Frigate Captain
With the end of the Peace of Amiens in 1803 Dundas returned to sea in 1804 in command of the 36-gun fifth rate HMS Naiad. He was initially assigned to patrol off the west coast of Spain and in the English Channel, where he captured several prizes. In late 1804 he captured a Spanish ship worth over 200,000 dollars, and also helped in the capture of the privateers Fanny and Superb. The Naiad was also involved in an engagement in the Bay of Gibraltar with a flotilla of Spanish gunboats. In mid-August 1805 Dundas had a narrow escape when he came across a large fleet off northern Spain, which challenged the Naiad using British codes. This was in fact the combined fleet under Pierre-Charles Villeneuve, heading for Ferrol. Naiad managed to escape, evading fire from the lead French frigates, and on 20 August Dundas fell in with Vice-Admiral Sir Robert Calder's squadron, on its way to blockade Ferrol.
Calder's force was then sent on to join the ships blockading the combined fleet in Cadiz under Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, and Dundas used his time here to harass enemy supply ships. With the arrival on 28 September of Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson to take command of the fleet, the main British force withdrew over the horizon. Nelson deployed his frigates, including Dundas's Naiad, and several ships of the line to provide a line by which the enemy fleet could be observed and signals transmitted back to him. When the combined fleet put to sea on 19 October Naiad was third in the line, between the frigate HMS Phoebe and the 74-gun third rate HMS Defence. As the combined fleet approached the British over the next couple of days, Naiad and the other frigates shadowed it, reporting on its movements.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Dundas (Royal Navy Officer)
Famous quotes containing the words frigate and/or captain:
“Our frigate takes fire,
The other asks if we demand quarter?
If our colors are struck and the fighting done?
Now I laugh content for I hear the voice of my little captain,
We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“So universal and widely related is any transcendent moral greatness, and so nearly identical with greatness everywhere and in every age,—as a pyramid contracts the nearer you approach its apex,—that, when I look over my commonplace-book of poetry, I find that the best of it is oftenest applicable, in part or wholly, to the case of Captain Brown.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)