THE NICHOLAS CRUWYS NAVAL SERIES
Ships of the series
Resolution
Captain James Cook
Resolution was a three-masted, square-rigged wooden vessel built at Whitby in 1770 as the collier Marquis of Granby; she measured 110 feet 8 inches along her lower deck, with a beam of 35 feet 3½ inches and a carrying capacity of approximately 462 tons burthen. Converted for exploration, she carried 112 men, twelve carriage guns and twelve swivel guns, along with equipment for distilling seawater and Kendall’s K1 chronometer for determining longitude, serving as Cook’s flagship on his second and third voyages. After returning to England in 1780, she became an armed transport and was captured by the French in June 1782; her eventual fate remains uncertain, with an unconfirmed account suggesting she ended her days as a Portuguese coal hulk at Rio de Janeiro.
lynx
Lynx was a ship sloop of sixteen guns in which nicholas Cruwys served under commander Henry walsh. built at Deptford in 1771 and coppered, she is based on the Swan class of the twenty four ships built in the 1760s and 1770s. She carried fourteen six-pounders on her main deck and two three-pounders on the quarterdeck, with a company of a hundred and twenty-five. She was small and fine lined, with a sharp entry and a clean run, and she was built for speed and handiness rather than weight of metal. That made her a natural dispatch vessel, convoy scout and inshore cruiser, able to go where frigates could not.
growler
Growler was a French brig of fourteen guns, built in 1778 to a design by Jacques-Noël Sané. She was built for fighting, not converted from a merchantman. She was handsome, sleek and well proportioned, sharp at the entry and fine on the run, with a marked tumblehome. Nicholas commanded her as prize master. He had a prize crew of forty, about half her proper complement.
barfleur
Barfleur was a second rate of ninety-eight guns. and the lead ship of a class of second rate line of battle ships built to Sir Thomas Slade’s design. launched at Chatham in 1768, She measured 1,947 tons, 177 feet 6 inches on the gundeck, and carried 750 men. She had twenty-eight thirty-two-pounders on the lower deck, thirty eighteen-pounders on the middle deck, thirty twelve-pounders on the upper deck, and two nine-pounders on the forecastle. She was rated a ninety, and became a ninety-eight when eight more twelve-pounders were added to the quarterdeck in about 1780.
She is Rear Admiral Hood’s flagship on the Leeward Islands station when Nicholas cruwys joins her at English Harbour on 17 January 1782
alert
Alert began as an American privateer. She was a topsail schooner, built in Virginia, registered out of Baltimore, and not more than two years old when Admiral Hood promoted Nicholas Cruwys to master and commander into her. She was a Chesapeake vessel, what her own people called “Virginia-built”: the sharp-built type that the war spread all down the American coast and that matured, a generation later, into the Baltimore clipper. The type already existed by 1780, but the name “Baltimore clipper” came much later. Contemporaries spoke of “Virginia-built” or “pilot-boat model” vessels, “Baltimore-built” appeared in the War of 1812. Virginia-built ships made up about half the American privateers in 1778, and probably a similar share of the more than three hundred commerce raiders at sea in 1782.
ganges
Ganges was an East India Company ship, not a King’s ship, built about 1778 at the Company yard in Bombay. She was teak-built and coppered, ship-rigged, and of about 650 tons. Designed for the China trade and for defence against South China Sea pirates, she had sharper lines than most Indiamen, “in effect a cross between an Indiaman and a 32 gun frigate. She carried twenty-four twelve-pounders and six eighteen-pounder carronades, with Nicholas’s own Spanish brass long nines from Alert as bow chasers, Nicholas, on Navy leave with his commission suspended but not revoked, accepted the Company commission in London in November 1782.
.jpg)
miranda
Miranda is fictional, but she is closely modelled on Heroine, a thirty-two-gun twelve-pounder frigate built by Henry Adams at Buckler’s Hard on the Beaulieu River. Both ships began the same way. Adams laid Heroine down in 1782 as a private venture, without an Admiralty order. The Admiralty bought her while her frame was still on the stocks, and the Navy Board adapted her design to naval standards. Miranda is likewise “begun on speculation, and now purchased by the Admiralty for completion”, with Adams admitting he has “taken liberties with the standard Amazon lines.”
Miranda is launched in late May 1784, so that Nicholas, newly promoted to post captain, can see her finished on the stocks beside the sixty-four Indefatigable and commission her himself. She keeps the standard Amazon dimensions of a hundred and twenty-six feet by thirty-five. Adams’s refinements are modest and plausible, finer lines aft and a shade more deadrise in her floors, and she carries Nicholas’s own long brass nines in the bows. In speed, weatherliness and handiness she is what Heroine was admired for: a frigate made for detached service far from an admiral’s eye.
romulus
Romulus was Henry Harrington’s thirty-six gun frigate of the Flora class. She was longer and beamier than Miranda, and she carried twenty-six eighteen-pounders on her main deck and half a dozen twenty-four-pounder carronades. Henry kept her immaculate, in black-and-yellow chequer with her rigging blacked down, and her gunnery was the best in Trevenen’s Baltic squadron. In October 1787 she was sent on to Stockholm and Nicholas temporarily commands her.
victory
​Victory is of course well known, but here we see her as she was when nicholas first boards her in 1793 off of toulon. She is a hundred-gun first rate, Sir Thomas Slade’s design, laid down at Chatham in July 1759 and launched on 7 May 1765. Her frame stood for nearly three years to season, and she was first commissioned only in 1778. By 1793 she carried forty-two-pounders on her lower deck, twelve-pounders in her upperworks since 1783, two sixty-eight-pounder carronades on the quarterdeck, and a company of about 850. She still had her open stern galleries and her original oversized figurehead;both went in the great repair of 1800 to 1803. Victory was the ship flag officers asked for, even when newer and larger first rates were available: she is well documented as sailing better than any other first rate and handling with unusual responsiveness for a ship of her size.
topaze
​Topaze was a French built thirty-two of the Magicienne class, designed by Joseph-Marie-Blaise Coulomb at Toulon. She was the younger sister of Sensible, built to lines “refined from Sensible’s by a builder who understood what he had nearly achieved and intended to complete it.” Nicholas first hears of her from Deschamps on Christmas Eve 1788, before she has been built. Capitaine de vaisseau de Grasse-Limermont commissioned her in the spring of 1792 and kept her in good order through the collapse of the Marine Royale and the Toulon campaign. She is a few feet longer than Miranda, with her sheer running a little further forward and a finer entry. In British service she carries twenty-six twelve-pounders and six carronades on the quarterdeck. On the forecastle, in place of the two carronades the dockyard preferred, she has two long nines that Nicholas paid for himself. Hood gives her to Nicholas at Hyères on 23 December 1793.