SMS Albatross (1871)

SMS Albatross was a gunboat, the lead ship of the Albatross class, which were built for the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The ship was ordered as part of a construction program intended to begin replacing the old Jäger-class gunboats that had been built a decade earlier. Unlike the older ships, Albatross was intended to serve abroad to protect German economic interests overseas. The ship was armed with a battery of four guns, and had a top speed of 10.5 knots (19.4 km/h; 12.1 mph).

Albatross spent the first half of her career overseas, beginning with a deployment to South America from 1872 to 1874. After a brief period of time in home waters in 1874, she sailed to Spain to protect German nationals there during the Third Carlist War, patrolling the coast there into 1875. From 1877 to 1880, Albatross cruised in the Pacific Ocean, which included periods in Chinese waters as well as the South Pacific. After an overhaul in Germany in the early 1880s, Albatross spent the years from 1882 to 1888 overseas, beginning with a tour of South America that included an observation of the 1882 transit of Venus. She then moved back to the South Pacific, and in 1887, she took the exiled Samoan king Malietoa Laupepa to the German colony of Kamerun in Central Africa. After returning to Germany in 1888, she was used as a survey ship in home waters. She was eventually struck from the naval register in 1899, sold soon thereafter, and eventually converted into a storage hulk in 1905. She did not survive long, being wrecked in a storm the following year.