HMS Carrier
cutter of the Royal Navy
HMS Carrier was a cutter of 10 guns, the ex-mercantile Frisk, which the Royal Navy purchased in 1805. She captured two privateers, with one action earning her crew a Naval General Service Medal. She grounded in 1808, which enabled the French to capture her. She became a French privateer that the Royal Navy recaptured in 1811, but apparently did not take back into service.
Origins
Bools & Good, of Bridport, built Frisk in 1803. The Admiralty purchased her in 1805 and registered her on 28 May.
Service
Lieutenant John Gedge commissioned her in May 1805 for the North Sea. Carrier shared with Active, Earnest, Gripper, Mariner, and Minx in the proceeds from the recapture of Francis, Tucker, master, and Betsey on 14 and 15 September.
Lieutenant Robert Ramsey replaced Gedge in 1806.
On 18 January 1807, Carrier was in company with Dictator, Flora, and Forester when they captured the American brig Eliza.
“HMS Carrier” enters the record as cutter of the Royal Navy. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Carrier, cutter and Royal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 Dec 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5631794. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1805, 1808, 1811 and 1803.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMS Carrier” 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.