilers.
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