Service Record
The commissioning of Chishima was delayed by over a year, as the ship could achieve only 19 knots (35 km/h), instead of the promised 22 knots (41 km/h); the French government agreed to pay the Japanese government some financial compensation for the issue. The shakedown cruise of Chishima was made on its voyage to Japan, with a crew of 80 Japanese and eleven French technicians, via Alexandria, the Suez Canal and Singapore. The ship suffered from numerous problems on this voyage, including boiler failure, leaks, and ruptured steam lines, before finally arriving at Nagasaki.
However, Chishima was lost only one week after its formal commissioning into the Japanese navy, in a night collision on 30 November 1892 with the British P&O merchant vessel Ravenna (3257 tons), off Matsuyama, Ehime prefecture, at 33°55′N 132°39′E / 33.917°N 132.65°E / 33.917; 132.65 in poor weather. The larger merchant ship struck Chishima amidships, cutting her into two. Her captain and 74 sailors onboard drowned, but Ravenna suffered only minor damage. This incident led to the establishment of the Japanese "Maritime Anti-Collision Regulations".
One of the cannons of Chishima is preserved in a memorial at Aoyama Cemetery in Tokyo, and a memorial to the Chishima disaster with calligraphy by Tōgō Heihachirō is at the Buddhist temple of Jofuku-ji in Matsuyama.
Read more about this topic: Japanese Cruiser Chishima
Famous quotes containing the words service record, service and/or record:
“We too are ashes as we watch and hear
The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise
Of one whose promised thoughts of other days
Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed,
The service record of his youth wiped out,
His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)
“The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self- service populace, and all our specious comforts—the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria—are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)