HMS Saldanha (1809)
HMS Saldanha was a 36 gun Apollo class frigate of the Royal Navy, launched in 1809 and wrecked in 1811. She was named for the Battle of Saldanha Bay (1796); the first HMS Saldanha had been the former Dutch frigate Castor which the British Navy had captured in that battle.
Contents
Service
The new frigate was commissioned in April 1810 under Captain John Stuart, who died on 19 March 1811. Captain William Pakenham then was assigned to command her though in the Spring, Saldanha was temporarily under the command of Captain Reuben Mangin.
On 11 October 1811, and with Fortunee, Saldanha took the 18-gun French privateer Vice-Amiral Martin, which had a crew of 140 men. Vice-Amiral Martin had superior sailing abilities that had hitherto always helped her to escape from British cruisers.
Loss
Saldanha was shipwrecked in Lough Swilly, Donegal in a gale on the night of 4 December 1811. There were no survivors out of the estimated 253 aboard, and some 200 bodies washed up on shore. The ship's complement was 274 men, and 21 are known to have been off the ship at the time. (One man did make it to the shore alive but he died almost immediately thereafter.) Saldanha had been in the company of the sloop-of-war Talbot, which was also reported to have been wrecked but which succeeded in riding out the storm.
Earlier, Pakenham had been captain of Greyhound when she wrecked off the coast the coast of Luzon in the Philippines on 4 October 1808. In that wrecking only one seaman died and the survivors reached Manila.
See also
Sources
- Terence Grocott (1997) Shipwrecks of the Revolutionary & Napoleonic Eras. (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books), pp.326-8. ISBN 9780811715331
- Long, W.H. (1899) Naval yarns : letters and anecdotes, comprising accounts of sea fights and wrecks, actions with pirates and privateers from 1616 to 1831, pp. 257-63.
- Rif Winfield (2008), British Warships in the Age of Sail 1793-1817: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. 2nd edition, Seaforth Publishing, ISBN 978-1-84415-717-4.
