HMS Buzzard

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Four Royal Navy ships and two bases have been named HMS Buzzard after the bird:

• Buzzard (1813)-1815 was originally a French vessel named Lutine captured in the Leeward Islands in 1806 and renamed HMS Hawke. She was renamed Buzzard in 1813 and sold in 1815.
• Buzzard (1834)-1843 was a 237-ton Cherokee class brigantine, built in Portsmouth, which spent most of her career engaged in patrols against the Atlantic slave trade; James Covey, who played a key role in the Amistad court case, was a sailor on board this vessel. A picture of this ship capturing the slaver Formidable on 17th December 1834, by William John Huggins, is in the National Maritime Museum. 707 slaves were rescued but only around 400 survived. The vessel was sold in 1843.
• Buzzard (1849)-1883 was a wooden paddle sloop, launched in 1849 and commissioned on 7 May 1852. It was broken up in 1883.
• Buzzard (1887), a Nymphe-class composite screw sloop launched in 1887, later renamed HMS President and sold in 1921.
• A naval air station at Lympne, Kent, bore the name HMS Buzzard from 1939-1940, but was then renamed HMS Daedalus.
• Later during the Second World War, HMS Buzzard was the name of a naval air station in Port Royal, Jamaica.

[edit] References

• Colledge, J. J. and Warlow, Ben (2006). Ships of the Royal Navy: the complete record of all fighting ships of the Royal Navy, Rev. ed., London: Chatham. ISBN 9781861762818. OCLC 67375475. 
• Sailing ships of the Royal Navy for information about the 1813 and 1834 Buzzards
• Huggins' picture of the Buzzard of 1834
• Information on the 1834 Buzzard
• Log of the 1852 Buzzard