British ships in the Indian Ocean, 1795-1796…

Jumping ship from the French archives, might the British archives now help us find out what happened with the Le Butin / La Buse pirate cipher mystery?

To recap, what I’m trying to narrow down is the “large British frigate” mentioned by Le Butin: “at our last battle with a large British frigate on the shores of Hindustan, the captain was wounded and on his deathbed confided to me his secrets and his papers to retrieve considerable treasure buried in the Indian Ocean“.

I’ve decided to start by looking at the date range [summer 1795 to summer 1796] – partly because I think we’d have heard about it if it had happened on Admiral de Sercey’s watch (he started in summer 1796), but partly because I have a reasonable candidate who seems to have disappeared without a trace between November 1795 and late Spring 1796.

Hence what I’ll be doing is working out what “large British frigate”s were operating in the Indian Ocean around 1795-1796 (which is when I currently suspect Le Butin’s ship was hit by fire from a large British ship on the coast of Hindoustan). From H.C.M.Austen’s “Sea Fights and Corsairs of the Indian Ocean” and a multitude of other sources, I’ve pieced together a partial list of British ships operating in that arena at that time: though I believe I’ve probably got all the biggest ships (mainly because the British Navy never had that many ships sailing there), there may well have be others… but perhaps those will emerge as we tackle the primary sources.

Even though there may well be Admiralty reports to check as well, for now the first thing to do is to call up the relevant ship’s logs and see what they say. Note that “ADM 51” is the captain’s log section of the National Archives, while “ADM/L” is the lieutenant’s log section of the National Maritime Museum, and captain’s logs typically summarized the lieutenant’s logs (but adding details about changes to the ship’s inventory etc)…

Oh, it’s also very important to note here the difference in the 18th century between a “ship-of-the-line” and a “frigate”. Essentially, a ship-of-the-line has two decks of cannons (so that a set of ships can be arranged in an end-to-end “line of battle” so as to fire a multi-ship super-wide broadside at any enemy unfortunate to be in front of the cannons), while a frigate has only one row of cannons (though occasionally with others on the forecastle and the quarterdeck). Both ships-of-the-line and frigates were normally square-rigged on all three masts, so I believe you’d only be able to tell them apart when you were close enough to see how many rows of cannons a given ship had.

Technically, the British Admiralty only ever counted a ship as a frigate if it had at least 28 guns, while (confusingly) some “fifth-rate” 44-gun ships of this period had two decks of cannons but were still described as frigates. Personally, I have my doubts that Le Butin would have shared the Admiralty’s precise classification nuances. All the same, I suspect that his description of the ship as a “large English frigate” may be enough to narrow down our search, i.e. I suspect we’re looking for a big ship with a single deck of guns (probably more than 28 guns, but probably no more than 44 guns).

With these constraints in mind (and all the details that follow below), I think we can eliminate Suffolk and Centurion (both ships-of-the-line) and very possibly Diomede (a two-decker frigate) and Resistance (probably a two-decker frigate too, though it’s hard to be sure), as well as Carysfort (too small to be called “large”), Hobart (a sloop rather than a frigate) and Virginie (arrived in the Indian Ocean too late for our date range).

This broadly leaves us Sibylle, Oiseau, Heroine and Fox, with my best guess of the four being the massive 44-gun single-deck Sybille (simply because the others were all 32-gun frigates). Yet I don’t have any record of where the Sybille was between 1794 (when it was captured) and 1798 (when it was in the Philippines), so it is entirely possible that it wasn’t in the Indian Ocean or Indian Ocean at all during the period I’m focusing on. Fortunately, the Lieutenant’s Log should tell us exactly where it was and when. Bring on the primary evidence! 🙂

* * * * * * *

HMS Suffolk (74-gun third rate ship-of-the-line)
168ft long, 46ft wide, 1616 tons. Launched 1765, broken up 1803.
01 February 1795 – 21 September 1795 — ADM 51/1108
14 September 1796 – 30 September 1797 — ADM 51/1202
13 September 1795 – 13 September 1796 — ADM 51/1187
1794-1802 — ADM/L/S/497

HMS Centurion (50-gun fourth-rate ship-of-the-line)
146ft long, 40ft wide, 1044 tons. Launched 1774, sank 1824.
05 December 1795 – 23 March 1797 — ADM 51/1198
22 June 1797 – 23 January 1800 — ADM 51/4425
1793-1800 — ADM/L/C/92

HMS Diomede (44-gun Roebuck-class two-decker fifth-rate “frigate”)
140ft long, 38ft wide, 887 tons. Launched 1781, sank 2nd August 1795.
07 May 1794 – 06 May 1795 — ADM 51/1120
25 May 1795 – 03 August 1795 — ADM 51/4437
1793-1795 — ADM/L/D/125

HMS Resistance (44-gun fifth-rate frigate) [was this also a two-decker Roebuck-class “frigate”?]
140ft long, 38ft wide, 963 tons. Launched in 1782 and blown up in 1798.
28 June 1795 – 30 June 1796 — ADM 51/1194

HMS Sybille (44-gun single-deck frigate, with extra guns on the forecastle and querterdeck)
152ft long, 39ft wide, 700 tonnes. Launched 1792 as “La Sybille”, captured by HMS Romney in 1794, disposed of in 1833.
10 March 1795 – 30 April 1798 — ADM 51/1222
1795-1803 — ADM/L/S/616

HMS Oiseau (formerly La Cléopatre) (32-gun single-deck frigate)
145ft long, 37ft wide, tonnage not listed. Launched 1781, captured 1783, broken up in 1816.
01 January 1795 – 17 February 1796 — ADM 51/1115
03 May 1796 – 30 November 1796 — ADM 51/1183
1780-1781 — ADM/L/L/285

HMS Heroine (32-gun fifth-rate frigate)
Launched in 1783, sold in 1806.
04 March 1797 – 20 August 1798 — ADM 51/4457
01 February 1796 – 02 March 1797 — ADM 51/1193
1794-1802 — ADM/L/H/145

HMS Fox (32-gun fifth-rate frigate)
Launched in 1780, sold in 1816.
14 January 1793 – 11 January 1794 — ADM 51/371
15 January 1794 – 14 November 1794 — ADM 51/1146
01 January 1793 – 31 December 1795 — ADM 51/1107
15 November 1795 – 14 November 1796 — ADM 51/1180
15 November 1796 – 14 November 1797 — ADM 51/1211
15 November 1797 – 17 June 1798 — ADM 51/1257
1794-1801 — ADM L/F/216

HMS Carysfort (28-gun sixth-rate frigate)
118ft long, 33ft wide, 586 tons. Launched in 176, sold in 1813.
18 March 1795 – 31 March 1796 — ADM 51/1176
01 April 1796 – 02 March 1797 — ADM 51/1219
1795-1799 — ADM/L/C/64

HMS Hobart (formerly the French corsair ship La Revanche) (18-gun sloop)
Captured October 1794, sold 1803.
12 September 1795 – 27 March 1797 — ADM 51/1211
1795-1800 — ADM/L/H/159

HMS Virginie (44-gun French single-deck frigate)
Captured April 1796 off Ireland.
30 August 1796 – 29 August 1797 — ADM 51/1180
30 August 1797 – 10 August 1798 — ADM 51/1267
11 August 1798 – 14 September 1798 — ADM 51/1294
14 September 1798 – 13 September 1799 — ADM 51/1299