On 6 December 1868,
Arapiles got underway from the United Kingdom for her delivery voyage to Spain. With them aboard, she got underway from Naples early on 7 July and made a voyage in which she visited
Messina in
Sicily,
Piraeus in
Greece,
Beşik Bay and
Çanakkale in
Anatolia, the
Dardanelles, various ports in the
Aegean Islands,
Beirut and
Jaffa in the
Ottoman Empire, and
Alexandria in
Egypt. While returning to Spain, she stopped at
Valletta,
Malta, before arriving at Cartagena on 23 September 1871. at
Fort-de-France,
Martinique, in 1872. In 1872
Arapiles began a deployment to the
Caribbean, relieving the armoured frigate at
Havana in the
Captaincy General of Cuba, where
Spanish Empire forces had been fighting the
Cuban Liberation Army in the
Ten Years War since 1868. While on an anti-
piracy patrol along the coast of
Venezuela that year, she ran aground at
Puerto Cabello, sustaining serious damage which left her at risk of losing her
propeller. She proceeded to
Fort-de-France on
Martinique for repairs. The propeller was removed and the hole was plugged at Fort-de-France, but otherwise the damage was too great to be repaired in Martinique. The Spanish Navy decided to send her to
New York City in the
United States for repairs, but the northerly winds that prevailed at that time of year made the passage too dangerous. Instead,
Arapiles put into
Guantánamo,
Cuba, in the autumn of 1872 to await more favorable weather in the spring of 1873. in
Brooklyn,
New York. (Illustration by
Theodore R. Davis, ''
Harper's Weekly'', 13 December 1873) On 8 May 1873
Arapiles finally departed Guantánamo in company with the
paddle gunboat for the voyage to New York City. She made half the voyage under
tow by
Isabel la Católica and the other half
under sail. The two ships arrived at New York City on 26 May 1873, and
Arapiles entered
drydock at the
New York Navy Yard in
Brooklyn,
New York, for repairs. As tensions between Spain and the United States rose in October and November 1873 during the
Virginius Affair, a
lighter sank and blocked the drydock's gates. When her repairs were complete,
Arapiles departed New York City on 23 January 1874 to return to Havana, which she reached on 3 February 1874.
Arapiles returned to Spain in 1877. A structural inspection concluded that her wooden hull was not strong enough to support the
iron plates attached to it when she was converted during construction into an ironclad. Correction of the problem was deemed prohibitively expensive, so
Arapiles was
decommissioned on 14 November 1878 and
hulked in 1879. Her
boilers were installed in the
screw frigate , and her
steam engines and
rigging were also removed and placed in storage at the
Arsenal de la Carraca in
San Fernando. An order of 6 November 1879 directed that
Arapiles be converted into a
floating battery, but this conversion never took place because of her bad material condition. She was stricken from the
naval register in 1881 and scrapped in 1883. ==Memorial==