HMS Leopard (ship, 1790)
 The HMS Leopard (right) in action with the USS Chesapeake
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The HMS Leopard was a 50-gun ship fourth rank of Portland class of the British Royal Navy and the sixth ship of that name . It was used in the Revolutionary and Coalition Wars and the War of 1812 , before it ran aground and was lost in 1814.
Manufacturing and commissioning
The first order to manufacture was issued on October 16, 1775, just under a month later on November 13, it received its name, and production finally began in January 1776 in the Portsmouth shipyard . However, this first ship was not completed.
The order to manufacture was issued again on May 7, 1785, this time at the Sheerness shipyard . Until December of the same year, the work was directed by Martin Ware; John Nelson continued it until March 1786, William Rule completed it. The launch took place on April 24, 1790, a good month later, on May 26, the Leopard was completed and was finally put into service in June under the command of Captain John Blankett .
period of service
The East Indiaman China fleet left Macau on March 21, 1791. As far as Java Head formed the Leopard and the annotation: HMS - sometimes also written with punctuation marks as HMS - is an acronym or abbreviation for His Majesty's Ship ( His Majesty's Ship ) or Her Majesty's Ship ( Her Majesty's Ship ) and has been that since 1789 official name prefix used by all warships in the service of the British Navy. the escort.
French Revolutionary Wars
On October 24, 1798, the Leopard's crew succeeded in bringing up the French privateer Apollon , who was under the command of Captain La Vaillant. Almost two years later, on August 22nd, the Clarice was hijacked. From March 1801 to September of the same year, the Leopard was part of the British Navy's Egypt campaign. This earned her crew the "Egyptian Bracket", which the Admiralty decided in 1847 to allow all surviving members of the crew at that time to wear.
Napoleonic Wars
On March 30, 1806, the Leopard set sail with the East Indiamans Asia , Lady Burges , Lord Melville , Lord Nelson and Sovereign . On the night of April 20, the Lady Burgess ran aground on a reef near Boa Vista (Cape Verde) and sank, killing between 34 and 38 of 184 people. The Leopard returned to Spithead at a latitude of 9 ° N, where it arrived on June 8th.
The Chesapeake Leopard Affair
At the beginning of 1807 an incident occurred in Chesapeake Bay when some British sailors, some of American descent, abandoned their ships besieging French ships and joined the crew of the US USS Chesapeake . The Leopard's commander , Captain Salusbury Pryce Humphreys, then asked the American frigate, under the command of Commodore James Barron, to search that ship in order to arrest and punish the deserters. When Barron refused, Humphreys let fire open. The Americans were completely taken by surprise, Barron surrendered and a British boarding party began searching the frigate , picking up four deserters - three of whom were American and the fourth, Jenkin Ratford, was British. The prisoners were taken to Halifax , where Ratford was sentenced and hanged. The Americans were originally sentenced to 500 lashes, but the execution was suspended and an offer was made to return them to the United States . The incident had some political ramifications and nearly resulted in war between the United States and Britain.
Another fate
In 1812 the Leopard was converted into a troop transport and lost its armament in the process. When she was en route from Great Britain to Québec with 475 Scottish soldiers on board on June 28, she ran aground in thick fog near Anticosti . The 24 year old ship was lost with no human casualties.
The leopard in literature
In the novel storm in Antarctica by Patrick O'Brian , the fifth volume of his Aubrey-Maturin series , commanded Jack Aubrey , the leopard during a mission in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. This mission occurs after the Chesapeake-Leopard affair and includes the arrest of the fictional Dutch liner Waakzaamheid and a collision with an iceberg in the southern ocean . In the sixth volume in the series, Cannons on the High Seas , the ship in East India is left in port because it is unable to carry its armament. In the fourth volume and the following, she is called the "hideous old leopard ". She spends her last days as a cargo ship, which operates between the canal and the Baltic Sea .
Footnotes
- ^ A b c Rif Winfield: British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1714–1792. Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. Seaforth, Barnsley 2007, ISBN 978-1-84415-700-6 .
- ↑ Lloyd's List №2326.
- ↑ London Gazette . No. 15567, HMSO, London, March 15, 1803, p. 291 ( PDF , English).
- ^ Marshall (1829), Supple., Part 3, pp.134-136.
- ↑ The Chesapeake / Leopard Affair of 1807 ( Memento of the original from March 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ The Letter of Marque , O'Brian, Patrick (1988)
