HMS Newcastle (1653)

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HMS Newcastle drawn by Willem van de Velde , 1676

The HMS Newcastle was armed with 44 guns and rigged as a full-ship , fourth-rate two-deck frigate of the English Royal Navy , which was originally built by Phineas Pett II in Ratcliffe for the Navy of the Commonwealth of England on February 17, 1652 and there in May 1653 was launched. With a keel length of 32.9 meters and a width of 10.2 meters, it had a draft of 4 meters and displaced 631 t. Their armament was increased to 54 cannons by 1677. So according to the current classifications, she was more of a ship of the line than a frigate.

Calls

She had her first combat mission in 1655 together with 14 other warships that successfully fought the barbarian corsairs in the port of the North African port of Porto Farina , Tunisian: Ghar El Melh . The battle led to the destruction of the entire pirate fleet and was the first success for the Newcastle in a long list of warships of that name in the Navy. In 1657 she was involved in Admiral Robert Blake's daring attack on Santa Cruz de Tenerife . In 1665 it was used in the naval battle at Lowestoft and in 1666 in the St. James's Day Fight . In 1673 the Newcastle took part in the naval battle off Texel . During the Glorious Revolution (1688) the Newcastle ran under the command of George Churchill (1654-1710), early on to the side of William of Orange (later King William III.) Together with almost the entire Navy.

The Newcastle sank off Spithead in the Great Storm of 1703 with twelve other Navy ships. When it went down, 229 men of its crew lost their lives; In total, the Navy lost around 1,500 sailors to this storm.

logbook

In the Herzog August Bibliothek , the ship's diary of the naval officer Duke Christian August von Schleswig-Holstein-Norburg from his time as Commandant of Newcastle for the period from April 6, 1677 to June 6, 1679, has the title A Journal kept in as a manuscript y Newcastle fregat whereof I was appointed Comander by His Maj: Commission dated (y 4th of April, vid. No. 1, p. 31) y year 1677. received. The prince is listed in the Navy records under the anagram Augustus L'Hostine , while he himself writes his naval pseudonym as Lostine . The contemporary writing of the Navy’s biography leads him to Gustavus L'Holstein . The logbook comes from the estate of Princess Elisabeth Sophie Marie of Schleswig-Holstein-Norburg , who was second married to August Wilhelm , who later became the Duke of the Principality of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel .

literature

  • Brian Lavery: The Ship of the Line - Volume 1: The development of the battlefleet 1650-1850. Conway Maritime Press, 2003, ISBN 0-85177-252-8
  • Rif Winfield: British Warships in the Age of Sail 1603-1714: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates . Seaforth Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-1-84832-040-6

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lavery: Ships of the Line Volume 1, p. 160
  2. ^ Lavery: Ships of the Line Volume 1, p. 160
  3. ^ Richard Larn: Goodwin Sands Shipwrecks . David & Charles, Newton Abbot, London, North Pomfret 1977, ISBN 0 7153 7202 5 , p. 57.
  4. ↑ Signature : Cod. Guelf. 125.3 Extrav., Starts on 1r
  5. ↑ z. B. Order of Admiral John Narborough, March 30, 1678, The National Archives
  6. ↑ Ernst Theodor Langer: Some oddities from Duke Christian August von Holstein-Sonderburg. In: Neues Göttingisches Magazin 2 (1793), pp. 524–543 (p. 528) ( digitized version )
  7. ^ John Charnock: Biographia navalis; or, Impartial memoirs of the lives ... of officers of the navy of Great Britain from ... 1660 , Volume 1, 1794, p. 398 (L'Holstein, Gustavus)