Seahorse vs Sensible – 27 June 1798
In June 1798, the British frigate Seahorse easily captured the weaker French frigate Sensible in the Mediterranean, on board of which were a number of senior French Army officers whose overheard conversations revealed the first clear intelligence about the destination of a huge expedition that had set out from Toulon under the direction of General Napoleon Bonaparte.
In June 1798, Captain Edward James Foote, commanding the eighteen-pounder frigate Seahorse 38 was detached from the blockade of Cadiz by the commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet, Admiral the Earl of St. Vincent. His orders were to take stores and specie to Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson’s squadron, which was somewhere further up the Mediterranean attempting to discover the whereabouts of a French expedition from Toulon. Amongst the articles the Seahorse carried for Nelson’s squadron was the capstan of the Culloden 74, and she also had aboard a number of seamen from that ship.
At 4 p.m. on the afternoon of 26 June, the Seahorse was near the island of Marettimo off the west coast of Sicily in search of Nelson when she fell in with the 12-pounder French frigate Sensible 36, Captain Guillaume Francois Joseph Bourdé de la Villehuet. The enemy ship was in passage from Malta to Toulon carrying General Louis Baraguay d’Hilliers and his staff, together with General Napoleon Bonaparte’s dispatches and some of the plunder from the French expedition’s recent capture of Malta. Upon sighting the British frigate, the weaker French vessel turned and fled for Malta, and Foote’s command immediately set sail after her.
The Seahorse had been launched in the summer of 1794 and had seen service in home and Irish waters before sailing for the Mediterranean Fleet in January 1797. Whilst participating in Rear-Admiral Nelson’s disastrous attack on Tenerife that summer, her captain, Thomas Fremantle, had been wounded, and after taking Nelson home to England he had been obliged to give up the command in order to convalesce. In his place the Admiralty had appointed 30-year-old Captain Edward Foote, a post captain of three years’ seniority, who had earned King George’s respect because the crew of his previous frigate, the Niger 32, had remained loyal during the naval mutinies. Foote’s new command was armed with twenty-eight 18-pounders cannons on her upper gun deck, together with fourteen 32-pounder carronades and four 9-pounder cannons on her quarterdeck and forecastle, giving her a broadside weight of metal of 494 pounds. Her compliment at this time numbered 292 men and boys, including those who were sailing to rejoin their ship, the Culloden.
The Sensible had been launched in 1787 and already had the capture of a British frigate to her credit, for whilst in company with the corvette Sardine 16, she had taken the Nemesis 28, Captain Samuel Hood Linzee, off Smyrna, Turkey on 9 December 1795. Her original armament consisted of twenty-six 12-pounder cannons on her upper gun deck, and six 6-pounder cannons on her quarterdeck and forecastle, and in addition it seems likely that she bore four 36-pounder carronades. Even so, this meant that her broadside weight of metal was just about half that of her opponent. It seems likely that she had 300 men aboard, and just two months previously she had undergone a thorough refit and been copper-bottomed at Toulon.
Given her recent overhaul, the Sensible proved difficult to catch, and it was not until 4 a.m. the next day that, following a long chase, Foote managed to bring her to close action, some forty miles to the south-east of the island of Pantellaria. The French vessel had already incurred a great deal of damage aloft from the Seahorse’s bow guns, and her defence was significantly hampered when a number of Maltese ex-galley slaves serving in her crew fled their cannon on receiving the Seahorse’s first broadside. Unsurprisingly, the superior gunnery and firepower of the British frigate soon overwhelmed her opponent, and with at least three dozen shot in her hull, and having made a futile attempt to board the Seahorse, the Sensible’s crew surrendered in just eight minutes.
The action had seen the French incur casualties of 18 men killed and 37 wounded, including Captain Bourdé and his senior subordinate, although in a private letter to General Bonaparte, General d’Hilliers claimed that 25 men had been killed and 55 wounded. The one-sided victory was illustrated by the fact that aboard the Seahorse just one seaman and a drummer had been killed, and 16 men wounded. One of the injured men was the first lieutenant, David Wilmott, who thus suffered the singular misfortune of having been wounded for the eighth time in nine actions, but at least he had the compensation of being accorded the honour of commanding the Sensible for the journey back to join the Earl of St. Vincent.
Within half a day of receiving the Sensible into his fleet, St. Vincent had taken six men from each ship on his station to provide a crew; he gave the command to Commander John Baker Hay. He then promoted Lieutenant Wilmott into the command of the Alliance 14 en-flute in Hay’s stead, which advancement was confirmed by the Admiralty in due course. Commander Wilmott’s luck finally ran out eight months later when he was killed during Captain Sir William Sidney Smith’s defence of Acre.
News of the Sensible’s capture was delivered to the Admiralty at the end of July by St. Vincent’s flag-captain, Sir Robert Calder, who had gone home in the Success 32, Captain Philip Wilkinson. Meanwhile, General d’Hilliers was placed ashore at Portsmouth and within the next few weeks he visited Brighton and Lewes, where his height and upright gait (although perhaps not his inability to speak English) won the admiration of the populace. He was exchanged for Major-General Sir Eyre Coote, who had been captured in the reckless attack on Ostend, and he returned from Dover to France in August. The Sensible eventually arrived at Portsmouth on 25 November where she would be converted into a troopship.
Somewhat unjustly, Captain Bourdé was to be implicitly criticised by the French Minister of Marine for having struck his colours without putting up ‘a long, an obstinate, and a terrible resistance’, however, the testimony of General d’Hilliers and the findings of a naval court-martial at Toulon better represented of the force that had been opposed to him, and he was honourably acquitted of responsibility for the loss of his ship.
Armed from his capture of the Sensible with the French private signals and information gleaned from the captured officer’s conversations regarding the Toulon expedition’s destination, Captain Foote headed for the Egyptian coast where he hoped to find Nelson. On 21 July, being in company with the Terpsichore 32, Captain William Hall Gage, the Seahorse arrived off Alexandria where French transports were observed in the harbour and the Toulon fleet was discovered to be at anchor in Aboukir Bay. Of Nelson there was no sign, and it was only after a further fruitless search in the Mediterranean that the Seahorse returned to Alexandria on 17 August to learn of the British victory at the Battle of the Nile sixteen days earlier.
The Seahorse continued in commission until laid up at the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815. Her capture of the Sensible was surpassed by her victory (under the command of Captain John Stewart) over the Turkish ship Badere-i-Zaffér 52 on 5 July 1808, an engagement that saw 165 Turks killed and 195 wounded as opposed to 5 men killed and 10 wounded aboard the Seahorse. Captain Foote continued to be a favourite of King George, to such extent that from 1803 until advanced to flag rank in 1812 he stepped away from active service to command one of the royal yachts. The Sensible’s career in the navy was short, for having gone out to the East Indies, she was wrecked off Ceylon on 3 March 1802 under the command of Commander Robert Sauce. Ironically, Captain Foote, who was based in the East Indies at that time, was ordered by Rear-Admiral Peter Rainier to visit the wreck and attempt to salvage of anything of worth.