HMS satelliteSatellite, 1855-1879
HMS satelliteSatellite was a corvette-class vessel of 1,327 tonnes, with 21 guns.1 Prevost captained it for its time on the Pacific Station, from 1857-60, and it appears
in dozens of despatches, mostly in 1858.2
It was launched from a Devonport dockyard in 1855 and sailed in South America and
China, in addition to its work on the West Coast, where it acted, in 1858, as a guard-ship
and licence-checker for miners on the Fraser River. It was broken up in 1879, but
its memory lives on in the Salish Sea in at least three geographical place names:
Satellite Channel, Passage, and Reef.3
- 1. Andrew Scott, The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Placenames (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2009), 526.
- 2. Ibid.
- 3. Ibid.