HMS Alceste was built in 1804 for the French Navy as Minerve. In 1806 she engaged HMS Pallas, then under Lord Cochrane. During the duel she ran aground but Cochrane had to abort his attack when French reinforcements appeared. The British captured her in an action on 25 September 1806, and the Royal Navy took her into service in March 1807. She continued to serve throughout the Napoleonic Wars, and was converted to a troopship and used to transport British soldiers to North America during the War of 1812. Following the Treaty of Paris in 1815, she struck a reef in the Java Sea; her wreck was subsequently plundered and burned by Malayan pirates. She was eventually sold
About HMS Alceste (1806) in brief
HMS Alceste was built in 1804 for the French Navy as Minerve. In 1806 she engaged HMS Pallas, then under Lord Cochrane. During the duel she ran aground but Cochrane had to abort his attack when French reinforcements appeared. The British captured her in an action on 25 September 1806, and the Royal Navy took her into service in March 1807. She continued to serve throughout the Napoleonic Wars, and was converted to a troopship and used to transport British soldiers to North America during the War of 1812. Following the Treaty of Paris in 1815, she struck a reef in the Java Sea; her wreck was subsequently plundered and burned by Malayan pirates. She was eventually sold to the United States Navy in 1820, and later sold for $1,000,000 in 1825. She is now a museum ship at the Naval Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, and is on display at the Museum of Naval History and Science in New York City, along with a number of other historic ships from the French and British navies. She has been preserved in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, New York, as part of a collection known as the “Naval Museum of the Navy and Shipbuilding”, which is open to the public. The ship’s name is a reference to the French frigate Minerve, which was built to a design by Pierre Rolland in the early 1800s.
She had a capacity of 1,097 71⁄94 tons burthen and was armed with 28 18-pounder guns as her main battery. She also had 14 32-pounders on her quarter-deck; her forecastle had two 9- pounder long guns and two 32- Pounder carronades. She served in the First World War and the Second World War, and served as a troop ship in the Pacific and the Caribbean. She died in the Battle of the Bulge in 1858, after being sunk by a British frigate, HMS Pallas, in a battle that may have changed the course of the war. Her wreck was later looted by Malay pirates in the 1950s and 1960s, and her remains are still visible in the waters off the coast of Java, where they are still being used as a tourist attraction. Her name is still used by the British to this day, and she is commemorated in a plaque on the side of her former home port of Rochefort, near Paris, France. Her son, HMS Alcesto, was also a French warship, but he was killed in a separate battle in the Second Barbary War in 1864. He was buried in a shallow grave in the Bay of Biscay, France, and his remains are now displayed at the French National Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is the only member of his family to have survived the First War of the Wars to be a member of the British Royal Navy.
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