HMS Favourite

Seven ships of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Favourite, or HMS Favorite:

HMS Favorite (1864)

HMS Favorite was one of the three wooden warships of moderate dimension (the others being HMS Research and HMS Enterprise) selected by Sir Edward Reed for conversion to broadside ironclads in response to the increased tempo of French warship building.

Background and design

Favorite was named after a French prize-of-war, and hence her name is spelled in the French way. She was laid down as a corvette of 22 guns of the Jason class, and was selected for conversion after being two years on the builder's slipway. The hull form was already complete, so modifications were restricted to the installation of a rounded stern and a straight stem in place of the traditional overhanging stern and knee bow.

She carried her armour in a box battery amidships, and the guns carried therein, four on each side, were the heaviest naval cannon of the day. A degree of axial (fore and aft) fire was enabled through an arrangement in which part of the battery wall could be recessed, and one of the guns could be traversed around, about its own axis, to fire through the space thus produced.

HMS Favourite (1794)

HMS Favourite (or Favorite) was a 16-gun Cormorant-class sloop of the Royal Navy, launched in 1794 at Rotherhithe. The French captured her in 1806 and renamed her Favorite. However, the British recaptured her in 1807 and renamed her HMS Goree. She became a prison ship in 1810 and was broken up in Bermuda in 1817.

French Revolutionary Wars

Favourite was commissioned in March 1794 under Commander Charles White. In September of the next year Commander James Athol Wood took command and sailed her for the Leeward Islands.

Favourite's first task was to assist in the quelling of insurrections on Grenada and St. Vincent. In support of these operations, Captain Robert Otway of Mermaid had Wood patrol the waters to intercept vessels carrying provisions to the insurgents.

On 5 February 1796 Favourite captured two French privateers and ran one ashore within the Bocas Islands between Trinidad and Venezuela. The largest privateer was the Général Rigaud, of eight guns and 45 men, mostly Italians and Spaniards. The second privateer was the packet ship Hind, which the Général Rigaud had taken off St. Vincent's. Her crew escaped before Favourite could take possession. The vessel that ran ashore was the Banan.