Competitor (ship)
Ship
Competitor was launched at Whitby in 1813. She was initially a West Indiaman and then traded with India. She made two voyages transporting convicts to Australia, one to Van Diemen's Land and one to Port Jackson. She is last listed in 1833.
Career
Competitor cost £10,396 19s 4d. She entered the Register of Shipping in 1814 with Anthony Buck, master, G. Smales, owner, and trade Whitby–West Indies. Competitor only entered Lloyd's Register in the volume for 1815. She entered with trade Portsmouth–London.
On 10 June 1816 Orpheus, Bathgate, master, was sailing from New Orleans to Liverpool when she foundered at 31°N 81°W. Competitor was coming from Jamaica when she saved the crew. Competitor then brought them into London.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Competitor (ship)” is ship. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Competitor, ship and Ship, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “ship” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q55608245. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1813, 1833, 1814 and 1815.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Competitor (ship)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.