USS Savannah (1842)
.jpg) The Savannah in a 19th century painting.
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
.svg){kind=small}
The USS Savannah was a United States Navy sailing frigate that was in service from 1843 to 1862. The ship had already been laid down in July 1820 in the New York Naval Shipyard in New York City . As a result of budget and cost disputes, the unfinished Savannah , which was the second ship in the history of the US Navy to bear this name , remained on the slipway until 1841 . The reason for this was also the fact that the Savannah was officially and nominally only designated as a 44-gun ship, but carried 54 guns, which had led to an increase in costs. It was not until 1841 that permission was given to complete the frigate. After being launched on May 5 or May 24, 1842 (the information on this is contradicting), it was put into service on October 15, 1843. The Savannah's first in command was Captain Andrew Fitzhugh.
Working time
After the commissioning, the Savannah moved to the Pacific , with Cape Horn being sailed in December 1843 , and from spring 1844 joined the so-called Pacific Squadron of the US Navy. In July 1846, the frigate took part in the occupation of Monterey in the context of the Mexican-American War and together with the frigate United States , but was not involved in fighting.
After a layover in New York in 1847/48, the Savannah served as the flagship of the Pacific Squadron from 1849 to 1852 (Cape Horn had to be circumnavigated two more times as a result of the relocation trips). The Savannah showed very good sailing characteristics and was at that time one of the most seaworthy ships in the US Navy. Between 1852 and 1855 the ship was temporarily stationed off the coast of Brazil .
From around the middle of the 1850s, the United States Navy was of the opinion that the comparatively heavily armed and very expensive large frigates (officially called "heavy frigates") were no longer up to date. As a result, the Savannah was reclassified and converted into a so-called sloop-of-war in 1857 . Among other things, the number of cannons was reduced to 24 (22 32-pounder guns in the battery deck and two rotating 10-inch Dahlgren cannons on the upper deck).
Until 1860 the Savannah served as a patrol ship in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean . Here she fought on March 6, 1860, together with the armed schooner Saratoga and two other ships, off the coast near Veracruz, the two ships Marquis of Havana and General Miramon of the mutinous Mexican Rear Admiral Thomas M. Marin , who had previously been part of the Mexican government Pirates had been declared settled ( Battle of Antón Lizardo ). One of the mutineers' ships ran aground, the second was captured. The Savannah was undamaged.
After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the Savannah was used by the Navy of the Northern States as a patrol and watch ship off the coast of Georgia . The ship achieved two successes in the winter of 1861/62 when it was able to muster the two Confederate blockade breakers E. J. Waterman and Cheshire , both smaller sailors. On November 24, 1861, the Savannah participated as part of a squadron consisting of 13 ships under Commodore Samuel Francis Du Pont , also in the conquest of Tybee Island and then temporarily blocked the mouth of the Savannah River .
Whereabouts
On February 11, 1862, the Savannah was finally officially decommissioned; However, the ship was still used by the United States Naval Academy as a training and exercise ship until 1870 . After 1870 at the shipyard of the Naval Base Norfolk launched , the former frigate was at the 1883 in Connecticut sold seated company E. Stannard & Company. There is no precise information about the further fate of the ship, but it is possible that it was still used as a coal store until 1891 (?).
literature
- Lardas, Mark: American Heavy Frigates 1794-1826 . Osprey Publishing Ltd., Oxford 2003.
Web links
- The frigate Savannah at Navsource Online. (English)
- History of Savannah at Naval History and Heritage Command. (English)
Footnotes
- ↑ http://www.navsource.org/archives/09/86/86047.htm
- ↑ Lardas, Mark: American Heavy Frigates 1794-1826 . Osprey Publishing Ltd., Oxford 2003, p. 37.
- ↑ Lardas: Heavy Frigates , p. 37.