French frigate Réunion
1786 Magicienne-class fifth-rate frigate
Réunion was a 36-gun frigate of the French Navy launched in 1786. During the French Revolutionary Wars she was stationed at Cherbourg and was successfully employed harassing British merchant shipping in the English Channel until the British captured her off the Cotentin Peninsula during the action of 20 October 1793. Renamed HMS Reunion, she served for three years in the Royal Navy helping to counter the threat from the new Batavian Navy, before she was wrecked in the Thames Estuary in December 1796.
Construction
Réunion was built at Toulon between February 1785 and January 1787. She was one of a further five ships built to Joseph-Marie-Blaise Coulomb's 1777 design for the Magicienne-class frigates. Réunion was launched on 23 February 1786.
French career
On 20 April 1792 the Legislative Assembly voted for war with Austria thus starting a conflict which would become known as the French Revolutionary War. France declared war on Britain on 1 February 1793 and began to focus heavily on the disruption of British commerce through the deployment of frigates on raiding operations against British commercial shipping. In the English Channel, two of the most successful raiders were the frigates Réunion and Sémillante, both then based in Cherbourg on the Cotentin Peninsula. These frigates would make short cruises, leaving Cherbourg in the early evening and returning in the morning with any prizes they had encountered during the night.
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