Favourite of Fortune by Andrew Bond

Author:Andrew Bond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Military
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2021-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

19

‘A Very Fast Ship’1

Quilliam’s appointment to command one of the Royal Navy’s newest and most powerful frigates was a reflection of professional performance. With ever more ships coming into service, the Navy needed experienced, capable commanders and was not over-blessed with talent. The hapless John Surman Carden, appointed to the frigate Macedonian, a sister ship of Quilliam’s new command, managed to lose first the support of his crew and then the ship itself through a combination of excessive brutality and rank incompetence.2 By contrast Quilliam, who had impressed as Alexandria’s captain, was singled out for a larger command and greater responsibilities. Quilliam had acquired a new sponsor in Sir James Saumarez, himself a great seaman, because he was an exceptional captain.

Nevertheless, HMS Crescent, the Lively-class frigate launched at Woolwich on 11 December 1810, may not have been the Admiralty’s first choice for his next command. Several authorities list him as actually being in command of the 36-gun frigate Inconstant between October and December 1810 while she was refitting in Portsmouth, although he was hundreds of miles away in the Baltic at the time.3 Indeed, Inconstant is one of two other frigates pencilled in on Quilliam’s record of service, the other being the 38-gun Amelia.4 Be that as it may, an internal Admiralty memo, dated 29 December 1810 and now filed among his Captains’ Letters at the National Archives at Kew, simply reads: ‘Captain John Quilliam to have Commission for the Crescent.’5

That Quilliam himself knew that he was to have Crescent by the time Alexandria reached the Downs is clear since he wrote to the Admiralty from there on 3 January 1811 asking for his ‘Commission for H.M. Ship Crescent to be forwarded to the Commissioners office at Sheerness.’6 A week later he was writing from Sheerness, requesting that the Admiralty ‘appoint Lieut Thos Crane … as first Lieutenant of His Majestys Ship Crescent under my Command’.7 Thomas Crane was not only a fellow Manxman and briefly a former shipmate but family, his brother having married Quilliam’s sister Elizabeth during the peace of 1802–03. Unfortunately, Crane’s tenure was short lived. Even before Crescent had completed her first deployment, he lost his big toe in action and was invalided home.8

The first entry in the ‘Log-Book of the Proceedings On Board His Majesty’s Ship Crescent … Kept By Captain Quilliam’9 was made on 11 January 1811, the day after he left the Alexandria and almost certainly the day he joined Crescent. While no doubt familiar with the Lively class, he would surely have been struck by the contrast with Alexandria: 27ft longer on the gun deck, more than 5ft wider in the beam and a design complement greater by seventy-five men. Most impressively, with twenty-eight 18pdrs and fourteen 32pdr carronades, she threw a total weight of shot more than 50 per cent heavier than the smaller frigate. Even for the former first lieutenant of a 100-gun first-rate battleship, Crescent was a seriously powerful weapon of war.10

Three days after Quilliam’s arrival, Crescent ‘Received …

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