- Source: SMS Panther (1901)
SMS Panther was one of six Iltis-class gunboats of the Kaiserliche Marine that, like its sister ships, served in Germany's overseas colonies. The ship was launched on 1 April 1901 in the Kaiserliche Werft, Danzig. It had a crew of 9 officers and 121 men.
Design
The German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) abandoned gunboat construction for more a decade after Eber, launched in 1887. By the mid-1890s, the navy began planning to replace the older vessels of the Wolf and Habicht classes, but the loss of the gunboat Iltis necessitated an immediate replacement, which was added to the 1898 naval budget. The new ship was planned to patrol the German colonial empire; requirements included engines powerful enough for the ship to steam up the Yangtze in China, where the new gunboat was intended to be deployed. Six ships were built in three identical pairs.
Panther was 66.9 meters (219 ft 6 in) long overall and had a beam of 9.7 m (31 ft 10 in) and a draft of 3.54 m (11 ft 7 in) forward. She displaced 977 metric tons (962 long tons) as designed and 1,193 t (1,174 long tons) at full load. The ship had a raised forecastle deck and a straight stem. Her superstructure consisted primarily of a conning tower with an open bridge atop it. She had a crew of 9 officers and 121 enlisted men.
Her propulsion system consisted of a pair of horizontal triple-expansion steam engines each driving a single screw propeller, with steam supplied by four coal-fired Thornycroft boilers. Exhaust was vented through two funnels located amidships. Panther could steam at a top speed of 13.5 knots (25.0 km/h; 15.5 mph) at 1,300 metric horsepower (1,300 ihp). The ship had a cruising radius of about 3,400 nautical miles (6,300 km; 3,900 mi) at a speed of 9 knots (17 km/h; 10 mph).
Panther was armed with a main battery of two 10.5 cm (4.1 in) SK L/40 guns, with 482 rounds of ammunition. One was placed on the forecastle and the other at the stern. She also carried six 37 mm (1.5 in) Maxim guns. The only armor protection carried by the ship was 8 mm (0.31 in) of steel plate on the conning tower.
Service history
Panther was laid down at the Kaiserliche Werft (Imperial Shipyard) in Danzig in 1900. She was launched on 1 April 1901 and was commissioned into the German fleet on 15 March 1902.
In September 1902, after the Haitian rebel ship Crête-à-Pierrot hijacked the German steamer Markomannia and seized weapons destined for the Haitian government, Germany sent Panther to Haiti. Panther found the rebel ship. The rebel Admiral Killick evacuated his crew and blew up Crête-à-Pierrot, which was by then under fire from Panther. There were concerns about how the United States would view the action in the context of the Monroe Doctrine. But despite legal advice describing the sinking as "illegal and excessive", the US State Department endorsed the action. The New York Times declared that "Germany was quite within its rights in doing a little housecleaning on her own account".
Some months later, in December 1902, the Panther was in the German naval contingent during the naval blockade of Venezuela, during which she bombarded the settlement of Fort San Carlos, near Maracaibo. The shallow waters that connected lake Maracaibo with the sea were passable for major ships only in the strait that separated San Carlos from the island of Zapara, yet even there it needed the help of a local pilot to avoid the sand banks and shallow waters of the passage. The battle started when the fort's gunners opened fire as Panther was crossing the bar. Panther returned fire, but the shallow waters limited its effectiveness. Inside the fort, two gunners (Manuel Quevedo and Carlos José Cárdenas) managed to score several hits on Panther with their 80-millimeter Krupp gun, causing considerable damage. After half an hour of exchanging fire, the Germans retreated.
In 1905, Panther was sent to the Brazilian Port of Itajahy, where its crew conducted an unauthorized search in their pursuit of a German deserter by the name of Hassman. They ended up kidnapping, inexplicably, the German Fritz Steinhoff. This incident became known as the "Panther Affair" ("Caso Panther").
In October, 1906, Panther visited the Royal Naval Dockyard, in the British Imperial fortress colony of Bermuda, anchoring at Grassy Bay, the main anchorage of the squadron of the Royal Navy's North America and West Indies Station to the east of Ireland Island and in the mouth of the Great Sound. Members of the crew were hosted on Sunday, the 14 October 1906, by the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps at the new St. George Hotel on Rose Hill at St. George's Town, to where they were carried from Grassy Bay by the steamer Gladisfen of the firm William E. Meyer and Company, Ltd (named for the Danzig-born progenitor of Bermuda's prominent Meyer family).
= Agadir Crisis
=Panther became notorious in 1911 when it was deployed to the Moroccan port of Agadir during the "Agadir Crisis" (also called the "Second Moroccan Crisis"). Panther was dispatched on the pretext of protecting (non-existent) German citizens in the port (a German sales representative, Hermann Wilberg, had been sent to Agadir on behalf of the Foreign office, but only arrived three days after Panther). The ship's actual mission was to apply pressure on the French, as the latter attempted to colonize Morocco, to extract territorial compensation in French Equatorial Africa. This was an example of "gunboat diplomacy". The incident contributed to the international tensions that would lead to the First World War.
The ship was scrapped in 1931.
Notes
References
Gröner, Erich (1990). German Warships: 1815–1945. Vol. I: Major Surface Vessels. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-0-87021-790-6.
Hildebrand, Hans H.; Röhr, Albert & Steinmetz, Hans-Otto (1993). Die Deutschen Kriegsschiffe: Biographien: ein Spiegel der Marinegeschichte von 1815 bis zur Gegenwart (Band 7) [The German Warships: Biographies: A Reflection of Naval History from 1815 to the Present (Vol. 7)] (in German). Ratingen: Mundus Verlag. ISBN 9783782202671.
Lyon, Hugh (1979). "Germany". In Gardiner, Robert; Chesneau, Roger; Kolesnik, Eugene M. (eds.). Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1860–1905. Greenwich: Conway Maritime Press. ISBN 978-0-85177-133-5.
Mitchell, Nancy (1999). The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-4775-6.
Nottelmann, Dirk (2022). "The Development of the Small Cruiser in the Imperial German Navy Part III: The Gunboats". In Jordan, John (ed.). Warship 2022. Oxford: Osprey Publishing. pp. 63–79. ISBN 978-1-4728-4781-2.
Simpson, Lloyd P. (1966). "The German-Haitian Naval Clash of 1902". Warship International. III (23): 216. ISSN 0043-0374.