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French frigate Weser

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionFeb 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ85762125 ↗
Source-derived summary

Weser was a 44-gun Pallas-class frigate of the French Navy launched in 1812 in Amsterdam. The British Royal Navy captured her on 21 October 1813. As HMS Weser she served in North American waters and then was sold for breaking up in September 1817.

Origin

Weser was designed by Sané.

Capture

On 30 September 1813 Weser, under the command of captaine de vaisseau Cantzlaar, Chevalier de L'ordre Imperiale de la Reunion, sailed from the Texel for the North Sea. There she captured two Swedish ships before a gale on the 16th took away her main and mizzen mast. Two days later HMS Scylla, Commander Colin Macdonald, encountered her 60 leagues west of Ushant, making her way towards Brest under jury main and mizzen masts. Rather than engage Weser and risk being crippled and so unable to follow her given the weather, Macdonald decided to follow her.

Fortuitously, on 20 October, Royalist, Commander J.J. Gordon Bremer, arrived and Macdonald and Bremer decided to attack Weser. They engaged her for about an hour and a half before they had to withdraw to repair their rigging.

Editorial summary

“French frigate Weser” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what French, frigate and Weser can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1812, 1813, 1817—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around French, frigate and Weser.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“French frigate Weser” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, French, frigate and Weser provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85762125. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1812, 1813 and 1817.

Critical limits

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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  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “French frigate Weser” 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.