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Providence (1807 ship)

649 ton merchant ship and convict ship

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 12, 2025
Entity authorityQ7252374 ↗
Source-derived summary

Providence was a merchant ship built at Calcutta, India, and launched in 1807. She made four voyages for the British East India Company (EIC), on one of which she delivered convicts to New South Wales. The ship was scuttled at St Martin's, Isles of Scilly in 1833 after grounding while on a voyage from London to Bombay, India.

EIC voyage #1 (1809-1810)

Captain Hugh Reid sailed Providence from Bengal to Britain, leaving Calcutta on 18 June 1809, resting at Diamond Harbour on 23 June, passing Saugor on 25 July, and reaching Madras on 24 September. Providence then reached the Cape on 25 December and St Helena on 27 January 1810, before arriving at the Downs on 16 April. Reid sold Providence in England. A supplement to Lloyd's Register for 1810 shows the master changing to Barclay, and the next Lloyd's Register shows her owner as Barclay. Providence was admitted to the Registry of Great Britain on 9 July 1810.

EIC voyage #2 (1810-12)

Captain Andrew Barclay left Portsmouth on 7 September 1810, bound for New South Wales and China. She sailed under a letter of marque issued to Barclay on 19 July 1810.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Providence (1807 ship)” is 649 ton merchant ship and convict ship. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Providence, ship and merchant, not as a finished interpretation.

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—1807, 1833, 1809, 1810—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Providence, ship and merchant is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “649 ton merchant ship and convict ship” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

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 Dec 12, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7252374. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1807, 1833, 1809 and 1810.

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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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Providence (1807 ship)” 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.