HMS Chanticleer (1808)

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For other ships of the same name, see HMS Chanticleer.

Career (UK)

Ordered:	31 December 1807
Laid down:	March 1808
Launched:	26 July 1808
Commissioned:	September 1808
Decommissioned:	1848, transferred to Coastguard
Motto:	–
Fate:	Sold and broken up in June 1871 at Sheerness
General characteristics
Displacement:	237 tons (242 tons for second voyage)
Length:	90.3 ft (27.5 m)
Beam:	24.6 ft (7.5 m)
Draught:	12.5 ft (3.8 m)
Propulsion:	Sail
Speed:	–
Range:	–
Complement:	75 as a ship-of-war
Armament:	10 guns: 8 x 18 pdr carronades, 2 x 6 pdr

HMS Chanticleer was a Cherokee class 10-gun brig of the Royal Navy. Chanticleer was built by Daniel List at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, where she was launched on 26 July 1808, weighing in with a displacement of 237 tons, and was initially based at Great Yarmouth under Commander Charles Harford (who drowned 19 October 1808) and then Commander Richard Spear. The ship saw action in the Baltic Sea, becoming involved in an action with three warships of the Royal Danish Navy on September 2, 1811.^[1]

Chanticleer served chiefly as an escort vessel and cruised off the European coast. In 1813, Chanticleer was responsible for taking three prizes near the German archipelago of Heligoland in the North Sea.

Chanticleer was dispatched on a scientific expedition of the Pacific Ocean in 1828 under the command of Captain Henry Foster who was lost off the coast of Panama. After Foster's loss, the ship was commanded by the First Lieutenant. On the 1828 expedition, the ship circumnavigated along the Southern Hemisphere, visiting the River Plate and Isla de los Estados of Argentina, Cape Horn at the southernmost tip of South America, New Zealand, South Georgia, circled the Cape of Good Hope near the southern tip of the African continent, and made port at Trinidad before returning across the Atlantic Ocean to Falmouth in 1830.

Chanticleer had originally been scheduled to make the second South America survey of 1831, but due to the exceedingly poor condition of the ship, the Beagle, one of Chanticleer's sister ships in the Cherokee class, was selected instead.^[2] Thus it was the Beagle, and not the Chanticleer, that became that ship upon which Charles Darwin established his reputation as a naturalist.

In 1832, John Frost obtained an Admiralty grant to establish Chanticleer as a hospital ship to be moored off Millbank, intended to serve as a refuge for Thames boatmen. However, Frost overextended himself and the plan fell through.^[3]

In 1848, Chanticleer was towed to Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex, for use in the River Crouch as a Customs watch ship. She was re-named WV5 on May 25, 1863 and broken up in June 1871 at Sheerness.