SMS Cyclop (1860)

SMS Cyclop was a Camäleon-class steam gunboat of the Prussian Navy (later the Imperial German Navy) that was launched in 1860. The ship was ordered as part of a program to strengthen Prussia's coastal defense forces, then oriented against neighboring Denmark. A small vessel, armed with a battery of only three light guns, Cyclop served during the three wars of German unification; during the first, the Second Schleswig War on 1864, she guarded the Prussian coastline but saw no action. She supported the army's campaign against the Kingdom of Hanover during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, and she defended the Elbe for the duration of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, but again took part in no battles.

Badly deteriorated by 1872, she was stricken from the naval register in March that year and reconstructed into an iron-hulled gunboat. Recommissioned in 1875, she thereafter served abroad to protect German economic interests overseas. The first deployment, from 1875 to 1881, sent the ship to East Asia, where she operated against Chinese pirates and helped to create maps of the area. A second voyage overseas followed from 1882 to 1883, this time to the Mediterranean Sea, initially in response to the ʻUrabi revolt in Egypt. She served in secondary roles thereafter, including as a fishery protection ship, before being deployed overseas for a third time in 1885, now to the new German colony of Kamerun in Africa. Cyclop participated in the suppression of revolts against German rule and conducted surveys of the colony. Badly worn out by 1888, she was stricken again and converted into a floating workshop and a storage hulk at Suellaba, Kamerun. After the British overran the colony in 1914 during World War I, the ship was seized and sold to ship breakers.