HMS Pegasus was one of 11 protected cruisers ordered for the Royal Navy in 1893 under the Spencer Program and based on the earlier . The class were fitted with a variety of different boilers, most of which were not entirely satisfactory, and by 1914, four ships had been withdrawn. They had all been condemned in 1904 but were reprieved and remained in service, with scrapping proposed in 1915. History Pegasus was completed in 1898, and in 1899, she was stationed off the southeast coast of America. She was commissioned at Chatham on 21 May 1901 by Commander Edmund Hyde Smith, to serve at the Mediterranean Station. In June 1902 she was in Gibraltar for a coronation fête, and in September that year she visited the Aegean sea with other ships of the station for combined manoeuvres near Nauplia. She was later stationed at Australia, China, and finally Africa, serving on the Cape of Good Hope Station in 1906. In 1908, Pegasus rescued the crew of the wrecked French barque President Félix Faure, who had been stranded for sixty days on the Antipodes Islands. First World War Pegasus remained part of the Cape Station on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War. As the likelihood of war with Germany increased, the commander of the Cape Station, Rear Admiral Herbert King-Hall, deployed his ships in order to counter the threat posed by the German light cruiser , based at Dar es Salaam. On 31 July 1914, Pegasus sighted Königsberg leaving Dar es Salaam, but was unable to keep track of the faster German cruiser. King-Hall recognised that Königsberg outclassed Pegasus and intended that Pegasus should operate with the cruiser while his flagship operated independently to protect the trade routes around the Cape, but on 12 August, the Admiralty ordered Astraea to join Hyacinth off the Cape to escort troop convoys, leaving Pegasus unsupported at Zanzibar. On 23 August Pegasus sailed to the port of Bagamoyo in German East Africa with the intention of forcing a truce so that the port would take no further part in the war. When the port authorities refused to agree to such a truce, Pegasus shelled the port's Customs House. Sinking On 18 September 1914 Pegasus returned to Zanzibar harbour to carry out repairs to her engines. In the early morning of 20 September Königsberg launched a surprise attack on Pegasus. Pegasuss engines