HMS Gorgon (1791)
| Overview | |
|---|---|
| Type | 44-gun two-decker |
| Shipyard |
Perry & Hankey, Blackwall |
| Order | 1782 |
| Keel laying | 1782 |
| Launch | 1785 |
| 1. Period of service |
.svg){kind=small}
|
| Whereabouts | Wrecked in Portsmouth in 1817 |
| Technical specifications | |
| displacement |
911 tons builder's measurement |
| length |
140 feet |
| width |
38 feet 3 inches |
| Draft |
16 feet 10 inches |
| crew |
300 (as a warship) |
| Armament |
As a warship: |
HMS Gorgon was built as a 44-gun two-decker adventure class and was assigned to 5th rank as a warship .
Converted to a supply ship, she sailed under Captain John Parker in March 1791 with the Third Fleet , the third British fleet with destination Australia , and arrived there on September 21. She brought food for 900 people to the starving colony for 6 months and was greeted frenetically on arrival. There were also 30 convicts on board and Philip Gidley King , who was returning from England to take up his post as Lieutenant Governor of Norfolk Island .
On December 18, 1791, the Gorgon Port Jackson left with some of the Royal Marines used to guard the convicts who had arrived with the First Fleet , including Watkin Tench , Robert Ross , William Dawes and Ralph Clark . She also carried samples of animals, birds and plants from New South Wales .
At the Cape of Good Hope , they also took Mary Bryant , her daughter Charlotte and the four male survivors of the first successful breakout from the British penal colony Australia on board, as well as four mutineers from the Bounty , on Tahiti from the HMS Pandora had been captured and whose shipwreck survived. During the voyage, many of the children on board, including Charlotte Bryant, died of heat and illness. The Gorgon entered Portsmouth on June 21, 1792 .
Later the Gorgon served in the Mediterranean, the Irish Sea and the Baltic Sea a. a. as a guard ship, transport ship, supply ship and hospital ship. In 1817 the ship was scrapped in Portsmouth .
literature
- Charles Bateson: The Convict Ships, 1787-1868. 1st Australian edition. Reed, Sydney 1974, ISBN 0-589-07146-7 .
- Mollie Gillen : The Founders of Australia. A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet. Library of Australian History, Sydney 1989, ISBN 0-908120-69-9 , p. 433.