HMS Blanche (1800)

1803 plan of the Apollo class
History
United Kingdom
Name	Blanche
Ordered	18 January 1799
Builder	Deptford Dockyard
Laid down	February 1800
Launched	2 October 1800
Completed	17 January 1801
Commissioned	19 November 1800
Fate	Destroyed, 19 July 1805
General characteristics [1]
Class and type	Fifth-rate Apollo-class frigate
Tons burthen	95086⁄94 (bm)
Length	145 ft 1 in (44.2 m) (upper deck) 121 ft 9+1⁄2 in (37.1 m) (keel)
Beam	38 ft 3+3⁄4 in (11.7 m)
Draught	10 ft 5 in (3.2 m) (forward) 14 ft 1 in (4.3 m) (aft)
Depth of hold	13 ft 3 in (4 m)
Propulsion	Sails
Complement	264
Armament	UD: 26 × 18-pounder guns QD: 2 × 9-pounder guns + 10 × 32-pounder carronades Fc: 2 × 9-pounder guns + 4 × 32-pounder carronades

HMS Blanche was a 36-gun

Blanche was sailing off Puerto Rico on 19 July 1805 when she was attacked by a French squadron of four ships, led by Captain François-André Baudin in the 40-gun frigate Le Topaze. After a battle lasting forty-five minutes Mudge surrendered Blanche, having had eight men killed. The frigate was beginning to sink, and later in the day the French set Blanche on fire before sinking her. Two of the four French warships were captured a month later, while Mudge was released after Topaze reached Portugal. Blanche's loss is controversial; while Rear-Admiral John Sutton praised Mudge and his crew for their defence of the outnumbered ship, historians such as William James have criticised the British performance as lacklustre and undistinguished.

Design

Blanche was a 36-gun, 18-pounder Apollo-class frigate.^[2] Designed by Surveyor of the Navy Sir William Rule, the Apollo class originated as three ships constructed between 1798 and 1803. The class formed part of the Royal Navy's response to the French Revolutionary Wars and need for more warships to serve in it.^[1][3] The original Apollo design would be revived at the start of the Napoleonic Wars in 1803, with twenty-four ships ordered to it over the next nine years.^[4] This order came about as the threat from the French fleet against Britain began to dissipate, especially after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The Royal Navy stopped ordering specifically large and offensively capable warships, and instead focused on standardised classes of ships that were usually more moderate in size, but through larger numbers would be able to effectively combat the expected increase in global economic warfare.^[5]

The Apollo class became the standard frigate design for this task, alongside the

The fitting out process for Blanche was completed on 17 January 1801, also at Deptford.^[6][1] With a crew complement of 264, the frigate held twenty-six 18-pounder long guns on her upper deck. Complementing this armament were ten 32-pounder carronades and two 9-pounder long guns on the quarterdeck, with an additional two 9-pounder long guns and four 32-pounder carronades on the forecastle.^[1] Blanche's armament stayed as originally established throughout her service.^[10]

Service

Copenhagen

Blanche was commissioned under the command of

During the night of 1 April the frigate grounded off

The frigates withdrew after two hours, having received heavy casualties in the victorious battle.[18] In the engagement Blanche received seven men killed and a further nine badly wounded, with damage to her hull and rigging.^[11] In the wake of the battle the commander of the British fleet, Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, agreed an armistice with the Danes that the First Lord of the Admiralty, Admiral Lord St Vincent, believed was too lenient, and he recalled Parker. On 5 May Parker left his flagship and went on board Blanche, reaching Yarmouth in the frigate on 13 May.^[14][19][20]

Channel Fleet

Blanche spent the rest of the French Revolutionary Wars attached to Admiral

With the Peace of Amiens having ended with the start of the Napoleonic Wars, Blanche sailed to the West Indies where she joined the Blockade of Saint-Domingue towards the end of the year.^[1][21] On 3 November she discovered the French 4-gun privateer cutter L'Albion sheltering under the gun batteries of Monte Christi.^[1][22] Mudge sent four of Blanche's boats with sixty-three men to cut out Albion, but did so in broad daylight; before they could reach the French ship Blanche's boats turned back, believing the task too dangerous.^[22]

Mudge decided to attack Albion again, this time during the night of 3–4 November. He sent the marine Lieutenant Edward Nicolls out in a boat with thirteen men to make the attack, but soon realised this was not enough and sent Lieutenant Warwick Lake with twenty-two men to reinforce and supersede Nicolls. The two boats approached Albion, but Lake believed the French vessel to be in a different location and took his boat off in the wrong direction, leaving Nicolls to make the attack alone. Nicolls boarded Albion and, despite being shot through the stomach, quickly captured the vessel, the British having killed five of the French crew.^[23]

