Abondance | |
History | |
---|---|
France | |
Name | Abondance |
Namesake | Abundance |
Builder | Jean-Joseph Ginoux, Le Havre |
Laid down | January 1780 |
Launched | 16 September 1780 |
Captured | 12 December 1781 |
Great Britain | |
Name | HMS Abondance |
Acquired | 12 December 1781 by capture |
Fate | Sold 1784 |
Great Britain | |
Name | Abondance |
Acquired | 1784 by purchase |
Fate | No longer listed in 1786 |
General characteristics [1] | |
Class and type | Baleine-class gabare |
Tons burthen | 524, or 52650⁄94, or 600 (bm) |
Length |
|
Beam | 29 ft 5+3⁄4 in (9.0 m) |
Depth of hold | 11 ft 9 in (3.6 m) |
Propulsion | Sails |
Complement |
|
Armament |
|
Abondance was a French Baleine-class gabare (cargo ship) launched in 1780. The Royal Navy captured her on 11 December 1781 and took her into service as a troop transport and store ship under the name HMS Abondance. After the end of the war with France the Admiralty sold her in 1784. She then became a merchantman.
Abondance was launched at Le Havre in September 1780. [3] She sailed on 11 December 1781 for the Antilles in a convoy under the command of Admiral de Guichen. She was under the command of a M. Dupuis and was carrying 248 soldiers and ordnance, stores, and provisions. [4]
On the 12th Admiral Kempenfelt, who had been sent out by the Admiralty with an unduly weak force to intercept de Guichen, sighted the French convoy in the Bay of Biscay through a temporary clearance in a fog, at a moment when de Guichen's warships were to leeward of the convoy, and attacked the transports at once. de Guichen could not prevent the British from capturing 15 of the transports, Abondance among them, destroying two or three others, and driving the remainder into a panic-stricken flight. The survivors returned to port; de Guichen therefore returned to port also.
The Royal Navy sent Abondance into Plymouth and then took her into service, rating her as a 28-gun sixth rate. Lieutenant N. Phillips commissioned her in April 1783 and on 23 May sailed for North America. [1] She made several trips carrying black loyalists to Halifax, among them the fiery Methodist preacher Moses Wilkinson. In November, she evacuated the last group, some 80 members of the Black Brigade, a unit of black loyalists, from New York. [5]
Disposal: Phillips paid off Abondance in March 1784. The Admiralty then sold her for £2,200 on 29 April. [1]
Abondance entered Lloyd's Register in 1784 with T. Eve, master, L. Teffier, owner, and trade London–Ostend. [6] She was no longer listed in 1786.
The second Hancock was one of the first thirteen frigates of the Continental Navy. A resolution of the Continental Congress dated 13 December 1775 authorized her construction; she was named for the patriot and Continental congressman John Hancock. In her career, she served under the American, British and French flags.
HMS Guadeloupe, was a 28-gun sixth-rate Coventry-class frigate of the Royal Navy. The ship was designed by Sir Thomas Slade, and was initially contracted to be built with the Pembrokeshire shipwright John Williams of Neyland; however he became bankrupt and the Admiralty transferred the order to the Plymouth Naval Dockyard.
HMS Cumberland was a 74-gun third rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched on 29 March 1774 at Deptford Dockyard.
Bellone was an Iphigénie-class 32-gun frigate of the French Navy on plans by Léon-Michel Guignace. She took part in the American Revolutionary War in the Indian Ocean with the squadron under Suffren, and later in the French Revolutionary Wars. She was present at the Glorious First of June.
HMS Hinchinbrook was the French privateer Astrée, which the British captured in 1778 and took into the Royal Navy as a 28-gun sixth-rate frigate. She was Captain Horatio Nelson's second navy command, after the brig HMS Badger, and his first as post-captain. She was wrecked, with no loss of life, in January 1783.
HMS Albemarle was a 28-gun sixth rate frigate of the Royal Navy. She had been built as the French merchantman Ménagère, which the French Navy purchased in 1779. A British squadron captured her in September and she was commissioned into service with the Royal Navy. Amongst her commanders in her short career was Captain Horatio Nelson, who would later win several famous victories over the French. The Navy sold her in 1784. She subsequently became a merchant vessel again. In 1791 she transported convicts to Port Jackson as part of the third fleet. She then sailed to India where she picked up a cargo on behalf of the British East India Company. As she was returning to England a French privateer captured her.
