HMS Firefly

At least seven vessels of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Firefly:

• HMS Firefly (1801), was a vessel built in Bermuda that the Royal Navy purchased there in 1801. She was the former John Gordon, which probably had been a privateer.[1] British Admiralty records list an armed ship built in Bermuda in 1801, and purchased in 1803.
• HMS Firefly (1803) was the French privateer schooner Poisson Volant, of 130 tons (bm), which the Royal Navy captured in 1803.[2] She was wrecked on 17 November 1807 off Curacao; no survivors.
• HMS Firefly (1808) was a 14-gun schooner, the ex-Spanish prize Antelope captured in February 1808 and purchased. She was renamed HMS Antelope in 1812, or possibly in 1809, and was broken up in 1814.
• HMS Firefly (1828), a schooner wrecked on 27 February 1835 on the Northern Triangles, off Belize with the loss of thirteen of her 23 crew.[3][4]
• HMS Firefly (1832), a Firefly-class gunboat, re-engined in 1844 with the engine from HMS Phoenix and became a survey ship.
• HMS Firefly (1877), a British Forester-class gunboat.
• HMS Firefly (1915), a British Fly-class gunboat that the Ottomans captured but that the British recaptured at the Battle of Nahr-al-Kalek in February 1917.
• HMT Firefly, a British trawler that operated between 1930 and 1961, and that between September 1939 to October 1945 served as a minesweeper.

References

1. "Royal Naval Ships built in Bermuda", (1961), Bermuda Historical Quarterly, vol 18 no2.
2. "No. 15620". The London Gazette. 13 September 1803.
3. "(untitled)". The Times (15802). London. 28 May 1835. col B, p. 3.
4. Gilly, William O.S. (1850). Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy: between 1793 and 1849, by William Octavius Shakespeare Gilly. London: John W. Parker, West Strand. Retrieved 27 February 2015.