History | |
---|---|
France | |
Name: | Sensible |
Namesake: | French: "sensitive" |
Ordered: | 23 January 1786 |
Builder: | Toulon |
Laid down: | February 1786 |
Launched: | 9 August 1787 |
In service: | March 1788 |
Captured: | 28 June 1798 |
United Kingdom | |
Name: | Sensible |
Acquired: | 28 June 1798 by capture |
Honours and awards: |
Naval General Service Medal with clasp "Egypt" |
Fate: | Wrecked on 2 March 1802 |
General characteristics | |
Class and type: | Magicienne-class frigate |
Displacement: | 600 tonnes & c.1100 tonnes fully loaded |
Tons burthen: | 945 67⁄94 (bm) |
Length: | 44.2 m (145 ft) |
Beam: | 11.2 m (37 ft) |
Draught: | 5.2 m (17 ft) |
Sail plan: | Full rigged ship |
Armament: |
Sensible was a 32-gun Magicienne-class frigate of the French Navy. The Royal Navy captured her in 1798 off Malta and took into service as HMS Sensible. She was lost in a grounding off Ceylon in 1802.
From November 1789, she served at Martinique under captaine de vaisseau Durand de Braye (or Durand d'Ubraye). In September 1790, she ferried Joséphine de Beauharnais and her daughter Hortense from Martinique to Toulon.
In 1792, she took part in operations against Sardinia. In 1793, she was equipped as a bomb ship.
On 9 December 1795, Sensible was part of Gantaume's squadron. Sensible, along with the corvettes Sardine and Rossignol, captured the 28-gun Nemesis in the neutral port of Smyrna. The French warships entered the harbour in disregard of its neutrality and forced Nemesis to surrender. Murray Maxwell (then a midshipman) was taken prisoner on this occasion.
Under lieutenant de vaisseau (later capitaine de frégate) Escoffier, in March–April 1795 Sensible crossed the Aegean Sea, stopping at Tunis and Valletta on her way to Toulon. The next year she came under the command of capitaine de frégate Guillaume-François-Joseph Bourdé. He sailed Sensible from Toulon to Trieste via Corfu. She then cruised the Adriatic before returning to Corfu.