| History | |
|---|---|
 Great Britain | |
| Name | HMS Euphrosyne |
| Namesake | Euphrosyne, one of the three Carites (graces) of Greek mythology |
| Acquired | 1796 by purchase |
| Fate | Sold 1802 |
| General characteristics | |
| Type | Brig |
| Tons burthen | 125 (bm) |
| Propulsion | Sails |
| Armament | 14-16 guns |
HMS Euphrosyne (or Euphroysene) was an American brig that Vice-Admiral George Elphinstone purchased for the Royal Navy at Simon's Bay in 1796 in preparation for his attack on the Dutch squadron at Saldanha Bay. She was sold in 1802.
In May 1796 Elphinstone arrived at Simon's Bay from India. There he purchased an American brig that had been damaged. Elphinstone had her repaired, armed, and manned; [1] He took her into service as HMS Euphrosyne.
Then a squadron of the navy of the Batavian Republic, under the command of Rear-Admiral Engelbertus Lucas, surrendered on 17 August 1796 at Saldanha Bay without a fight to a Royal Navy squadron under Elphinstone's command. Euphrosyne is not among the vessels listed as qualifying for prize money from the captures. [2] This may be a consequence of her not yet being commissioned, or her being viewed as a tender and her crew qualifying by virtue of their being on the rolls of their parent vessels.
On 7 October 1797 a mutiny developed on several vessels at Simon's Bay, Euphrosyne among them. The mutiny ended five days later after Admiral Pringle, the naval commander on the station, promised to address the mutineers' grievances and to issue a general pardon. The mutiny broke out again on several ships, but the authorities were able to suppress it. Ultimately, a handful of the ringleaders were hanged. [3]
In 1799 Euphrosyne was under the command of Lieutenant D. Whittle, [4] and between 1800 and 1802 belonged to a squadron based there under the command of Vice-Admiral Roger Curtis.
In 1800 Euphrosyne was under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Walker. [4] In March or so she underwent repairs and coppering. [5] On 5 May Walker and six others drowned when a boat carrying them to shore at Algoa Bay sank. [6] Lieutenant W. Shirley (probably William Warden Shirley) then took command.
In July, Curtis sent Lancaster, Adamant, Rattlesnake, and Euphrosyne to blockade Isle de France and Bourbon. They remained until October and during this period shared in the proceeds of several captures. [7] [8]
Also in August Euphrosyne alone captured the Gleneure and her cargo. [7] Gleneure, of 150 tons (bm), had been sailing from Bourbon to Isle de France with a cargo of coffee and cotton, and 40 slaves. [8]
On 17 September 1801 Euphrosyne returned from Rio de Janeiro, together with Jupiter and the storeship Hindostan, after a voyage of about a month. Lion, together with Hindostan, had escorted to Rio a convoy of East Indiamen bound for China, arriving at Rio on 1 August. Captain Losack, of Jupiter, decided to accompany the convoy eastward until they were unlikely to encounter some Spanish and French vessels known to be cruising off Brazil. [9]
Admiral Curtis sold Euphrosyne in 1802 at public auction at Cape Town for £977 12s. [10]
George Keith Elphinstone, 1st Viscount Keith, was a British naval officer active throughout the Napoleonic Wars.
HMS Leda, launched in 1800, was the lead ship of a successful class of forty-seven British Royal Navy 38-gun sailing frigates. Leda's design was based on the French Hébé, which the British had captured in 1782. Leda was wrecked at the mouth of Milford Haven in 1808, Captain Honeyman was exonerated of all blame, as it was a pilot error.
HMS Raisonnable was a 64-gun third-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, named after the ship of the same name captured from the French in 1758. She was built at Chatham Dockyard, launched on 10 December 1768 and commissioned on 17 November 1770 under the command of Captain Maurice Suckling, Horatio Nelson's uncle. Raisonnable was built to the same lines as HMS Ardent, and was one of the seven ships forming the Ardent class of 1761. Raisonnable was the first ship in which Nelson served.
HMS Lancaster was a 64-gun third-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched on 29 January 1797 at Rotherhithe. She was designed and built as the East Indiaman Pigot for the British East India Company, but the Navy purchased her on the stocks because of a shortage of naval vessels to prosecute the French Revolutionary Wars.
HMS Hindostan was a 56-gun fourth-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy. She was originally the East Indiaman Hindostan, launched in 1789, that the Admiralty bought in 1795. She is known for two events, her voyage to China between 1792 and 1794 when she carried Lord Macartney on a special embassy to China, and her loss in a fire at sea in 1804.
Vice-Admiral Thomas Pringle was a British officer of the Royal Navy. He served during the American War of Independence, and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
HMS Calcutta was the East Indiaman Warley, converted to a Royal Navy 56-gun fourth rate. This ship of the line served for a time as an armed transport. She also transported convicts to Australia in a voyage that became a circumnavigation of the world. The French 74-gun Magnanime captured Calcutta in 1805. In 1809, after she ran aground during the Battle of the Basque Roads and her crew had abandoned her, a British boarding party burned her.