HMS Porcupine was a 24-gun Porcupine-class sixth-rate post ship of the Royal Navy built in 1777 and broken up in 1805. During her career she saw service in the American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary Wars.
The action of 8 January 1780 was a naval encounter off Cape Finisterre between a British Royal Naval fleet under Admiral Sir George Rodney, and a fleet of Spanish merchants sailing in convoy with seven warships of the Caracas Company, under the command of Commodore Don Juan Augustin de Yardi. During the action the entire Spanish convoy was captured. Rodney's fleet was en route to relieve Gibraltar, and this action took place several days before Rodney's engagement and defeat of a Spanish fleet at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent.
The Third Battle of Ushant or the action of 20–21 April 1782 was a naval battle fought during the American Revolutionary War, between a French naval fleet of three ships of the line protecting a convoy and two British Royal naval ships of the line off Ushant, a French island at the mouth of the English Channel off the northwesternmost point of France. This was the third battle that occurred in this region during the course of the war.
HMS Monsieur was the former 40-gun French privateer Monsieur, built at Le Havre between July 1778 and 1779, then armed at Granville. The Royal Navy captured her in 1780 and subsequently put her into service as a 36-gun Fifth Rate. This frigate was sold in 1783.
HMS Prince William was a 64-gun third-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy. She had previously been Guipuzcoano, an armed 64-gun ship of the Spanish (Basque) mercantile Guipuzcoan Company of Caracas. She was also known by the religious name of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción.
HMS Medea was a 28-gun Enterprise-class sixth-rate frigate of the Royal Navy. Medea was first commissioned in May 1778 under the command of Captain William Cornwallis. She was sold for breaking up in 1805.
HMS Loyalist was the 14-gun sloop Restoration, which the Royal Navy purchased in North America in 1779. In May 1781 her captain was Morgan Laugharne. Prior to being acquired by the Royal Navy, the ship belonged to the Connecticut State Navy as the Oliver Cromwell.
Poulette was a French Coquette-class corvette built to a design by Joseph-Marie-Blaise Coulomb and launched in March 1781. She served the French navy until 1793 when the British captured her at Toulon in 1793. She served briefly in the Royal Navy, including at the battle of Genoa in 1795, until she was burned in October 1796 to prevent her falling into French hands.
HMS Ceres was an 18-gun sloop launched in 1777 for the British Royal Navy that the French captured in December 1778 off Saint Lucia. The French Navy took her into service as Cérès. The British recaptured her in 1782 and renamed her HMS Raven, only to have the French recapture her again early in 1783. The French returned her name to Cérès, and she then served in the French Navy until sold at Brest in 1791.
HMS Speedwell was a mercantile vessel that the Admiralty purchased in 1780. During the American Revolutionary War she served at Gibraltar during the Great Siege. In 1796 she was converted to a brig. Although she did capture two French privateers and participate in an incident in which the Royal Navy violated Swedish neutrality, her service in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was apparently relatively uneventful. A storm in February 1807 destroyed her, causing the loss of her entire crew.
The French brig Duc de Chartres was built between 1779 and 1780 at Le Havre as a 24-gun privateer. As a privateer she captured one British warship before in 1781 the Royal Navy captured her. The Royal Navy took her into service as HMS Duc de Chartres. She then captured several American privateers and armed merchant vessels, and one French naval corvette in a noteworthy single-ship action. The Navy sold Duc de Chartres in 1784.
HMS Pilote was a cutter launched for the French Navy at Dunkirk in 1778. The British Royal Navy captured her in 1779 and took her into service under her existing name. It sold her in 1799.
HMS Eclipse was a French Navy Vésuve-class brick-canonnier or chaloupe-canonnière, (gunbrig) launched at Saint-Malo in 1793 as Volage. She was renamed Venteux in 1795 (possibly also Vérité on 30 May 1795, although this might have been a second ship of the same name. The British Royal Navy captured her in 1803 and took her into service as HMS Eagle, but then renamed her HMS Eclipse in 1804. She had a completely unremarkable career before the Navy sold her in 1807.
HMS Fly was a cutter that the Royal Navy purchased in 1778. The French Navy captured Fly in June 1781.
This article includes data released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported UK: England & Wales Licence, by the National Maritime Museum, as part of the Warship Histories project.