East Indiaman

The term was commonly used to refer to vessels belonging to the British, Dutch, French, Danish, Swedish, Austrian or Portuguese East India companies.

EIC East Indiamen usually ran between Britain, the Cape of Good Hope and India, where their primary destinations were the ports of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta.

East Indiamen were the largest merchant ships regularly built during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, generally measuring between 1100 and 1400 tons burthen (bm).

One of the most celebrated of these incidents occurred in 1804, when a fleet of East Indiamen and other merchant vessels under Commodore Nathaniel Dance successfully fought off a marauding squadron commanded by Admiral Linois in the Indian Ocean in the Battle of Pulo Aura.

[3] Another significant East Indiaman in this period was the 1176-ton (bm) Warley that John Perry built at his Blackwall Yard in 1788, and which the Royal Navy bought in 1795 and renamed HMS Calcutta.

In 1803 she was employed as a transport to establish a settlement at Port Phillip in Australia, later shifted to the site of current-day Hobart, Tasmania by an accompanying ship, the Ocean.

In 1815, she was wrecked near Cape Agulhas with the loss of 372 lives after a navigation error that was caused by inaccurate dead reckoning and the lack of a marine chronometer with which to calculate her longitude.

[4] A ship named Lalla Rookh, involved in an incident in November 1850 off Worthing, West Sussex, in which many local men died after their rescue boat capsized, was described as an East Indiaman bringing sugar and rum from Pernambuco, Brazil.

The 2018 video game Return of the Obra Dinn features an East Indiaman as the fictional title vessel,[18] with gameplay requiring players to thoroughly explore a 3D model of the ship and observe the crew's activities.