HMS Crane (1806)

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Career (UK) Royal Navy Ensign
Name: HMS Crane
Ordered: 11 December 1805
Builder: Custance & Stone, Great Yarmouth
Laid down: February 1806
Launched: 26 April 1806
Fate: Wrecked 26 October 1808
General characteristics
Class and type: Cuckoo-class schooner
Tonnage: 75 1/94 bm
Length: 56 ft 2 in (17.12 m) (overall)
42 ft 4.125 in (12.9 m) (keel)
Beam: 18 ft 3 in (5.56 m)
Depth of hold: 8 ft 3 in (2.51 m)
Sail plan: Schooner
Complement: 20
Armament: 4 x 12-pounder carronades

HMS Crane was a Royal Navy Cuckoo-class schooner of four 12-pounder carronades and a crew of 20. She was built by Custance & Stone at Great Yarmouth and launched in 1806.[1] Like many of her class and the related Ballahoo-class schooners, she succumbed to the perils of the sea relatively early in her career.

She was commissioned in 1806 under Lieutenant John Cameron for the North Sea.[1] In 1808 she was under a Lieutenant Mitchell, and then under Lieutenant Joseph Tindale.[1]

At 7:30pm on 25 October 1808 she was driven from her anchorage at Plymouth.[2] She dropped a second anchor. By 4am she was near shore and got underweigh to make for the Sound. She returned three hours later to find an anchorage but a squall hit her as she went about. She let go an anchor but struck a rock off Plymouth Hoe. With some assistance she was refloated but she went aground again. She sank in deeper water with her starboard gunwhale just clearing the surface.[2] She was later broken up. Fortunately, all aboard her were saved.[2][3]

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 Winfield (2008), p.361.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 Gossett (1986), p.67.
  3. Grocott (1997), p.263.
  • Gossett, William Patrick (1986) The lost ships of the Royal Navy, 1793-1900. (London:Mansell).ISBN 0-7201-1816-6
  • Grocott, Terence (1997). Shipwrecks of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Chatham. ISBN 1-86176-030-2. 
  • Winfield, Rif (2008). British Warships in the Age of Sail 1793–1817: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. Seaforth. ISBN 1861762461.