The colonial despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871
HMS Bacchante, 1859-1869
HMS Bacchante was a Liffey
class, wood construction frigate carrying fifty-one guns and 560 crew.1
Like many ships built during introduction of steam power, Bacchante was equipped with
boilers and a screw, but regularly used sail as a source of propulsion. Launched at
Portsmouth in 1859,
decommissioned in 1864, and scrapped in 1869, the ship spent its short service life captained by Donald
McLeod Mackenzie in the Royal Navy's Pacific squadron.2Bacchante was the flagship of the squadron's commander-in-chief,
Sir Thomas Maitland,
from 1860 to 1862.3
The ship was frequently present at Esquimalt which had, according to an 1861 editorial in
Victoria's Daily British Colonist newspaper, become the the actual naval headquarters in
the Pacific, despite not being formally declared so by the
Admiralty.4
When Bacchante's heavy '68-pounder' pivot gun was upgraded in
1862, its surplus weaponry was
transferred to Esquimalt's defensive fortifications, reducing the number of guns carried
to
thirty-nine.5
1. David Lyon and Rif Winfield, The Sail & Steam Navy List: All the Ships of the Royal Navy 1815-1889 (London: Chatham Publishing, 2004), 200-201.
2. Lyon and Winfield, The Sail & Steam Navy List, 201; Naval and Military Intelligence,Times (London, England), 1 August 1859, 12; Naval and Military Intelligence,Times (London, England), 25 July 1864, 12; The Navy List [June 1860] (London: John Murray, 1860), 145. http://n2t.net/ark:/13960/t41s69784; The Navy List [June 1864] (London: John Murray, 1864), 172. http://n2t.net/ark:/13960/t16n2rj0h; The Mails,Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle (Portsmouth, England), 29 September 1869, 2; The Navy List [December 1869] (London: John Murray, 1870), 183. http://n2t.net/ark:/13960/t3329gb0x