6th rate 24 (3m).
L/B/D:
113 × 32 × 11 (34.4m × 9.8m × 3.4m). Tons:
508 burden. Hull:
wood. Comp.:
160. Arm.:
22 × 9pdr, 2 × 3pdr. Built:
Fellowes, Woolwich Dockyard, Eng.; 1751.
The ninth ship of the Royal Navy to bear the name, HMS Dolphin saw duty throughout the Seven Years' War and was part of Admiral John Byng's fleet at the Battle of Minorca (for which the Admiral was court-martialed and executed). The year after the war ended, she was made the flagship of an expedition under Commodore John Byron (a veteran of
HMS Wager). The voyage had several purposes—all redounding to "the advancement of the Trade and Navigation" of Great Britain. Chief among them was to establish a base in the South Atlantic from which Britain might monitor traffic bound for the Pacific.
On June 21, 1764, Dolphin and the sloop HMS Tamar sailed from Portsmouth and made their way down the Atlantic stopping at the Cape Verdes and Madeira islands before crossing to Rio de Janeiro and down to Port Desire. After provisioning at bountiful Port Famine in the Strait of Magellan, Byron sailed back to the Falkland Islands, which he claimed in the name of George III, not realizing that the French had established a colony there the year before. Returning to Port Famine for provisions, Byron was next to have searched for other islands in the South Atlantic. Instead, he sailed through the Strait of Magellan and into the Pacific from where he had orders to "proceed to New Albion, on the Western Coast of North America" and thereafter search for a Northwest Passage or return to England via the East Indies.
Byron chose to search for the Solomon Islands discovered by Alvaro Mendaña in
Los Reyes in 1568. This course took Dolphin first to the island of Más Afuera in the Juan Fernández group, 400 miles off the coast of Chile. Continuing north, in the latitude of the Tropic of Capricorn, Byron turned west northwest and on June 10 came to the island of Takaroa (14°30S, 143°W) in the Tuamotus. Desperate for fresh provisions, Byron and his crew forced a landing against the inhospitable natives. Here the English found "the carved Head of a Dutch Long boats Rudder," from Roggeveen's Afrikaansche Galei which had wrecked in 1721. From here Byron sailed west, jogging to the north just before he hit Tahiti, and continuing until he was in the Tokelaus. On June 28, "Finding there is no such Land as laid down in the [chart by] Neptune François for Solomon's Islands," he hauled to the northward for the Mariana Islands. Sailing through the Gilbert Islands, he turned west again to land at Tinian on July 30, where he spent nine weeks. Now in relatively well known waters, the expedition sailed to the north of the Philippines, through the South China Sea to Batavia and from there, via the Cape of Good Hope, to the Downs, where Dolphin arrived on May 9, 1766.
Dolphin was in excellent condition due mostly to the fact that before her sailing, her hull was sheathed in copper "to cause some further experiments to be made of the efficacy of Copper-Sheathing" against teredo worms. Byron had written from Port Famine, "My Opinion of Copper Bottoms is that it is the finest Invention in the World," and this was confirmed by the master shipwright at Deptford who declared her "fit for further Service." Dolphin was the second Royal Navy ship fitted with copper (the first was HMS Alarm, in 1761), but despite the benefits, copper cladding was not widespread until after 1783.
Almost immediately, Dolphin was fitted out for a second voyage, under Captain Samuel Wallis. As Tamar had sailed to the West Indies with a damaged rudder, Dolphin's consort this voyage would be
HMS Swallow, under Lieutenant Samuel Carteret. If Byron had accomplished little else, he had forced a redirection in the Admiralty's exploratory focus to the South Pacific, and when the two ships sailed on August 21, 1766, it was to find "Land or Islands of Great extent ... in the Southern Hemisphere between Cape Horn and New Zeeland ... in Climates adapted to the produce of Commodities useful in Commerce."
While the lack of any such lands made this unnecessary, the westerlies that predominate in the southern ocean made it impossible for the ships to sail 100° to 120° of longitude from the Cape "losing as little Southing as possible." Sailing from Plymouth on August 22, 1766, the two ships made a slow passage down the Atlantic and arrived at the Strait of Magellan on December 17. There followed, in the words of J. C. Beaglehole, "one of the longest and most unpleasant passages of the strait of which there is a record ... four months in almost perpetual danger of shipwreck." No sooner had they entered the Pacific on April 11, 1767, than Wallis lost sight of Swallow; and the two ships carried on alone. Forced to the northwest, by June 10 Dolphin was in the Tuamotus, and on June 18 she arrived at Tahiti, the first European vessel to do so. Wallis established excellent relations with the queen, Oborea, and the crews spent six idyllic weeks recovering from scurvy and marveling at the people and climate of Tahiti. When they sailed on July 26, it was with promises to return. The European discovery of Tahiti had a profound effect not only on the subsequent exploration of the Pacific—by coincidence, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's
Boudeuse and L'Etoile arrived at Tahiti only a few months after Dolphin—but on the European imagination as well. In his introduction to The Journals of Captain James Cook, Beaglehole explains:
Sailors ... may well be forgiven for thinking themselves imparadised. So almost suddenly, so overwhelmingly, was the idea of the Pacific at last to enter into the consciousness, not of seamen alone but of literate Europe.... For Wallis had not merely found a convenient port of call. He had stumbled on a foundation stone of the Romantic movement.
The remainder of the voyage paralleled Byron's, although the westward leg was farther to the south, passing through the Society Islands, then between Tonga and Samoa before heading north for Tinian. From there, Dolphin sailed on to Batavia, then to the Cape and so to the Downs where she arrived on May 20, 1768. Dolphin remained in service as a surveying ship until broken up in 1770.
Byron, Journal of His Circumnavigation. Robertson, Discovery of Tahiti.
