Vaillante was a 20-gun French ship-corvette, built at Bayonne and launched in 1796. Captain Edward Pellew in captured her off the Île de Ré

Île de Ré

Île de Ré is an island off the west coast of France near La Rochelle, on the northern side of the Pertuis d'Antioche strait....

 on 7 August 1798. The Admiralty took her into the Royal Navy as HMS Danae. Some of her crew mutinied in 1800 and succeeded in turning her over to the French. The French returned her to her original name of Vaillante, but sold her in 1801. As a government-chartered transport she made one voyage to Haiti; her subsequent history is unknown.

French service

Vaillante was built at Bayonne between 1794 and August 1796, and was launched in 1796. She was armed with twenty long 8-pounders and 175 men, commanded by Lieutenant la Porte, and bound to Cayenne. She was carrying 25 banished priests, 27 convicts, and Madame Rovère and family.

After Indefatigable captured Vaillante, she arrived in Portsmouth on 20 October. There she was registered and renamed Danae on 11 October 1798 and was fitted out until February 1799. James draws attention to the fact that the British equipped her with more cannons, but fewer men, than the French had.

British service

Captain Lord William Proby

William Proby, Lord Proby

William Allen Proby, Lord Proby was a British Royal Navy officer and Whig politician.-Background and education:...

 commissioned Danae in December 1798. In March 1799 a gale caught her in a bay of shoals and rocks near the Île de Batz

Île de Batz

The Île de Batz is an island off Roscoff in Brittany, France. Administratively, it is a commune in the Finistère department of Brittany in north-western France.-Population:...

. Two of her anchor cables broke but her crew let go a third anchor, which held. The storm stove in all her boats and Proby slipped and fell down the main hatchway. The fall dislocated his shoulder and broke two ribs.

On 4 April Danae captured the 14-gun lugger Sans Quartier, off Chausey

Chausey

Chausey is a group of small islands, islets and rocks off the coast of Normandy, in the English Channel. It lies from Granville, and forms a quartier of the Granville commune, in the Manche département...

. Sans Quartier had a crew of 56 men and though she was pierced for 14 guns, she had thrown all overboard in an attempt to escape from Danae.

On 25 December 1799 Danae, and the hired armed

Hired armed vessels

right|thumb|250px|Armed cutter, etching in the [[National Maritime Museum]], [[Greenwich]]During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Royal Navy made use of a considerable number of hired armed vessels...

 cutter Nimrod

Hired armed cutter Nimrod

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars the Admiralty also made use of hired armed vessels, one of which was the hired armed cutter Nimrod. Three such vessels are recorded, but the descriptions of these vessels and the dates of their service are such that they may well represent one...

 assisted , which had hit some rocks. They were able to rescue the crew and Ethalion was then burnt.

The next year, on 10 January 1800, Danae was in company with and when Excellent recaptured the American vessel Franklin, which a French privateer Alliance had taken the day before. Franklin had been sailing from St. Thomas for London with a cargo of sugar, coffee and indigo. The privateers had done a great deal of damage to the vessel and her cargo before the British recaptured her.

Then on 6 February 1800, Danae, with other vessels, captured the 38-gun frigate Pallas from St Malo bound to Brest, off St Malo. The British took Pallas into service as .

That morning Danae also captured a French cutter. Then on 10 March Danae recaptured the sloop Plenty.

Mutiny

On 6 March 1800 Danae sailed from Plymouth on a cruise to the westward. At 9:30 in the evening on 14 March mutineers

Mutiny

Mutiny is a conspiracy among members of a group of similarly situated individuals to openly oppose, change or overthrow an authority to which they are subject...

 took control of the deck while the officers were mostly below decks asleep. The captain of the foretop, William Jackson, attacked and threw the master, who was officer of the watch, down the main hatchway. The mutineers succeeded in securing the hatchways, preventing Proby, his officers and the loyal seamen from coming up on deck. Proby and his officers tried to regain the deck but were driven back with Proby himself sustaining a head wound.

The following morning the mutineers reached Le Conquet

Le Conquet

Le Conquet is a commune in the Finistère department of Brittany in north-western France.-Geography:Le Conquet is a fishing port in the northwest of Brittany...

 in Finistère

Finistère

Finistère is a département of France, in the extreme west of Brittany.-History:The name Finistère derives from the Latin Finis Terræ, meaning end of the earth, and may be compared with Land's End on the opposite side of the English Channel...

 where they met up with the French brig Colombe, which Danae had herself chased into the port. There a detachment of soldiers came aboard and accepted Lord Proby's surrender. The two vessels then sailed together to Brest. On the way the frigates and chased them briefly before breaking off after the mutineers falsely signaled that they were in pursuit of Colombe.

The French treated Captain Proby, his officers and the loyal seamen well, and then paroled them. A court martial aboard on 17 June honourably acquitted Proby, his officers and the loyal members of the crew of blame.

Fate

The French restored Danae to her original name. They sold Vaillante to a Morlaix merchant named Cooper in 1801. In her new civilian guise she was chartered back to the French government as a transport. She made a single voyage to Haiti

Haiti

Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...

 during the Haitian Revolution

Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution was a period of conflict in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which culminated in the elimination of slavery there and the founding of the Haitian republic...

 of Toussaint Louverture. It is not known what happened to the ship after 1802.

Post script

On 30 May 1800 left Plymouth on a cruise. She returned that same evening and landed two seamen, mutineers from the Danae that Dasher had taken out of a cartel off the Sound. On 12 June 1800 Indefatigable captured the French privateer Vengeur, which had sailed from Bordeaux two days previously for Brazil. When her crew landed at Plymouth the authorities conveyed them to Mill prison. There, on 24 August, Lieutenant Neville Lake, who had been first lieutenant in Danae, identified John Barnet(t) as one of the mutiny's ringleaders. The court martial on 2 September sentenced Barnet to death; he was hanged from the fore-yard arm of Pique on 9 September.The identification of Lieutenant Lake as first lieutenant of Danae is inconsistent with the identification of Lieutenant Nevin as first lieutenant of Danae in a subsequent court martial of another mutineer.

At the end of September the Guernsey

Guernsey

Guernsey, officially the Bailiwick of Guernsey is a British Crown dependency in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy.The Bailiwick, as a governing entity, embraces not only all 10 parishes on the Island of Guernsey, but also the islands of Herm, Jethou, Burhou, and Lihou and their islet...

 privateers Alarm, Dispatch and Marquis of Townsend recaptured a large West Indiaman that the French privateer Grand Mouche had captured and sent to Brest. The Guernseymen's prizemaster discovered that the French prize crew included seven mutineers from Danae.

Another mutineer, John M'Donald, alias Samuel Higgins, was seized in the streets of Wapping disguised as an American carrying American protection papers. His court martial took place aboard , at the Nore

Nore

The Nore is a sandbank at the mouth of the Thames Estuary, England. It marks the point where the River Thames meets the North Sea, roughly halfway between Havengore Creek in Essex and Warden Point in Kent....

on 10 June 1801. Lieutenant Nevins, who had been the Danaes first lieutenant and who had apprehended M'Donald in London, testified that while he was in a tavern with M'Donald after apprehending him, M'Donald had said that the instigators of the plot to take Danae were two men named Jackson and Williams and an Irish priest (and former officer of the Irish rebel army) named Ignatius Finney. M'Donald was hanged on 20 June on , a guardship at the Nore. John Williams was hanged in September 1801. It is not clear what, if anything, happened to William Jackson or Ignatius Finney.

External links

• Phillips, Michael: Ships of the Old Navy - Danaehttp://www.ageofnelson.org/MichaelPhillips/info.php?ref=0691