HMS Undaunted (1807)

• 1. Introduction

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  HMS Undaunted was a fifth-rate 38-gun sailing frigate of the British Royal Navy, and in the spring of 1814 she carried the most famous passenger in the world to a distant island exile. That passenger was Napoleon Bonaparte, former Emperor of France, and the island was Elba. But the ship that made that crossing had spent years earning the name she bore. Her story is one of relentless coastal warfare, audacious raids, prize captures, and an accidental brush with the hinge of European history. How did a frigate built at Woolwich Dockyard end up ferrying the fallen emperor of France across the Mediterranean? And what happened to her after that moment passed?

• 2. Built for War

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  William Rule, the Surveyor of the Navy, drew up the design for the Lively-class in 1799, and the sixteen ships eventually built to that plan were regarded as probably the most successful British frigate design of the period. Undaunted's path to the water was not smooth. She was originally ordered on the 7th of November 1803 from a builder named Joseph Graham at Harwich, but Graham went bankrupt before work could begin in earnest. The contract transferred to Woolwich Dockyard on the 6th of January 1806. There, the naval constructor Edward Sison oversaw the laying of the keel in April 1806. She was launched on the 17th of October 1807 and completed just six weeks later, on the 2nd of December 1807, at a total cost of £36,967. Captain Thomas James Maling received his appointment to command her on the 27th of October 1807, before she was even finished.

• 3. Captures and Coastal War

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  On the 29th of February 1808, Undaunted took her first notable prize: the Spanish ship Nostra Senora del Carmen, also known as La Baladora. Then, on the 12th of February 1809, she ran down the French privateer San Josephe in the English Channel. Undaunted spotted San Josephe at dawn and pursued her for four hours before taking her. The privateer was brought into Spithead the following day. She had only been four days out of St. Malo, was provisioned for two months, carried a crew of 96, and was pierced for 18 guns, though she actually mounted only 14. The Royal Navy took San Josephe into service. In early 1810 Undaunted was engaged in the defence of Cadiz, and in June of that year Captain George Charles Mackenzie replaced Maling. On the 30th of August 1810 she sailed with a convoy for Malta. On the 17th of February 1811 she recaptured the transport ship Dorothy shortly before command passed again, this time to Captain Richard Thomas.

• 4. Raids Along the French Coast

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  Captain Richard Thomas brought Undaunted to the Mediterranean, where she cooperated with Spanish guerrillas on the coast of Catalonia before shifting to the blockade of Marseille. For a time she served as the flagship of the small squadron blockading Toulon. On the 29th of April 1812 the boats of Undaunted, her frigate, and a sloop attacked a convoy of 26 French vessels near the mouth of the river Rhone. Lieutenant Eagar of Undaunted led the raiding party; they captured seven vessels, burned twelve, and left two grounded on the beach. Among the vessels destroyed was a French Navy schooner armed with four 18-pounders and crewed by 74 men. The attack cost the British nothing. Captain Thomas was eventually invalided home, and on the 2nd of February 1813 command passed to Captain Thomas Ussher, the man who would define Undaunted's most active period. Under Ussher, the ship was continually employed on the southern coast of France for the next two years, striking at ships and fortifications along stretches of coast that most naval commanders would have considered unassailable.

• 5. Bayonets and Batteries

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  On the 18th of March 1813, Lieutenant Aaron Tozer led a landing party from Undaunted ashore near Carri, west of Marseille. The marines drove the defenders out of a shore battery at bayonet point, then destroyed four 24-pounder long guns, a 6-pounder field gun, and a 13-inch mortar, before seizing a tartan anchored nearby. Two men from Undaunted were killed and one wounded. Less than two weeks later, on the 29th of March 1813, a combined force from Volontaire and Undaunted landed at Sormiou by night and attacked the batteries at Morgiou from the rear at dawn. The 40 enemy troops there offered only partial resistance. A lieutenant and 16 men of the French 62nd Regiment were taken prisoner, the five 36-pounder guns in one battery and two 24-pounders in the other were thrown into the sea, a mortar was spiked, and all the ammunition was destroyed. Lieutenant Syer's boats meanwhile captured 11 merchant vessels, mostly tartans and settees ranging between 25 and 45 tons, laden mainly with oil. On the 18th of August 1813 Undaunted joined an assault on the strongly defended port of Cassis, east of Marseille. Light winds prevented her from reaching her assigned position, but Marines and seamen captured the main battery in the Citadel by escalade, seized 24 settees and tartans, and took 60 prisoners. By November 1813, Captain Ussher noted in his report that the total number of vessels taken or destroyed during his ten months in command of Undaunted had reached seventy.

• 6. Napoleon on the Water

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  Late on the evening of the 24th of April 1814, Undaunted and Euryalus, commanded by Captain Charles Napier, were off Marseille when they saw illuminations in the town. The lights indicated something significant had happened. The next morning both ships anchored offshore, noticing that the semaphore station appeared abandoned. A boat flying a flag of truce carried the mayor and municipal officials out to them with the news: Napoleon had abdicated. Captains Ussher and Napier landed to meet the military governor. During that meeting Ussher received a letter stating that Colonel Sir Neil Campbell was in Marseille with orders from Lord Castlereagh in Paris to convey the former Emperor and his retinue to exile on the island of Elba. On the 26th of April Undaunted sailed for Saint-Tropez, then to Frejus, where Napoleon was lodged in a small hotel. On the evening of the 28th of April, Napoleon, his followers, and the representatives of the victorious Allies boarded Undaunted and set sail. She arrived at Elba on the 30th of April, and Napoleon disembarked on the 3rd of May to formally take possession of the island. Undaunted remained at Elba until the end of the month before sailing for Genoa. Captain Ussher relinquished command on the 29th of June 1814.

• 7. Aftermath and Final Years

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  When Napoleon escaped from Elba in February 1815 Undaunted, now under Captain Charles Thurlow Smith, was sent into the Adriatic in pursuit of a Neapolitan squadron. Captain Charles Austen commanded a companion vessel in that search. On the 2nd of May 1815 Undaunted destroyed vessels at Tremiti, and two privateers were captured in late May and early June. Undaunted was paid off at Chatham in October 1815 and kept in ordinary until she was recommissioned on the 11th of August 1827 under Captain Sir Augustus William James Clifford. She attended the Lord High Admiral, the Duke of Clarence, during his official visits to Chatham and Sheerness. In 1828 she carried Lord William Bentinck to India via the Cape of Good Hope so he could take up his post as Governor-General. She returned to Britain with Major-General Bourke, the former Lieutenant-Governor of the Cape, and was paid off again in November 1830. Recommissioned in November 1831 under Captain Edward Harvey, she served at the Cape of Good Hope and on the African and East India stations, during which Harvey commanded a squadron at the time of an insurrection on the Ile de France. On the 1st of February 1834 Undaunted ran aground off Selsey Bill in West Sussex and was put out of commission later that year. She was laid up at Portsmouth until the 24th of November 1859, when she was used as a target ship to test molten-iron filled shells designed to set a target on fire. The shells succeeded too well: the blaze could not be controlled, and she was finally sunk with conventional shot. She was broken up in 1860.