HMS Fly (1831)
1831 Fly-class ship-sloop
HMS Fly was an 18-gun sloop of the Royal Navy. She was responsible for the exploration and charting of much of Australia's north-east coast and nearby islands. She was converted to a coal hulk in 1855 and broken up in 1903.
Design and construction
Fly was a development of the Orestes-class ship-sloop designed by Professor Inman of the School of Naval Architecture. She was 114 feet 4 inches (34.8 m) long on the gundeck and 93 feet 6+1⁄8 inches (28.5 m) at the keel. She had a beam of 31 feet 7 inches (9.6 m) overall, and a hold depth of 14 feet 5 inches (4.4 m), giving her a tonnage of 485 69/94 bm. Her armament was made up of sixteen 32-pounder carronades and a pair of 9-pounder bow chasers.
Fly and her three sister ships Harrier, Argus and Acorn were ordered on 30 January 1829. She was laid down in November 1829 and launched from Pembroke Dockyard on 25 August 1831. Argus and Acorn were cancelled on 27 April 1831, leaving Fly as the lead ship of a class of two.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMS Fly (1831)” 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.