HMS Cambridge (1815)

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Career (UK)
HMS Cambridge firing a torpedo (1856)
Name:	HMS Cambridge
Ordered:	16 July 1810
Builder:	Deptford Dockyard
Laid down:	December 1811
Launched:	23 June 1815
Fate:	Broken up, 1869
General characteristics
Class and type:	80-gun third rate ship of the line
Tons burthen:	2139 tons (2173.3 tonnes)
Length:	187 ft 2.25 in (57.055 m) (gundeck)
Beam:	50 ft 11.5 in (15.53 m)
Depth of hold:	21 ft 7 in (6.6 m)
Propulsion:	Sails
Sail plan:	Full rigged ship
Armament:	80 guns: Gundeck: 30 × 32 pdrs Upper gundeck: 32 × 18 pdrs Quarterdeck: 4 × 12 pdrs, 10 × 32 pdr carronades Forecastle: 2× 12 pdrs, 2 × 32 pdr carronades Poop deck: 6 × 18 pdr carronades

For other ships of the same name, see HMS Cambridge.

HMS Cambridge was an 80-gun third rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched on 23 June 1815 at Deptford. She was built to the lines of the Danish ship Christian VII, which had been captured in 1807 at the Second Battle of Copenhagen. She saw little action early in her life, due to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. However, in the journal of Thomas Reed Stavers, she is recorded as being at Callao Roads, under a Captain Malin, on 3 July and on 4th/5th September 1824, on the latter occasion sailing from Callao to "the Island of Lorenzo" to avoid attacks by a Spanish Gun Boat.[1]

By January 1840 she was out of commission at Sheerness, but on 31 January that year she was commissioned there under Captain Edward Barnard and from then until 26 January 1843 served as the head of a naval squadron in the Mediterranean. This squadron's actions included operations in the eastern Mediterranean on the coast of Syria, a bombardment of Beirut on September 10, and blockading Alexandria, all as part of the 1840 combined Ottoman-British campaign against Mehmet Ali.

On her return, she was again decommissioned and laid up at Devonport, until on August 9, 1856 she was re-commissioned as 'the gunnery ship at Plymouth', under Captain Richard Strode Hewlett. In this role she saw four more captains (3 January 1857—1 April 1862 Arthur William Jerningham; 1 April 1862—20 April 1863 Captain Leopold George Heath; 20 April 1863—May 1867 Charles Joseph Frederick Ewart; May 1867—January 1869 Fitzgerald Algernon Charles Foley) before being scrapped in 1869. HMS Windsor Castle was renamed HMS Cambridge and replaced her as the gunnery ship.