The origins of HMS Carlotta are obscure. In January 1812, Admiral Edward Pellew appointed Lieutenant Richard Howell Fleming to command Pyllades, later renamed Carlotta. [1]
Admiral Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount Exmouth, GCB was a British naval officer. He fought during the American War of Independence, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic Wars. His younger brother Israel Pellew also pursued a naval career.
Some sources treat this Carlotta as the salvaged Carlotta. However, the database of the National Maritime Museum (NMM) treats them as two vessels. Currently available online resources do not yield information on Pylades, or her capture or other origin. There were apparently no French naval vessels of that name, suggesting that she was a merchant vessel. Furthermore, the NMM database allocates the capture of the brig Carlotta to HMS Carlotta captured in 1810, and Pylades to the second HMS Carlotta. If the Royal Navy captured or otherwise acquired Pylades shortly before the first Carlotta was wrecked, it would be consistent with Navy practice to name PyladesCarlotta as there was already an Pylades on active duty.
The French brig Carlotta was a brig-rigged corvetta-cannoniera or, corvetta-brig, of 10 guns, launched in 1807 at Venice as Fiamma that served the French Navy as Carlotta. HMS Belle Poule captured her in 1810 and the British Royal Navy took her into service as HMS Carlotta. She was wrecked in 1812.
The National Maritime Museum (NMM) in Greenwich, London, is a maritime museum in London. The historic buildings form part of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site, and it also incorporates the Royal Observatory and 17th-century Queen's House. In 2012, Her Majesty the Queen formally approved Royal Museums Greenwich as the new overall title for the National Maritime Museum, Queen’s House, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and the Cutty Sark. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Like other publicly funded national museums in the United Kingdom, the National Maritime Museum does not levy an admission charge, although most temporary exhibitions do incur admission charges.
Under Fleming's command Carlotta captured several small vessels, including a French privateer, and partook of various services on the coasts of Tuscany and Genoa. [1] Carlotta shared in the proceeds from the capture on 24 May 1813 of the privateer Columbo, which may be the privateer alluded to. The actual captors appear to have been Nautilus and Redwing. [Note 1]
HMS Redwing was a Cruizer-class brig-sloop of the British Royal Navy. Commissioned in 1806, she saw active service in the Napoleonic Wars, mostly in the Mediterranean, and afterwards served off the West Coast of Africa, acting to suppress the slave trade. She was lost at sea in 1827.
On 13 October 1812 Carlotta detained the settee St Vittoria and put a prize crew consisting of Midshipman Hugh Stewart Morris and two sailors, Francis Baynson and François Richie, on board with instructions that they were to sail her in company with Carlotta to Malta. However, on 19 October, St Vittoria went her own way, stopping first at Port St Vito and then to sailing on to Palermo. There Morris sold part of her cargo. After spending almost three weeks at Palermo, Stewart sailed to Cephalu where he disposed of the rest of the cargo. Then he scuttled St Vittoria, but sold the wreck for 373 ounces of gold to a man named "Fellipo". Morris, Baynson, and Richie split the proceeds and made their way to Messina. However, Lieutenant-colonel Coffin, the deputy quartermaster general at Messina, arrested them as they were about to take a boat to Calabria, and sent them to Malta. A court martial convened at Port Mahon aboard Hibernia on 8 and 9 April 1813 sentenced all three miscreants to be mulcted of all outstanding pay and prize money. It also sentenced Morris to two years of solitary confinement, after which he could never serve as a petty officer or officer in the Navy. Baynson was sentenced to 200 lashes. Richie was an impressed Frenchman and the court martial ruled that he was to be treated as a prisoner of war. [3]
The settee sail was a lateen sail with the front corner cut off, giving it a quadrilateral shape. It can be traced back to Greco-Roman navigation in the Mediterranean in late antiquity; the oldest evidence is from a late-5th-century AD ship mosaic at Kelenderis, Cilicia. It lasted well into the 20th century as a common sail on Arab dhows. The settee sail requires a shorter yard than does the lateen, and both settee and lateen have shorter masts than square-rigged sails.
San Vito Lo Capo is a town and comune in North-Western Sicily, Italy, administratively part of the province of Trapani. The small town is located in a valley between mountains, and is home to a public beach that is destination of local vacationers. The town's primary industries are tourism and agriculture, particularly olive groves owned by small farmers.
Cefalù, the classical Cephaloedium (Κεφαλοίδιον), is a city and comune in the Italian Metropolitan City of Palermo, located on the Tyrrhenian coast of Sicily about 70 km (43 mi) east of the provincial capital and 185 km (115 mi) west of Messina. The town, with its population of just under 14,000, is one of the major tourist attractions in the region. Despite its size, every year it attracts millions of tourists from all parts of Sicily and also, from all over Italy and Europe.
Carlotta was paid off in February 1815 and broken up in May at Pater (Pembroke Dock). [4]
Pembroke Dock is a town and a community in Pembrokeshire, South West Wales, 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Pembroke on the banks of the River Cleddau. Originally Paterchurch, a small fishing village, Pembroke Dock town expanded rapidly following the construction of the Royal Navy Dockyard in 1814. The Cleddau Bridge, a toll bridge links Pembroke Dock with Neyland.