The Java campaign of 1806–1807 was a minor campaign during the Napoleonic Wars by British Royal Navy forces against a naval squadron of the Kingdom of Holland, a client state of the French Empire, based on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. Seeking to eliminate any threat to valuable British merchant convoys passing through the Malacca Straits, Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Pellew determined in early 1806 that the Dutch naval forces based at Java, which included several ships of the line and three frigates, had to be defeated to ensure British dominance in the region. Lacking the forces to effect an invasion of the Dutch colony, Pellew instead sought to isolate and blockade the Dutch squadron based at Batavia in preparation for raids specifically targeting the Dutch ships with his main force.
HMS Adamant was a 50-gun Portland-class fourth rate warship of the British Royal Navy. She served during the American War of Independence, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic Wars in a career that spanned thirty years.
The Battle of Saldanha Bay was a naval action that occurred off the Dutch Cape Colony on 21 July 1781 during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War. A squadron of Royal Navy warships under the command of commodore George Johnstone captured five Dutch East India Company ships; her own crew destroyed a sixth. Casualties on the Dutch side were minimal if any, and there were no British casualties.
HMS Jupiter was a 50-gun Portland-class fourth-rate ship of the Royal Navy. She served during the American War of Independence, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic Wars in a career that spanned thirty years. She was also one of the fastest ships in the Royal Navy as shown by her attempt to capture the cutter Eclipse under Nathaniel Fanning.
The Dutch ship sloop Havik was launched in 1784 and served in the Batavian Navy. The British captured her in 1796 at the capitulation of Saldanha Bay. She then served briefly in the Royal Navy as HMS Havick before she was wrecked in late 1800.
The Dutch sloop Sireene was launched in 1786. The British captured her in 1796 at the capitulation of Saldanha Bay. She then served in the Royal Navy, first briefly as the sixth rate HMS Daphne, and then from 1798 as the prison ship HMS Laurel. The Admiralty sold her in 1821.
HMS Crescent was a 36-gun Flora-class frigate of the British Royal Navy. Launched in 1784, she spent the first years of her service on blockade duty in the English Channel where she single-handedly captured the French frigate, La Reunion. In 1795, Crescent was part of a squadron commanded by George Elphinstone, that forced the surrender of a Batavian Navy squadron at the capitulation of Saldanha Bay. After serving in the West Indies, Crescent returned to home waters and was wrecked off the coast of Jutland on 6 December 1808.
The East Indies theatre of the French Revolutionary Wars was a series of campaigns related to the major European conflict known as the French Revolutionary Wars, fought between 1793 and 1801 between the new French Republic and its allies and a shifting alliance of rival powers. Although the Indian Ocean was separated by vast distance from the principal theatre of the conflict in Western Europe, it played a significant role due to the economic importance of the region to Great Britain, France's most constant opponent, of its colonies in India and the Far Eastern trade.
The Capitulation of Saldanha Bay was the surrender in 1796 to the British Royal Navy of a Dutch expeditionary force sent to recapture the Dutch Cape Colony. In 1794, early in the French Revolutionary Wars, the army of the French Republic overran the Dutch Republic which then became a French client state, the Batavian Republic. Great Britain was concerned by the threat the Dutch Cape Colony in Southern Africa posed to its trade routes to British India. It therefore sent an expeditionary force that landed at Simon's Town in June 1795 and forced the surrender of the colony in a short campaign. The British commander, Vice-Admiral Sir George Elphinstone, then reinforced the garrison and stationed a naval squadron at the Cape to protect the captured colony.
The Invasion of the Cape Colony, also known as the Battle of Muizenberg, was a British military expedition launched in 1795 against the Dutch Cape Colony at the Cape of Good Hope. The Dutch colony at the Cape, established and controlled by the United East India Company in the seventeenth century, was at the time the only viable South African port for ships making the journey from Europe to the European colonies in the East Indies. It therefore held vital strategic importance, although it was otherwise economically insignificant. In the winter of 1794, during the French Revolutionary Wars, French troops entered the Dutch Republic, which was reformed into the Batavian Republic.
Engelbertus Lucas was a Dutch naval officer, who as a rear-admiral, commanding a squadron of the Batavian Navy, was forced to surrender that squadron on 17 August 1796 at Saldanha Bay to a Royal Navy squadron under Vice-Admiral George Elphinstone.
Brunswick was launched in 1792 as an East Indiaman for the British East India Company (EIC). She made five complete voyages for the EIC before the French captured her in 1805. Shortly thereafter she wrecked at the Cape of Good Hope.
Young Nicholas was built in Holland in 1790 under another name. The British captured her in 1798 and Prinsep & Saunders purchased her and named her Young Nicholas. She made one voyage under license from the British East India Company (EIC) that resulted in legal difficulties. Next she had a short, unsuccessful cruise as a privateer that resulted in a French privateer capturing her in a single-ship action, but then releasing her. Lastly, she made a third cruise that resulted in French privateer capturing her, the Royal Navy recapturing her, and her being wrecked in a hurricane. This cruise too resulted in legal difficulties culminating in a notable court case.
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.