With the enemy gun batteries overlooking the scene of the battle, Nicolls had his men keep firing their muskets to make it seem as if the battle was still ongoing, so that the batteries would not fire on the newly taken ship. As Nicolls was just getting Albion away from the shore Lake appeared in his boat and ordered the men to stop firing. "As a reward of his stupidity", the naval historian William Laird Clowes says, the gun batteries then killed two of his men before Albion sailed out of range. Mudge reported Lake rather than Nicolls as the victor of the battle, leading the contemporary naval historian William James to suggest Lake was a favourite of the captain's, despite Clowes describing him as "a thoroughly worthless officer".^[24] Mudge's operations were not always so confused, and in a one-month period off San Domingo he captured or destroyed twenty-four enemy vessels, halting much of the communication between the enemy islands.^[21][25]

In the morning after the capture of Albion one of Blanche's boats attacked and captured a 1-gun privateer schooner. About a day after this another of the frigate's boats, under the command of Midshipman Edward Henry à Court, was on a mission to gather sand with only eight men and five muskets on board, when they encountered a French schooner with over thirty French soldiers. À Court chose to board the schooner despite his numerical disadvantage, and successfully captured the vessel when the soldiers were found to all be seasick.^[26]

Under the orders of Captain

Continuing off Curacao, Blanche captured the French 14-gun privateer La Gracieuse on 21 October and at some point in the year also took the Dutch 4-gun schooner Nimrod.^[1][21] The ship captured two more French privateers in 1805; the 6-gun Le Hansard on 5 April and the 14-gun schooner L'Amitie on 9 April.^{[Note 2][1]}

Loss

Blanche was sailing 100 miles (160 km) north of

At about 12 a.m. Mudge surrendered Blanche in a sinking state, having lost eight members of the crew killed and a further fifteen wounded.[1]^[21] French casualties were minimal, with Topaze having three men killed and nine wounded. The French took control of Blanche, but at 6 p.m. found her to be sinking and unrecoverable. Her timbers were infected with dry rot and had broken easily under the French gunnery.^[33] The frigate was set on fire, and once she had burned to the waterline, sunk.^[32]

Aftermath

Twenty-two members of Blanche's crew were taken on board Faune, which herself was captured to the west of Rochfort on 15 August by the 74-gun ship of the line HMS Goliath and 20-gun post ship HMS Camilla.^[29] Later in the day Goliath, now accompanied by the 64-gun ship of the line HMS Raisonnable, found the other three ships of the French squadron to the south.^[33] These vessels scattered to avoid the powerful British ships, with Goliath chasing and capturing Torche soon afterwards, recovering another fifty-two of Blanche's crew. Raisonnable instead focused on Topaze, getting in range on 16 August, but was forced to give up the chase when Topaze's chase guns did heavy damage to her rigging, leaving both Topaze and Départment des Landes to escape, the former to Lisbon with Mudge on board.^[34][35] Having reached Lisbon, Mudge and the crew remaining with him were released upon application from the British consul there.^[36]

Despite some suggestions that Blanche had not been fully prepared for the fight and had given up too easily, Mudge was honourably acquitted in a

James has questioned how truthful Mudge was in his account of the loss of Blanche, noting how he greatly overestimated the strength of his four opponents in his reports and made suggestions of much higher casualties than had actually occurred. The French officers involved also negated Mudge's account of an especially hard-fought battle, noting how only Topaze had truly engaged Blanche, with the other vessels firing very few shots at the British ship, and those mostly at the rigging and masts. James ends his debate on the merits of the defence of Blanche by saying:

"We confess our inability to discover any thing calculated to distinguish this case of defence and surrender from others that have occurred; not, at least, on the score of superior merit"[38]

The historian E. V. E. Sharpston builds on James' argument, concluding that:

"It is difficult to escape the conclusion (reinforced by other episodes in his career) that Mudge was inept, his crew slack, and that neither measured up to Captain Baudin and his crew"^[31]

Part of Blanche's wreck, including her mainmast, was found floating at 22°N 63°W / 22°N 63°W / 22; -63 by the American schooner Sally on 27 July; the ship then found another mast a mile onward, with rigging and an anchor still attached. A still flying battle ensign could be seen underwater. Markings on the recovered material led the captain of Sally to initially announce that he had discovered the destruction of the 74-gun ship of the line HMS Blenheim rather than the remains of Blanche, but this was rectified by a report in The Times on 16 October.^[39]

Notes and citations

Notes