NAVAL HISTORY

Greymouth Evening Star, 1 April 1933, Page 5

NAVAL HISTORY

H.M.S. GANGES. The inscription on the seat made from the timber of the old line-of-battle-ship Ganges and presented to the City ? of Nelson by their Excellencies, Lord and Lady Bledisloe, recalls something more even than the hundred and eleven years of history indicated by the dates, for there has been a Ganges in the British Navy since 1782, and one of them fought under Nelson, after whom the city was named, at the battle of Copenhagen. The Ganges from whose ancient timbers tho seat was made took pait in no great battles. Launched at Bombay in 1821, she was an 84-gun ship of the line, and her main claim to fame is that she was the last of the old “wooden-walls” of -the age of sail to act as flagship of a squadron at sea. From 1860 to 1899, the period in which wooden ships were being broken up or swept away into remote harbours to act as training ships or as coal hulks for their successors —sea-mon-sters of steel and steam—the Ganges lay in Falmouth Harbour as a training ship for boys. In the latter year she was towed to Harwich, where she was renamed. Eor many years she was known as the Tenedos HI. In 1910 she became the Indus V., and then, in spite of her 11 years, she was never by sixty-five years than Nelson’s famous Victory, which, still flies the flag of the Admiral commanding at Portsmouth.

The first Ganges, a 74-gun ship of the line, was launched in 1782 when England was still trying vainly to subdue her rebellious American colonies. She took part in various minor operations, including the capture of the West Indian island of Santa, Lucia from the French in. 1790- Her day <a crowning glory tame on April 2, 1801, when she sailed into Copenhagen as one of Nelson's ships to do buttle with Hie Hanes. Six years later she look part, in another expedition against. Denmark, this time io break up the Federation id' Northern States against. England. With her consorts she received the surrender of the Danish Fleet., just, as more than a century later British ships received the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet in the North Sea.