Frigates of the period were three-masted, full-rigged ships that carried their main battery on a single, continuous gun deck.

[a] Carronades were lighter so could be manoeuvred with fewer men, and had a faster rate of fire but had a much shorter range than the long gun.

[b][10] Originally intended as a series of four, by the time the first of the 1795 class had been launched on 4 July, Rule had already drawn up plans for HMS Naiad, an expanded version which was larger at 1,013 tons (bm), had a complement of 284 men and carried 38 guns.

[5] Amazon had a short but eventful career during the French Revolutionary War, which she spent in the Channel and Western Approaches, part of a frigate squadron under Sir Edward Pellew.

[5] She was actively involved in the capture of seven enemy brigs, two chasse-marees,[13] two corvettes [5][14] the 32-gun frigate, Unité[15] and the 40-gun Virginie,[16] before she was wrecked following an engagement with a French ship-of-the-line.

Amazon, going north, and more severely damaged, was unable to wear and ran aground at Audierne Bay, Isle Bas.

[5] In 1797, Emerald was one of several vessels sent to hunt down and capture the Spanish flagship Santisima Trinidad, which had escaped from the British at the Battle of Cape St Vincent.

[23][24] Emerald was supposed to have been present at the Battle of the Nile but in May 1798 a storm separated her from Horatio Nelson's squadron and she arrived in Aboukir Bay nine days too late.

[26] Emerald served in the Caribbean throughout 1803 in Admiral Samuel Hood's fleet, then took part in the invasion of St Lucia in July,[27] and of Surinam the following spring.

[28][5] Returning to home waters for repairs in 1806, she served in the Western Approaches before joining a fleet under Admiral James Gambier in 1809, and taking part in the Battle of the Basque Roads.

[5] First commissioned in March 1796 for service in the North Sea,[5] Trent was briefly involved in the fleet mutinies of 1797, when her crew refused to set sail from Great Yarmouth on 22 May.

[29] In November, Trent sailed for the Leeward Islands where, on 30 March 1799, she and the 10-gun cutter HMS Sparrow captured a Spanish ship and schooner in a cutting out expedition off Puerto Rico.

[30] In October 1800, while serving in the Channel, Trent's crew took part in another boat action when they boarded a cutter and a lugger off the Ile de Brehat.

[36] During a refit at Plymouth in March 1800, the naval architect Robert Seppings introduced, as an experiment, diagonal trusses that reduced hogging.

The new commander was not popular, a much stricter disciplinarian who ordered up to five times as many floggings as his predecessor, and the crew felt that most of the punishments were excessive or unwarranted.