Japanese cruiser Tatsuta (1894)

Tatsuta was an unprotected cruiser of the Imperial Japanese Navy, named after the Tatsuta River near Nara, and she served mainly as an aviso, a dispatch boat used for scouting, reconnaissance and carrying priority messages. She was ordered from Armstrong Whitworth at Elswick as a large torpedo boat under the 1891 budget to replace the lost Chishima. She had a steel hull and kept a full barque rig with two masts as auxiliary sail power beside her steam engine, and she carried two 4.7 inch guns, smaller quick-firing guns and five torpedo tubes. Rushed to completion for the First Sino-Japanese War, she was held at Aden by the British authorities in August 1894 and could not reach Japan until March 1895. In the Russo-Japanese War she fought at Port Arthur, the Yellow Sea and Tsushima and rescued survivors from the battleships Yashima and Hatsuse. She was reclassified as a gunboat, then a submarine tender renamed Nagaura Maru, and she was sold for scrap in 1926.