HMS Pandora (1779)

For other Royal Navy ships of this name, see HMS Pandora.

Career (Great Britain)
Name:	HMS Pandora
Ordered:	11 February 1778
Builder:	Adams & Barnard, Grove Street shipyard, Deptford
Laid down:	2 March 1778
Launched:	17 May 1779
Completed:	3 July 1779 at Deptford Dockyard
Commissioned:	May 1779
Fate:	Wrecked on 28 August 1791 in the Torres Strait.
General characteristics
Class and type:	24-gun Porcupine-class sixth-rate post ship
Tons burthen:	524.4 long tons (533 t)
Length:	114 ft 7 in (34.93 m) (overall) 94 ft 9.5 in (28.893 m) (keel)
Beam:	32 ft 3 in (9.83 m)
Draught:	7 ft 4 in (2.24 m) 11 ft (3.4 m)
Depth of hold:	10 ft 3 in (3.12 m)
Sail plan:	Full-rigged ship
Complement:	160 (140 by 1815)
Armament:	As built: Upper deck: 22 × 9pdrs Quarterdeck: 2 × 6pdrs By 1815: Upper deck: 14 × 9pdrs + 8 × 18pdr carronades Quarterdeck: 2 × 6pdrs

HMS Pandora was a 24-gun Porcupine-class sixth-rate post ship of the Royal Navy, built by Adams and Barnard at Deptford, England and launched on 17 May 1779. She is best known as the ship sent in 1790 to search for the Bounty and the mutineers who had taken her. She was wrecked on the return voyage in 1791.

Early service

Her first service was in the Channel during the 1779 threatened invasion by the combined fleets of France and Spain. She was deployed in North American waters during the American Revolutionary War and saw service as a convoy escort between England and Quebec. Later, as a lone cruiser off the North American coast, she captured several rebel privateers. She was put in ordinary (mothballed) in 1783 at Chatham for 7 years

Voyage in search of the Bounty

Pandora was finally ordered to be brought back into service on 30 June 1790 when war between England and Spain seemed likely due to the Nootka Controversy. However, in early August 1790, 5 months after learning of the mutiny on HMS Bounty, the First Lord of the Admiralty, John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham, decided to despatch her to recover the Bounty, capture the mutineers, and return them to England for trial. She was refitted, and her 6-pounder guns were reduced to 20, though she gained four 18-pounder carronades.

Pandora sailed from Portsmouth on 7 November 1790, commanded by Captain Edward Edwards and manned by a crew of 134 men.

Unbeknown to Edwards, sixteen of the mutineers had by then already elected to return to Tahiti, after a failed attempt to establish a colony (Fort St George) under Fletcher Christian's leadership on Tubuai, one of the Austral Islands. They were living in Tahiti as 'beachcombers', many of them having fathered children with local women. Fletcher Christian's group of mutineers and their Polynesian followers had sailed off and eventually established their settlement on then uncharted Pitcairn Island.

The Pandora reached Tahiti on 23 March 1791 via Cape Horn. Five of the men from the Bounty came on board voluntarily within 24 hours of the frigate's arrival, and nine more were arrested by armed shore parties a few weeks later after fleeing to the mountains to avoid capture. These fourteen men were locked up in a makeshift prison cell on the Pandora's quarter-deck, which they called "Pandora's Box". Edwards was told that two of them had already died before the Pandora's arrival.

On 8 May 1791 the Pandora left Tahiti and subsequently spent three months visiting islands in the South-West Pacific in search of the Bounty and the remaining mutineers, without finding any traces of the pirated vessel. During this part of the voyage 14 crew went missing in two of the ship's boats. In the meantime the Pandora visited Tokelau, Samoa, Tonga and Rotumah. They also passed Vanikoro Island, which Edwards named Pitt's Island; but they did not stop to explore the island and investigate obvious signs of habitation. If they had done so, they would very probably have discovered early evidence of the fate of the French Pacific explorer La Perouse's expedition which had disappeared in 1788. From later accounts about their fate it is evident that a substantial number of crew survived the cyclone that wrecked their ships L'Astrolabe and La Boussole on Vanikoro's fringing reef.

