SMS Basilisk

SMS Basilisk was a Camäleon-class steam gunboat of the Prussian Navy (later the Imperial German Navy) that was launched in 1862. The ship was ordered as part of a program to strengthen Prussia's coastal defense forces, then oriented against neighboring Denmark. A small vessel, armed with a battery of only three light guns, Basilisk served during all three wars of German unification in the 1860s and early 1870s. The ship was present during the Battle of Heligoland in May 1864 during the Second Schleswig War, but was too slow to engage the Danish squadron. During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, Basilisk was stationed in the North Sea to help defend the coast, but she did not see action during either conflict. Between 1873 and 1875, she was employed experimentally as the first torpedo-armed warship of the German fleet. Basilisk was decommissioned in 1875, renamed "Mine Barge No. 1", and converted into a naval mine storage hulk. The details of her fate are unrecorded, but she was still in service in that capacity at least as late as 1900. Sometime thereafter, she was broken up.