was a protected cruiser built in France for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) by Forges et Chantiers de la Gironde during the 1880s as the Japanese were not yet able to build warships of her size in Japan. Completed in 1886, the ship disappeared somewhere between Singapore and Japan on her delivery voyage with the loss of all hands. Background In the early 1880s, Navy Minister Kawamura Sumiyoshi was struggling to reconcile his desire for expansion in the face of the growing Chinese Beiyang Fleet with Japan's limited financial resources. Two developments offered Kawamura a way to resolve his problems. First, the French development of the naval doctrine which emphasized the use of cheap torpedo boats and heavily armed light ships to offset an opponent's superiority in expensive, heavily armed and armored battleships. Second, the design of heavily armed, lightly protected cruisers by George Rendel of Armstrong Whitworth, as exemplified by the Chilean cruiser Esmerelda, fit the doctrine. Rendel believed that his ships could be battleship destroyers as their higher speed would allow them to dictate the range at which the battle was fought or they could disengage at need. After Chile rejected Kawamura's attempt to buy her in September 1883, he placed an order for two improved versions, the , with Armstrong Whitworth in March 1884 as Japan was not yet capable of building such ships itself. Desiring another ship to match the British-built ships, he sent a representative to France to order a comparable ship. Impressed by the reasonable price offered by Forges et Chantiers de la Gironde, a contract was signed on 22 May. Description Compared with the preceding British-built s, Unebi was an old-fashioned design, fully rigged for auxiliary sail propulsion. The ship had a length between perpendiculars of with a beam of and had a mean draft of . She displaced and had a crew of 400 officers and enlisted men. Unebis hull was fitted with a ram and it had a considerable amount of tumblehome amidships to increase the traverse of the main guns and reduce blast damage from them firing close to the hull. While her metacentric height was never measured before her loss, it is believed that it may have been very low which would rendered her stability precarious. Reports from the ship on her delivery voyage discussed her excessive rolling motions. Unebi had two horizontal double-expansion steam engines, each driving one