HMS Scorpion
Eleven ships of the Royal Navy have been named HMS Scorpion after the carnivorous arthropod, or the scorpion, a ballistic weapon in use in the Roman army:
- HMS Scorpion (1746) was a 14-gun Merlin-class sloop launched in 1746. She sank in the Irish Sea in 1762.
- HMS Scorpion was the 8-gun fireship HMS Etna, converted to a sloop in 1771 and renamed Scorpion. She was sold in 1780. She took part in Tryon's Raid on the Connecticut coast in 1779.[1] She became one of the infamous Hudson River prison ships sometime after.[2] The American poet Philip Morin Freneau was captured by the British in 1780 and imprisoned on the HMS Scorpion; he wrote a harrowing first-person a poem in four cantos about his six- week ordeal titled "The British Prison Ships".[3] It is considered "his best-known revolutionary poem".[4]
- HMS Scorpion (1785) was a 16-gun Echo-class sloop launched in 1785 and sold in 1802. She apparently became the whaler and letter of marque Scorpion, and worked in the South Seas fisheries until the Spaniards captured her in 1808.
- HMS Scorpion (1794) was a gunvessel purchased in 1794 and sold in 1804
- HMS Scorpion (1803) was a Cruizer-class brig-sloop launched in 1803 and sold in 1819.
- HMS Scorpion (1832) was a Cherokee-class brig-sloop launched in 1832, converted to a survey vessel in 1848 and on loan to the Thames Police from 1858. She was broken up in 1874.
- HMS Scorpion (1863) was a turret ship, one of two being constructed for the Confederate States of America under the cover story that they were intended for Egypt; the British Government seized them before they were launched in 1863. Scorpion sank in 1903 while being towed for scrapping.
- HMS Scorpion (1910) was a Beagle-class destroyer launched in 1910 and sold for scrapping in 1921.
- HMS Scorpion (T67) was a river gunboat launched in 1937 and sunk by Japanese destroyers in Banka Strait in 1942.
- HMS Scorpion (G72) was an S-class destroyer launched in 1942 and sold to the Netherlands in 1945.
- HMS Scorpion (D64) was a Weapon-class destroyer launched in 1946 and scrapped in 1971.
Citations and references
- Allen, Houghton Mifflin Company (1913). A Naval History of the American Revolution. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. pp. 2:398–399.
- Cray, Robert E. “Commemorating the Prison Ship Dead: Revolutionary Memory and the Politics of Sepulture in the Early Republic, 1776-1808.” The William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 3 (1999): 565–90. https://doi.org/10.2307/2674561.
- Freneau, Philip Morin. The Poems of Philip Freneau: Poet of the American Revolution (United States: University Library, 1902), 18-38.
- Blakemore, Steven. Literature, Intertextuality, and the American Revolution: From Common Sense to Rip Van Winkle (United Kingdom: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), XIV
- Colledge, J. J.; Warlow, Ben (2006) [1969]. Ships of the Royal Navy: The Complete Record of all Fighting Ships of the Royal Navy (Rev. ed.). London: Chatham Publishing. ISBN 978-1-86176-281-8.
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