Why the hunt for Bismarck became possible

Were there historical ship hunts comparable to the hunt for Bismarck?

There were many raider pursuits, but treaty-era scarcity made the full-scale hunt for one modern capital ship unusually consequential.

Earlier pursuits of Goeben, Emden, and John Paul Jones show that hunting individual warships was not new. What distinguishes Bismarck is the concentration on a full capital ship at a time when each surviving battleship represented a large share of fleet strength. Interwar treaty limits and scrapping reduced the number of comparable ships available to intercept a breakout. With a looser twenty-capital-ship standard and additional British F3 or Nelson-type vessels, Bismarck would have been much more likely to encounter a powerful covering force immediately.