"HMS Wolverine, 1799 " Topic
3 Posts
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Tango01 | 17 Mar 2017 11:29 a.m. PST |
"My blog of February 10th of this year – accessible through the bar to the right – dealt with privateering action in the English Channel in 1793, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. It demonstrated that even at this very early stage the naval warfare in the "Narrow Seas" between Britain and the European coastline was to be of a quite savage nature, not unlike the battles that were to be fought by British and German coastal forces in the same waters in World War 2. The pace of action was not to let up in the years that followed as French privateers, often of very small size, darted out to prey on British coastal traffic and retired quickly to well-defended bases such as Calais. The war against them was to be waged not by the mighty battle-fleets or their supporting frigates but by small handy craft such as brigs and cutters, heavily armed for their size. The following account, drawing largely on information in the same W. Clark Russell book of 1889 as my previous blog, relates to another small-scale but epic battle that was typical of this aspect of the larger conflict. HMS Wolverine was a civilian-owned collier before being purchased by the Royal Navy in 1798 for conversion to an armed brig. Her armament was powerful – only two of her guns were long 18-pounders and her others were all carronades, six of them 24-pounders and six 12-pounders. The carronades were murderously efficient weapons at short range and gave a craft such as the Wolverine a "punch" out of all proportion to their size. She was to see service immediately after commissioning by Commander Lewis Mortlock when she supported a "Dieppe 1942" type raid on the port of Ostend. On January 3rd 1799 she was cruising off the French port of Boulogne, some twenty miles from the English coast. Weather conditions were poor but two large French armed luggers were spotted. These were later identified as the fourteen-gun Le Furet and the eight-gun Rusé, all weapons being four-pounders. Their combined crews were roughly four times the 70 men carried by Wolverine – a potentially decisive factor should it come to boarding. These were typical privateers of the English Channel and such craft usually fled from confrontation with naval units – their objective was capture of rich commercial prizes rather than combat – and Mortlock realised that to bring them to action it would be necessary to play the role of a merchantman, a ruse that Wolverine's civilian lines would assist. He accordingly hoisted Danish colours and, as expected, the luggers bore down on him and hailed. Asked for his identity, Mortlock answered that he was en-route from Plymouth to Copenhagen. All his guns were manned, their crews out of sight and to all appearances Wolverine looked like an unarmed and attractive commercial prize…" Main page link Amicalement Armand
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Green Tiger | 17 Mar 2017 11:19 p.m. PST |
Also active on the Zuider Zee during the Helder Campaign the same year. |
Tango01 | 19 Mar 2017 4:23 p.m. PST |
You are right my friend. Amicalement Armand |
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