Reina Regente (English: Queen Regent) was a Spanish Navy protected cruiser commissioned in 1888. She sank during a storm in the Gulf of Cádiz in 1895 with the loss of all hands.
Reina Regente was named for Queen Maria Christina, who served as Queen Regent of Spain from 1885 to 1902 during the minority of her son, the future King Alfonso XIII.
Reina Regente was the lead ship of the protected cruisers. She had an iron hull. She displaced either 4,664 or 4,725 tons, according to different sources. She was long, in beam, in height, and in draft. She had two Thompson horizontal triple expansion steam engines and four cylindrical boilers that produced a nominal , driving two screws. She reached under forced draft and on sea trials achieved under natural draft. She could carry up to 1,285 tons of coal and had a range of at her economical cruising speed.
Reina Regenteâ²s hull armor consisted of thick Siemens steel plates along the upper part of her sides and below, with protecting her propulsion machinery and stores. Her deck armor ranged in thickness from to amidships and was thick fore and aft. Her gun shields had of armor.
Reina Regenteâ²s armament consisted of four /35 Hontoria M1883 guns, six /35 Hontoria M1883 guns, six 57/42 Nordenfelt guns, two machine guns, and five torpedo tubes. The guns all were in single mounts; two of the guns were mounted forward and two aft, and the guns were in a central battery. Two torpedo tubes were mounted in her bow, two athwartships, and one aft.
The lead ship of her class, Reina Regente was laid down on 20 June 1886 at the shipyard of J&G Thomson in Clydebank, Scotland. She was launched on 24 February 1887 and commissioned on 1 January 1888 at Glasgow, Scotland, with a Spanish crew aboard.
Reina Regente was one of the Spanish Navy ships present at Barcelona, Spain, for the opening of the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition on 20 May 1888. In a ceremony at Barcelona on 3 June 1888 with Queen Regent Maria Christina in attendance, she received a battle ensign the queen regent gave to her. Reina Regente was part of the Training Squadron, which also included the unprotected cruiser and the protected cruiser , when Maria Christina visited the squadron on 11 August 1890. On 4 September 1892, the Training Squadron â by then under the command of Contraalmirante (Counter Admiral) Zoilo Sánchez de Ocaña y Vieitiz and made up of Reina Regente, the battleship , the unprotected cruiser , and the armoured frigate â rendezvoused with the torpedo gunboat at Genoa, Italy, where the ships represented Spain at events celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of the Americas. On 12 October 1892, Reina Regente was at Huelva, Spain, for more ceremonies honoring the discovery.
In February 1893, replicas of Christopher Columbus's three ships, the caravels Niña and Pinta and the carrack Santa Maria, left Huelva bound for Havana in the Captaincy General of Cuba. They departed Havana on 15 April 1893 bound for the United States, with Reina Regente towing the replica of Santa MarÃÂa, the unprotected cruiser towing the replica of Pinta, and the gunboat towing the replica of Niña. They arrived at dawn on 21 April at Hampton Roads, Virginia, where a U.S. Navy squadron and other foreign warships were waiting for them. Accompanied by the U.S. Navy squadron and the other foreign warships, they set out at dawn on 23 April for New York City, where they arrived that night and anchored in the Lower Bay of New York Harbor. They took part in the Columbian Naval Review on the Hudson River at New York on 27 April 1893. Infanta Isabel and Nueva España got underway from New York on 2 May 1893 bound for Havana, but Reina Regente remained behind at New York for drydock work.
In late August 1893, Reina Regente arrived at Cartagena, Spain, to take part in maneuvers with Pelayo, Alfonso XII, the protected cruiser , and the torpedo boats , , and . The maneuvers involved simulated torpedo attacks off Santa Pola, Spain.
Still under Ocañaâ²s command, the Training Squadron got underway from Cartagena on 15 October 1893 and anchored at Santa Pola on 16 October for maneuvers simulating a battle off Alicante, Spain, between two formations of warships, one composed of Pelayo, Isla de Cuba, Barceló, Rigel, the unprotected cruiser , and the torpedo boat and the other of Reina Regente, Alfonso XII, Habana, the destroyer , and the torpedo boat , later joined by the unprotected cruiser . The maneuvers ended on 22 October 1893.