Wrecked

File:HMS Pandora.jpg

HMS Pandora in the act of foundering

Heading west, making for the Torres Strait, the frigate ran aground on 29 August 1791 on the outer Great Barrier Reef. She sank the next morning claiming the lives of 31 of her crew and four of the prisoners. The remainder of the ship's company (89 men) and ten prisoners - seven of them released from their cell as the ship was actually sinking - assembled on a small sand cay and after two nights on the island they sailed for Timor in four open boats; arriving in Kupang on 16 September 1791 after an arduous voyage across the Arafura Sea. Sixteen more died after surviving the wreck, many having fallen ill during their sojourn in Batavia (Jakarta). Eventually only 78 of the 134 men who had been on board upon departure returned home.

Captain Edwards and his officers were exonerated for the loss of the Pandora after a court martial. No attempt was made by the colonial authorities in New South Wales to salvage material from the wreck. The ten surviving prisoners were also tried; the various courts martial held found four of them innocent of mutiny and, although the other six were found guilty, only three (Millward, Burkitt and Ellison) were executed. Peter Heywood and James Morrison received a Royal pardon, while William Muspratt was acquitted on a legal technicality.

Descendants of the nine mutineers not discovered by Pandora still live on Pitcairn Island, the refuge Fletcher Christian founded in January 1790 and where they burnt and scuttled the Bounty a few weeks after arrival. Their hiding place was not discovered until 1808 when the New England sealer Topaz (Captain Mayhew Folger) happened on the tiny uncharted island. By then all of the mutineers - except John Adams (aka Alexander Smith) - were dead, most having died under violent circumstances.

Wreck site: Discovery and archaeology

The wreck of the Pandora was discovered in 1977 and was immediately declared a protected site under the Australian Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976. It is located approximately 5 km north-west of Moulter Cay 11°23′S 143°59′E on the outer Great Barrier Reef, approximately 140 km east of Cape York, on the edge of the Coral Sea.

The Queensland Museum has been excavating the wreck according to a research design. Archaeologists and historians at the Museum of Tropical Queensland are still gradually fitting together pieces of the Pandora story puzzle, using the archaeological evidence as well as the extant historical evidence. A large collection of artefacts is on display at the museum.

In the course of nine seasons of excavation during the 1980s and 1990s, the museum's marine archaeological teams established that approximately 30% of the hull is preserved as a more or less intact structure. The vessel came to rest at a depth of between 30 to 33m on a gently sloping sandy bottom, slightly inclined to starboard; consequently more of the starboard side has been preserved than the port side of the hull. Approximately one third of the overburden in which the wreck is buried has been excavated by the Queensland Museum to date; it is estimated that the remainder to be excavated amounts to approximately 350 m³. This would probably require at least another ten full-blown seasons of excavation - assuming a similar methodology and level of technology is used as on previous museum expeditions. If an expedition were to be mounted from the 2008/09 summer - and subsequently at a rate of one excavation per summer (until 2017/18)- it is estimated that at least A$9.5 million would be required to complete 10 seasons of fieldwork. Additional funds (approx between $450k -$550k p/a) would also be required to provide for salaries of at least four additional full-time, 'back-of-house' professional contract positions at the museum, until at least 2020.

For strategic and financial reasons there are no plans to continue excavation in the foreseeable future. However, if the Queensland Museum were to continue excavation, priority would be given to the area under the stern and to the bow section of the wreck; especially to the various petty officers' storerooms that were erected in the bow at platform deck level in vessels of the Pandora's design. In addition to exposing professional and personal items belonging to the ordinary sailors and to such crew members as the carpenter and the bosun, the forward storerooms are expected to contain a range of extra spare stores and fittings which the Pandora was carrying in anticipation of the need to refit the Bounty after her recapture.

Further reading

• Rif Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail 1714-1792: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. Seaforth Publishing, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84415-700-6.
• Edwards, Edward; George Hamilton (1915). Voyage of H. M. S. 'Pandora': Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the South Seas, 1790- 1791. Francis Edwards. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22834. 
• Gesner, Peter (2000). HMS Pandora, an archaeological perspective:Revised (2nd ed.). Brisbane: Queensland Museum. ISBN 0724244824. 
• Conway, Christiane (2005). Letters from the Isle of Man - The Bounty-Correspondence of Nessy and Peter Heywood. The Manx Experience. ISBN 1-873120-77-X. 

External links

• Maritime Archaeology - HMS Pandora
• Reports of Captain Edwards from the Pandora and Batavia, Captain Edwards's instructions, Surgeon Hamilton's Narrative, Midshipman Renouard's narrative of the Voyage of the Matavy Tender.
• Track of the Pandora from England to wreck.
• Audio recording of ship surgeon George Hamilton's eyewitness account Voyage Round the World in His Majesty’s Frigate Pandora at librivox