The Chilean cruiser Esmeralda was the first protected cruiser, a ship type named for the arched armored deck that protected vital areas like propulsion machinery and ammunition magazines. The British shipbuilder Armstrong Mitchell constructed Esmeralda in the early 1880s, and the company's founder hailed the new ship as "the swiftest and most powerfully armed cruiser in the world"."The 'Esmeralda,'" Record (Valparaiso) 13, no. 183 (4 December 1884): 5. After it entered service, the Chileans deployed Esmeralda to Panama in 1885 to show the flag during an emerging crisis in the region. The cruiser was later used to support the Congressionalist cause during the 1891 Chilean Civil War.
In 1894, Esmeralda was sold to Japan via Ecuador. Renamed Izumi, the cruiser arrived too late to participate in the major naval battles of the 1894–1895 First Sino-Japanese War. It did see active service in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, where it contributed to a decisive Japanese victory in the Battle of Tsushima by being one of the first ships to make visual contact with the opposing fleet. In 1912, the aging Izumi was decommissioned and stricken from the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Design Background Esmeralda was designed and constructed in an era of rapidly advancing naval technology. Earlier cruisers were often constructed primarily of wood and nearly all carried the masts and rigging required for sailing; Esmeralda was built of steel and was not rigged for sailing. As such, historians have called it the first protected cruiser, a ship type characterized by its use of an arched armored deck to protect vital areas like propulsion machinery and ammunition magazines.Brook, Warships for Export, 44, 53.
The rise of protected cruisers accompanied that of the French naval theory, which catered to nations in a position of naval inferiority.Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 139–140. As historian Arne Røksund has said, "one of the fundamental ideas in the s naval theory [was] that the weaker side should resort to alternative strategies and tactics, taking advantage of the possibilities opened up by technological progress."Røksund, Jeune École, x. To accomplish this, adherents called for the construction of small, steam-powered, heavy-gunned, long-ranged, and higher-speed warships to counter the capital ship-heavy strategy of major navies and devastate their merchant shipping.
Within the Chilean context, Esmeralda was ordered in the midst of the 1879–1884 War of the Pacific, fought between Chile and an alliance of Bolivia and Peru. As moving goods and supplies in the region was far easier by sea, control of that would likely determine the victor. As a result, both sides rushed to acquire new and old warships in Europe even while Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and the United Kingdom were determined to remain neutral in the conflict. Esmeralda was the most capable of these ships, and although British neutrality meant that it could not be delivered until after the war's conclusion, the Chileans ordered it with the intention of gaining long-term naval superiority over their neighbors.Grant, Rulers, 121–122.Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 132.
Esmeralda was designed by the British naval architect George Wightwick Rendel, who developed it from his plans for the earlier , laid down in 1879.Brook, Warships for Export, 48, 53.
Publicity and reactions
The British shipbuilding company Armstrong Mitchell and its founder William Armstrong were keen to publicize their design and construction work on Esmeralda, as they believed it would bring in additional warship orders. Armstrong boasted to press outlets in 1884 that Esmeralda was "the swiftest and most powerfully armed cruiser in the world" and that it was "almost absolutely secure from the worst effects of projectiles."Bastable, Arms and the State, 176.
Armstrong believed that the protected cruiser warship type, exemplified by Esmeralda, would usher in the end of the ironclad era. According to him, several cruisers could be built and sent out as commerce raiders, much like the Confederate States Navy warship Alabama during the American Civil War, all for the price of one ironclad."Home," Graphic 30, no. 775 (4 October 1884): 347. This argument closely mirrored the emerging school of naval thought, and protected cruisers like Esmeralda were hailed by proponents as "the battleship of the future."Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 141.
Armstrong also pointedly noted that it was a friendly country like Chile purchasing the ship rather than one that might become hostile with the United Kingdom. With this comment, Armstrong hoped to induce the Royal Navy to order protected cruisers from his company to prevent him from selling them to British enemies. His remarks were later summarized in the Record of Valparaíso:
The promotion did not end with Armstrong himself. His company added a weighty article in the Times of London that was anonymously written by Armstrong Mitchell's chief naval architect,"Protected Cruisers," Times (London), 6 August 1884, 2a–c – via The Times Digital Archive. and the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, visited the ship.
These marketing efforts proved quite successful: an 1885 article in The Steamship journal said that "no vessel of recent construction has attracted greater attention than the protected cruiser Esmeralda"."The Chilean Cruiser 'Esmeralda'," The Steamship, 41. The positive attention Esmeralda wrought significantly benefited Armstrong Mitchell. By the time Esmeralda was completed in 1884, Armstrong was or would soon be constructing protected cruisers for over a dozen countries. Nathaniel Barnaby, the Director of Naval Construction for the British Admiralty (the department in charge of Britain's Royal Navy) would later write that Esmeralda and the ship type it pioneered "made the fortune" of Armstrong's company and was a major factor in the widespread abandonment of sails in the world's navies.Brook, "The Elswick Cruisers: Part I," 159.
