HMS Satellite, 1855-1879
HMS Satellite 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 Place Names (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2009), 526.
  • 2. Ibid.
  • 3. Ibid.
Mentions of this vessel in the documents