Chilean cruiser O'Higgins (1897)

O'Higgins was an armoured cruiser of the Chilean Navy, named for Bernardo O'Higgins and built by Armstrong Whitworth at Elswick to a design by Philip Watts. The Chilean government ordered her in April 1896 for 700,000 pounds, she was laid down on 4 April 1896, launched on 17 May 1897 and completed on 2 April 1898. She displaced about 8,500 tons at full load, carried four 8-inch and ten 6-inch guns among a heavy secondary battery, and her two vertical triple-expansion engines and thirty Belleville boilers gave her 21.6 knots. While she was still fitting out, the United States and Spain were drifting toward war, and both were rumoured to want her, but she reached Valparaiso on 25 July 1898. In 1899 she hosted the Embrace of the Straits meeting of the Chilean and Argentine presidents at Punta Arenas, was fitted with a floatplane in 1919, and was seized by her crew during the fleet mutiny of 1931. She was decommissioned in 1933 and scrapped in 1958.