HMS Chanticleer

Career (UK)
Ordered:	31 December 1807
Laid down:	March 1808
Launched:	26 July 1808
Commissioned:	September 1808
Decommissioned:	1848, transferred to Coastguard
Motto:	–
Fate:	Sold and broken up in June 1871 at Sheerness
General characteristics
Tons burthen:	237 bm
Length:	90.3 ft (27.5 m)
Beam:	24.6 ft (7.5 m)
Draught:	12.5 ft (3.8 m)
Propulsion:	Sail
Speed:	–
Range:	–
Complement:	75 as a ship-of-war
Armament:	10 guns: 8 x 18 pdr carronades, 2 x 6 pdr

HMS Chanticleer was a Cherokee class 10-gun brig of the Royal Navy. Chanticleer was built by Daniel List at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, where she was launched on 26 July 1808, and measured 237 tons burthen. Her initial base was Great Yarmouth. Commander Charles Harford commissioned her, but drowned on 19 October, so Commander Richard Spear took command in November.

Active service

On 2 September 1811 while off the coast of Norway, Chanticleer became involved in an action with three 18-gun brigs of the Royal Danish Navy, Loland, Alsen and Sampsoe.^[1] Out-gunned and out-numbered, Chanticleer made good her escape, leaving her consort, HMS Manly, for the Danes to capture.

Chanticleer served chiefly as an escort vessel and cruised off the European coast. In 1813, she took three prizes near the German archipelago of Heligoland in the North Sea.

Chanticleer was dispatched on a scientific expedition in the Pacific Ocean in 1828 under the command of Captain Henry Foster. He explored the South Atlantic, and especially the South Shetland Islands; Port Foster on Deception Island is named after him. Unfortunately, he drowned in 1831 in the Chagres River in Panama. After Foster's loss, the ship's command fell to her First Lieutenant. On the expedition, the ship circumnavigated along the Southern Hemisphere, visiting the River Plate and Isla de los Estados of Argentina, Cape Horn at the southernmost tip of South America, New Zealand, South Georgia, rounded the Cape of Good Hope near the southern tip of the African continent, and made port at Trinidad, before returning across the Atlantic Ocean to Falmouth in 1830.

Chanticleer had originally been scheduled to make the second South America survey of 1831, but due to the exceedingly poor condition of the ship, the Beagle, one of Chanticleer's sister ships in the Cherokee class, was selected instead.^[2] Thus it was the Beagle, and not the Chanticleer, that became that ship upon which Charles Darwin established his reputation as a naturalist.

In 1832, John Frost obtained an Admiralty grant to establish Chanticleer as a hospital ship to be moored off Millbank to serve as a refuge for Thames boatmen. However, Frost overextended himself and the plan fell through.^[3]

Fate

In 1848, Chanticleer was towed to Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex, for use in the River Crouch as a Customs watch ship. She was re-named WV5 on 25 May 1863 and broken up in June 1871 at Sheerness.

Notes

References

• "Mid-Victorian RN vessel HMS Chanticleer". William Loney RN - Background. http://www.pdavis.nl/ShowShip.php?id=2501. Retrieved 2008-01-22. 
• "HMS Chanticleer". Index of 19th Century Naval Vessels. http://www.pbenyon.plus.com/18-1900/C/00916.html. Retrieved 2008-01-22. 
• Winfield, Rif. British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1793-1817: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. Seaforth Publishing, 2nd edition, 2008. ISBN 978-1-84415-717-4.