Help sought for name of ship Plymouth Sound 1814.

Covers and postal matters before 1840.
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earsathome
Posts: 217
Joined: Sat Sep 19, 2009 6:00 pm

Help sought for name of ship Plymouth Sound 1814.

Post by earsathome »

HMS.jpg
We have a letter dated Feb 13th 1814 written by a Lieut R Sargent on board a ship in the Plymouth Sound, but unfortunately we cannot trace this vessel.

It looks clear enough and the scan attached looks legible, but there seems to be no such vessel in any of the lists I can find. It looks to us like ENDANUS.

The first sentence of the letter is another puzzle

“Sir
Yesterday we all Received our prize Money for the Recapture we took off the Isle of Wight….”

There is online a complete list of all the vessels captured in the 19th century, and it is not even on that list, as one that captured another vessel.

Any information welcome
Regards
Eunice and Ron
HMS.jpg
Winston W
Posts: 113
Joined: Fri Nov 02, 2012 6:00 pm
Location: East Anglia

Re: Help sought for name of ship Plymouth Sound 1814.

Post by Winston W »

Eunice and Ron,

Is the notation you show written by the sender or the recipient?

If the latter, possibly the ship was the frigate Menelaus.

As regards the ship captured, perhaps the the phrase "the Recapture" is a reference to a ship that had been recaptured, with the upper case R being the typical capitalisation of a noun, rather than a ship named the Recapture.
earsathome
Posts: 217
Joined: Sat Sep 19, 2009 6:00 pm

Re: Help sought for name of ship Plymouth Sound 1814.

Post by earsathome »

Hello Winston,

Thanks for your response and for taking the trouble.
The notation was written by the sender and we think you are right about the capital R.

As a matter of interest we put the query on another board and this is a summary of the information that came to hand.

The ship was named HMS LIFFEY, but was then launched as the ERIDANUS.
Having found that out, the next bit of information was that the ship that they recaptured was the COROMANDEL, (originally called the MODESTE) and the Coromandel had been captured by an American ship.
If you are interested in the end result of the queries
The full details about the letter contents and story connected is now up on our website under this url
http://www.earsathome.com/letters/Previ ... rgent.html

It is amazing that we could find none of this information on our web searches.
We live and learn!
Thanks again and regards
Ron and Eunice
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