Cristoforo Colombo was a steel-hulled corvette built in the early 1890s for the Italian Regia Marina (Royal Navy). The ship was built as a replacement for an earlier vessel of the same name, based on a nearly identical design. The new ship was intended to serve in Italy's colonial empire in eastern Africa, and was designed to be able to operate at long range, far from home ports, for an extended period of time. The Regia Marina ultimately sold the ship in March 1907, though her ultimate fate is unknown. Design In the late 1880s, the Italian Regia Marinas chief designer, Benedetto Brin, prepared the design for a new screw corvette to replace the earlier , which was by then more than a decade old. The new vessel is sometimes referred to as a reconstruction of the original vessel, but they were in fact distinct ships. That vessel's wooden hull had been superseded by newer steel-hulled ships like and that had been completed in the early 1880s. Brin's new design was an essential copy of the earlier vessel, though with a steel hull instead of the wooden one used in the old corvette. The Regia Marina intended to use the new ship as a colonial station ship in the Red Sea to help control Italian Eritrea. The new Cristoforo Colombo proved to be the final corvette of the Italian fleet; the navy thereafter turned to protected cruisers like for its colonial patrol duties. Characteristics Cristoforo Colombo was long between perpendiculars, with a beam of and a draft of . She displaced at full load. Her steel hull was sheathed in copper to reduce biofouling, which was necessary for a ship intended to be stationed far from the level of maintenance facilities in home ports. Cristoforo Colombo had a crew of 238 officers and enlisted men. The ship was powered with the same machinery used in the older Cristoforo Colombo, though it produced a lower speed. The engine was a 3-cylinder marine steam engine, which drove a single propeller shaft. Steam was provided by six boilers that were ducted into a pair of funnels. The propulsion system produced a top speed of from , though the contemporary source The Naval Pocket-Book credits the ship with a top speed of from . Coal storage capacity amounted to . To supplement the steam engine, particularly on long voyages to and from Italy's colonial