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''Dupuy de Lôme'' was an armoured cruiser built for the French Navy (''Marine Nationale'') during the late 1880s and 1890s. She is considered by some to be the world's first armoured cruiser and was intended to attack enemy merchant ships. The ship was named after the naval architect Henri Dupuy de Lôme.〔Silverstone, p. 96〕 ''Dupuy de Lôme''s completion was delayed by almost two years by problems with her boilers, but she was finally commissioned in 1895 and assigned to the Northern Squadron (''Escadre du Nord''), based at Brest, for most of her career. The ship made a number of visits to foreign ports before she began a lengthy reconstruction in 1902. By the time this was completed in 1906, the cruiser was regarded as obsolete and ''Dupuy de Lôme'' was placed in reserve, aside from one assignment in Morocco. The ship was sold to the Peruvian Navy in 1912, but they never paid the last two installments and the ship remained inactive at Brest during World War I. The French agreed to take the ship back in 1917, keeping the money already paid, and they sold her in 1918 to a Belgian shipping company that converted her into a freighter. Renamed ''Péruvier'', the ship's engines broke down and she had to be towed to her destination where part of her cargo of coal was discovered to be on fire during her maiden voyage as a merchant vessel in 1920. Deemed uneconomical to repair, ''Péruvier'' was towed to Antwerp and later scrapped in 1923. ==Design and description== ''Dupuy de Lôme'' was designed to fill the commerce-raiding strategy of the Jeune École. Considered by some the first true armoured cruiser, she was superior to existing British and Italian protected cruisers, especially in her relatively thick steel armour. She could control the engagement range with her superior speed and her heavy armament of quick-firing guns, all of which were mounted in gun turrets,〔Roksund, p. 116〕 in marked contrast to her intended opponents who mounted their guns in lightly protected casemates or pivot mounts.〔Chesneau and Kolesnik, pp. 74–76, 348–49〕 The ship measured between perpendiculars, with a beam of . ''Dupuy de Lôme'' had a mean draught of and displaced at normal load.〔Feron, p. 38〕 At deep load, she displaced and had a metacentric height of only . This gave the ship a long, slow roll and made her an uncertain gunnery platform.〔Feron, p. 37〕 Her long, cut-away bow resembled a spur-type ram, but was not armoured. It was reduced in profile to reduce blast damage when the forward guns were fired.〔 ''Dupuy de Lôme'' was fitted with two large military masts.〔Feron, p. 35〕 She had three triple-expansion steam engines, a vertical type for the centre shaft and horizontal types for the outboard shafts. Each engine drove a single propeller shaft, with propellers in diameter on the outboard shaft and a propeller on the centre shaft. Steam for the engines was provided by 11 Amirauté fire-tube boilers and they were rated at a total of . The ship had a designed speed of , but during sea trials on 2 April 1895 the engines only produced that gave a maximum speed of . ''Dupuy de Lôme'' carried up to of coal〔Feron, pp. 35–38〕 and could steam for at a speed of .〔Silverstone, p. 75〕 ''Dupuy de Lôme''s main armament consisted of two 45-calibre Canon de 194 mm Modèle 1887 guns that were mounted in single gun turrets, one on each broadside amidships. Her secondary armament comprised six 45-calibre Canon de 164 mm Modèle 1887 guns, three each in single gun turrets at the bow and stern. The three turrets at the stern were all on the upper deck and could interfere with each other. For anti-torpedo boat defence, she carried ten and four Hotchkiss guns. She was also armed with four pivoting torpedo tubes; two mounted on each broadside above water.〔 The whole side of the ship was protected by of steel armour, from the bottom edge of the protective deck below the waterline to the edge of the weather deck. The curved protective deck had a total thickness of and did not rise above the ship's waterline. Protecting the boiler rooms, engine rooms, and magazines below it was a splinter deck thick. The space between the protective and splinter decks could be filled with coal to increase the effective thickness of the ship's armour. It was very cramped there and the coal was very difficult to access. A watertight〔Feron, p. 33〕 internal cofferdam, filled with cellulose,〔Chesneau and Kolesnik, p. 303〕 ran the length of ''Dupuy de Lôme'' from the protective deck to a height of above the waterline. Below the protective deck the ship was divided by 13 watertight transverse bulkheads with three more above the protective deck. The ship's conning tower was protected by and her turrets by 100 mm of armour.〔Feron, pp. 33, 35, 38〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「French cruiser Dupuy de Lôme」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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