HMS Seaforth
1805 gun-brig
HMS Seaforth was the French privateer Dame Ernouf, which HMS Curieux captured in 1805. The Royal Navy took her into service, but she foundered later that year.
Capture
On 8 February 1805, Curieux chased the French privateer Dame Ernouf (or Madame Ernouf) for twelve hours before Curieux was able to bring her to action. After forty minutes of hard fighting the captain of Dame Ernouf, which had a crew almost twice as many crew members as Curieux, manoeuvred to attempt a boarding. Commander George Edmund Byron Bettesworth anticipated this and put his helm a-starboard, catching Dame Ernouf's jib-boom so that he could rake her. Unable to fight back, Dame Ernouff struck. The action cost Curieux five men killed and four wounded, including Bettesworth, who took a hit in his head from a musket ball. Dame Ernouf had 30 men killed and 41 wounded. She carried 16 French long 6-pounder guns and had a crew of 120. This was the same armament as Curieux carried, but in a smaller vessel.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMS Seaforth” 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.