The Dutch cruiser HNLMS ''Sumatra'' was a small

protected cruiser Protected cruisers, a type of naval cruiser of the late-19th century, gained their description because an armoured deck offered protection for vital machine-spaces from fragments caused by shells exploding above them. Protected cruisers re ...

with a heavy main gun. The ship was named after the island of Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies (now

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

). It was discarded in 1907.

Design and construction

The design resembled a smaller version of the ''Esmeralda'' concept (the 1883 protected cruiser built by Armstrong/Elswick shipyards for Chile) and is most similar in size to the Chinese protected cruiser ''Chi Yuan'' (1883) a ship built at about the same time as ''Esmeralda''. ''Sumatra'' had the 8.2-inch gun forward and the 5.9-inch gun aft, both in shields, with sponsons on the sides for the two 4.7-inch guns. The Dutch Navy also built a larger protected cruiser with even heavier armament, launched in 1892, which had an 11-inch gun forward and was most comparable to the Japanese protected cruisers of the type.Conways, p.376 These ships represented a design philosophy in which navies that could not afford first-class battleships (including the Netherlands) mounted heavy weapons on coastal defense ships or moderately sized protected cruisers with the idea these ships would pose a threat to first-class opponents.

References

Bibliography

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sumatra (1890) 19th-century naval ships of the Netherlands 1890 ships