Taxonomy Term

HMS Calcutta was an East Indiaman converted to a Royal Navy 56-gun fourth rate. This ship of the line served for a time as an armed transport. She also transported convicts to Australia in a voyage that became a circumnavigation of the world. The French 74-gun Magnanime captured Calcutta in 1805. In 1809, after she ran aground during the Battle of the Basque Roads and her crew had abandoned her, a British boarding party burned her. Originally Calcutta was the 1176-ton (bm) East Indiaman Warley, built at John Perry's Blackwall Yard in 1788, the first vessel of the name that Perry built for the East India Company. In early 1795, the Royal Navy purchased the first Warley and had her original builders, Perry & Co., refit her as a 56-gun fourth rate, under the name Calcutta, at a cost of £10,300. Between May 1802 and February 1803, the Navy had Calcutta fitted out as a transport for convicts being sent to Britain's penal colonies in Australia. Captain Daniel Woodriff recommissioned her in November 1802 and sailed her from Spithead on 28 April 1803, accompanied by the Ocean, to establish a settlement at Port Phillip. Calcutta carried a crew of 150, together with 308 male convicts, along with civil officers, marines, and some wives and children. Source: Wikipedia