USS Cornubia
gunboat of the United States Navy
The SS Cornubia was laid down in November 1856 and built in Hayle, Cornwall, by Harvey & Co. She was launched in February 1858 as a packet ship and ferry for the Hayle and Bristol Steam Packet Company. Sleek and painted white, with two funnels mounted close together amidships and with a high bridge over her paddle wheels, she plied the Hayle/St Ives to Bristol route in the days when the Great Western Railway had not penetrated as far as West Cornwall.
History
She was given the name Cornubia from the Latinised name for Cornwall and was a fast iron paddle steamer, long and narrow at 210 ft (64 m) long and with a 24 ft 6 in (7.47 m) beam. Her Harveys-built twin oscillating side-wheel engines with four boilers and 9 ft (2.7 m) stroke produced 230 hp (170 kW) and was capable of propelling the vessel at over 18 kn (21 mph; 33 km/h). Her shallow, 9 ft (2.7 m) draft was initially designed to cope with the shallow harbours in Cornwall, but proved to be very useful in her later life.
The accommodation on board was described in the Western Daily Press on Monday 19 July 1858 as
A capacious house, with plate-glass windows, tastefully designed, afforded two entrances to the cabin stairs, and the hundreds of visitors who, on Tuesday afternoon, came on board to "have a peep at the new boat" went down those stairs with a sense of being about to look on "something out of the common run." Nor were they disappointed. A more superb cabin they could scarcely have seen before. About a dozen mahogany velvet covered sofas occupied the sides of the capacious room, with velvet covered chairs to match. The panelling of the ceiling was white, with chaste gold mouldings.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “USS Cornubia” as gunboat of the United States Navy. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as gunboat of the United States Navy. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
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 Mar 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7868572. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1856 and 1858.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Cornubia” 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.