SURPRISE
It was common in earlier days for captured enemy ships to be recommissioned into the service of the captor’s navy.
Surprise was one such vessel. Launched as
L’Unité in the French port of Le Havre in 1794, she was taken as she lay at anchor off Tunis by the British ship
Inconstant two years later. Now classed as a sixth-rate frigate, and armed with 34 x 32-pounder guns and two four-pounders, she was renamed
Surprise and sailed into action against the fleets of which she had once been part. Her guns blazed many times in the following years, most notably in 1799 when her crew captured the Spanish ship
Santa Cecelia, which had sailed under the Union Jack as HMS
Hermione, until her mutinous crew had surrendered her to the Spanish in 1797. In 1801,
Surprise sailed into the Kent port of Sheerness to be recoppered, and was sold out of the service a year later. Almost two centuries later, she sailed into the lists once more, this time as the vessel that features in Patrick O’Brian’s best-selling ‘Master and Commander’ series of novels.
Tonnage: 350 tonnes
Length: 31ft (9.5m)
Beam: 63ft (19.2m)
Draught: 14ft (4.2m)
Armament: 34x32 pounders: 2x4-pounders (as chasers)
Launched: (as
L’Unité) 1794, Le Havre, France