Brig (14).
L/B:
78 × 26 (23.8m × 7.9m). Tons:
208 bm. Hull:
wood. Comp.:
90. Arm.:
14 × 4pdr. Built:
King, Dover, Eng.; 1782.
European navies did not employ brig-rigged vessels in significant numbers until after the Seven Years' War. The Royal Navy introduced a new class of brig—the prototype was HMS Childers—in 1778. Fast and nimble, the two-masted square-riggers were used as dispatch boats and for convoy protection. Probably the most famous Royal Navy brig was HMS Speedy. Although remembered as the vessel in which Lieutenant Thomas Lord Cochrane acquired his reputation as one of the most enterprising officers of his day, her early career is illustrative of the variety of duties to which these vessels were assigned.
At the start of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793, Speedy was dispatched to Gibraltar under Charles Cunningham. She undertook a variety of assignments around the Iberian peninsula and in the western Mediterranean for the next year. On June 9, 1794, she was looking for a British squadron off the coast of Nice when she closed with three French frigates that Commander George Eyre assumed to be British. He realized his mistake too late, and Speedy struck to the Sérieuse (36 guns). Taken into the French Navy, she was recaptured the following March by HMS Inconstant (36). Speedy remained in the Mediterranean, cruising with Commodore Horatio Nelson's squadron off the coast of Italy, and she took part in the capture of six vessels carrying arms for the siege of Padua.
On October 3, 1799, under command of Jahleel Brenton, Speedy attacked a convoy of eight merchantmen and two escorts. Though none were taken, six were forced ashore near Cape Trafalgar and destroyed. On November 6, Speedy fought off a flotilla of twelve Spanish gunboats while escorting a transport bound for Livorno with wine for the fleet. Although the Spaniards were driven off, Speedy suffered extensive damage to her hull and rigging. Shortly thereafter, Brenton was assigned to command the recently captured Généreux, and Lieutenant Cochrane assumed command of Speedy on March 28, 1800.
Speedy cruised off the Spanish coast with great success. In thirteen months under Cochrane's command, she captured upwards of fifty vessels, together with 122 guns and 534 prisoners. On December 21, 1801, Cochrane evaded a Spanish frigate detailed to capture her by flying the Danish flag and the quarantine flag and having a Danish-speaking officer explain that the ship had been at a North African port riddled with the plague. On May 6, 1802, Speedy fell in with the Spanish frigate El Gamo (32) off Barcelona. Although Cochrane had described Speedy as "crowded rather than manned" with a crew of ninety officers and men when he took command, nearly forty of these had been put aboard various prizes to be taken into port, and Speedy's complement numbered only fifty-four. Nonetheless, Cochrane commenced an attack of unrivaled daring. Running alongside the larger ship, Cochrane fired a series of treble-shotted broadsides into El Gamo, whose twenty-two 12-pdr., eight 9-pdr., and two carronades were mounted too high to damage the smaller brig. Cochrane then led a boarding party and captured the frigate and her crew of 319. Spanish losses were fifteen killed (including Captain Don Francisco de Torris) and forty-one wounded, as against three British dead and eight wounded. Although outnumbered six to one, the British took El Gamo into Port Mahon, Minorca. To keep the Spanish crew below decks, their captors loaded El Gamo's main-deck guns with canister and pointed them down the hatchways.
Instead of the honors he so richly deserved for such an unparalleled feat of arms, Cochrane was all but ignored. Although he was promoted to the rank of post-captain, his recommendation that Lieutenant Parker be promoted was overruled by Lord St. Vincent, First Lord of the Admiralty, on the grounds that "the small number of men killed on board the Speedy did not warrant the application." Cochrane imprudently observed that she had suffered more casualties than had
HMS Victory at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, for which Admiral Sir John Jervis had been made Earl St. Vincent and his first captain a knight.
Cochrane received more respect from his enemies. Ordered back to the Mediterranean, on July 3 Speedy was escorting a slow transport when she was set upon by three French frigates. After several hours of combat, Cochrane was forced to haul down his flag. The French captain of the Dessaix was so impressed by his enemy that he declined to accept Cochrane's sword in surrender. Speedy's subsequent career is unknown, but it is doubtful that she entered French service.
Cochrane was soon exchanged and went on to further fame in the frigates Pallas and Impérieuse. His brazen and tireless campaigning against corruption in the service kept him out of favor with his superiors, and in 1814 he was disgraced because of his apparent complicity in a stock swindle perpetrated by a French refugee under his command. In 1816, Cochrane accepted an offer to command the Chilean Navy against the Spanish, and he sailed in the
O'Higgins. He went on to serve in the Brazilian and Greek navies before his reinstatement as a rear admiral in the Royal Navy in 1832.
Clowes, Royal Navy. Cochrane, Autobiography of a Seaman. Phillips, Ships of the Old Navy.