In 1895, Sultan Abdelaziz of Morocco sent an ambassador to Madrid to revise the Treaty of Fez, which had ended the First Melillan campaign, also known as the First Rif War, in 1894. A Spanish Army general named Fuentes, offended that a Muslim had set foot in Madrid, slapped the ambassador during the visit. Mortified, the Spanish government ordered Fuentes to apologize and gave the ambassador the use of Reina Regente for his return voyage to Spain. Reina Regente departed Cádiz, Spain, at 11:30 on 9 March 1895, transporting the ambassador and his entourage. She arrived at Tangier that night, and the Moroccans disembarked.
Reina Regenteâ²s commanding officer, Capitán de navÃÂo (Ship-of-the-Line Captain) Francisco Sanz de Andino, was eager to return to Cádiz so that he could witness the launching of the modern armored cruiser . At 10:00 on 10 March 1895, Reina Regente departed Tangier bound for Cádiz with a crew of 412 on board, leaving behind two crewmen who had not arrived in time for her departure. She disappeared over the horizon shortly after 12:00.
As Reina Regente passed through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Gulf of Cádiz a severe storm struck the area. At around 12:30, the merchant ships Matheus and Mayfield, struggling against hurricane-force winds and huge waves, sighted Reina Regente when she was about northwest of Cape Spartel, and some people at Tarifa, Spain, also sighted her. Reina Regente never arrived at Cádiz, and was declared overdue on 13 March 1895.
Amid hopes that Reina Regente had survived the storm and perhaps taken shelter in an African port or the Canary Islands, Isla de Luzón, the protected cruiser , other warships, and merchant ships put to sea from Spain, Gibraltar, and Morocco to conduct a massive search. The search focused on her route from Tangier to Cádiz, especially in the vicinity of Cape Trafalgar, but did not find her, although a British ship found a Newfoundland dog which had belonged to an alférez de navÃÂo (ensign) aboard Reina Regente which had survived by jumping onto a grating. (The British ship's crew rescued the dog and kept it aboard as a pet; when the ship later visited Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the dog recognized the coastline, jumped overboard, swam to shore, and ran to the home of its late owner's parents.) Otherwise the search effort found no sign of Reina Regente or her crew. Wreckage washed up on several nearby beaches in Tarifa and Algeciras in the following days, including pieces of wood, oars, lifebuoys, a compass box, a piece of a flag sheath bearing the name "Reina Regente," and a metope bearing the letter "R". The two men left behind in Tangier were the ship's only human survivors.
Press reporting of 19 March 1895 indicated that Alfonso XIII had discovered a wreck with only of its masts protruding from the water near Bajo Acientos, not far from the Strait of Gibraltar, and had returned with divers to recover bodies from it. A newspaper article of 2 April 1895 reported that the wreck Alfonso XIII found probably was that of a merchant ship, and that the Spanish Minister of the Navy held out hope that Reina Regente remained afloat. On 26 April 1895 the press reported that Isla de Luzón had discovered Reina Regenteâ²s wreck in of water midway between Tarifa and Cape Trafalgar, but this also did not turn out to be Reina Regente. The location of Reina Regenteâ²s wreck, presumably in the Gulf of Cádiz, is unknown, although its whereabouts have been the subject of academic and scientific inquiry. Her loss remains one of the deadliest shipwrecks in the history of the Spanish Navy.
The exact cause of the loss of Reina Regente is unknown, although several hypotheses arose in its aftermath. All five of her commanding officers during her service life reported that she was top-heavy and recommended either the replacement of her guns with guns to reduce weight or an increase in the capacity of her coal bunkers to improve her stability and seaworthiness. The Ministry of the Navy took no action on these recommendations, and the most widely held hypothesis was that her top-heaviness was at least a contributing factor in her loss, perhaps causing her to capsize and sink during the 1895 storm. With this in mind, her sister ships Alfonso XIII and were armed with guns.