Across the Atlantic, the Army and Navy Journal published an interview with an American naval officer who expressed his belief that Esmeralda could stand off San Francisco and drop shells into the city while being in no danger from the shorter-ranged shore-based batteries covering the Golden Gate strait. "Chile has today the finest, fastest, and most perfectly equipped fighting war ship of her size afloat," he said. "She could destroy our entire Navy, ship by ship, and never be touched.""We Cannot Fight the Chilean Navy," Army and Navy Journal 23, no. 1 (1 August 1885): 16. This hyperbolic perspective was part of a larger effort to draw attention to the underfunded and under-equipped state of the United States Navy.Sater, Chile and the United States, 51–52.
In Chile itself, Esmeraldas capabilities were highly anticipated: it was financed in part by public donations and the country's newspapers published lengthy treatises on the cruiser's potential power.Grant, Rulers, 122. Chile's president, Domingo Santa María, said that Esmeralda would keep the Chilean Navy on a "respectable footing.""The Address of the President," Record (Valparaiso) 13, no. 172 (21 June 1884): 2.
Analysis and criticism Like the Tsukushi design that preceded it, Esmeralda mounted a heavy armament and was constructed out of lightweight steel, a feature enabled by the Siemens process.Brook, Warships for Export, 53.Brook, "Armstrongs and the Italian Navy," 94. Unlike the earlier ship, Esmeralda was far larger and had much more seaworthy design, including a freeboard that put the ship's deck farther above the water; it was faster (it was for a time the fastest cruiser in the world); had a better secondary armament; was able to steam longer distances before needing more coal; and had deck armor that extended the length of the ship to protect the propulsion machinery and magazines.Perrett, "Some Notes," 211.Crucero "Esmeralda" 3°, Armada de Chile. Accessed 4 February 2022. Esmeralda's design also favorably compared to the British and the American cruisers and .Rodger, "The First Light Cruisers," 219–220."The New Cruisers," The New York Times, 10 December 1884, 4.
Still, Esmeraldas design was the target of strong criticism from the British Admiralty, especially in comparison to contemporary designs like their .Brook, Warships for Export, 54–55. The Chilean ship's freeboard was higher than Armstrong's previous design, but it was still a mere from the waterline. It also lacked a double bottom, a heavily armored conning tower, and any provision for emergency steering should the primary steering position be destroyed in battle. Moreover, the design of Esmeraldas coal bunkers meant that if it was hit in certain key areas, water would be able to flow into a large part of the ship.Brook, Warships for Export, 54. Finally, an Admiralty comparison of Esmeralda with the Mersey design found that the former carried nearly less armor. That meant that armor made up of the ship's total displacement; the same figure for Mersey was .
Modern assessments have also veered toward the negative. Nearly a century after Esmeralda was completed, naval historian Nicholas A. M. Rodger wrote that Esmeraldas design suffered from a disconnect between what Rendel designed the ship to do, and the missions most small cruisers in the world, including Chile's, would take on in a conflict.Rodger, "The First Light Cruisers," 214, 220–221.Brook, Warships for Export, 62. With large ten-inch (254 mm) guns and a high speed, which meant its captain could choose any appropriate fighting range, Rendel intended to make Esmeralda a threat to even the most heavily armed and armored capital warships. However, the typical role of a wartime cruiser in this period was to protect its flag's maritime trade or disrupt an enemy's. For this mission, the ten-inch guns were unnecessarily large and took up displacement that could have been devoted to other concerns.Rodger, "The First Light Cruisers," 214, 220–221. Warship contributor Kathrin Milanovich added that the practical utility of Esmeraldas ten-inch guns were limited by the light build of the ship, which did not provide a stable platform when firing, and its low freeboard, which allowed the guns to be swamped in rough seas. Milanovich also pointed out the lack of a double bottom and the limited size of Esmeraldas coal bunkers.Milanovich, "Naniwa and Takachiho," 31.
Except for designs that immediately followed Esmeralda (the Japanese and the Italian ), no other Armstrong-built protected cruiser would ever mount a gun larger than .Brook, Warships for Export, 58 and 62.
Specifications
Esmeralda was made entirely of steel and measured in at a length of between perpendiculars. It had a beam of , a mean draft of , and displaced . It was designed for a crew of 296.Lyon, "Chile," 411.
For armament, Esmeraldas main battery was originally equipped with two ten-inch (254 mm)/30 caliber guns in two single barbettes, one each fore and aft. These weapons were able to be trained to either side of the ship, raised to an angle of 12°, and depressed to 5°. They weighed each; the shells they fired weighed and required a powder charge of . Its secondary armament consisted of six /26 caliber guns in single Vavasseur central pivot mountings; two 6-pounder guns located on the bridge wings; and five Hotchkiss revolving cannons located in elevated positions.Brook, Warships for Export, 52–53. The ship was also fitted for but not with three torpedo tubes.
The propulsion machinery consisted of two horizontal compound steam engines built by R and W Hawthorn, which were fed by four double-ended fire-tube boilers. The engines were placed in separate compartments. On Esmeraldas sea trials, this machinery proved good for , making a speed of . The ship generally carried up to of coal, but a maximum of could be carried if necessary. Unusually, the ship was not equipped with sailing rigging.Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 140.