HDMS Galathea was a three-masted corvette of the Royal Danish Navy, constructed at Gammelholm to designs by Andreas Shifter in 1831.

The artworks were mostly commissions for installation in the Church of Our Lady and Christiansborg Palace, both of which were under reconstruction after fires, but also plaster copies for the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts' study collection.

Other naval officers who participated on the expedition included Hans Peter Rothe and Oluf Vilhelm de Fine Skibsted, Galathea called at Tanger and Tripoli to pay bribes to the local authorities.

On 6 August 1833, she was therefore able to inform her father about the arrival of the ship:[3] They have already begun to bring the boxes on board, although the corvette has been in quarantine until yesterday, Tuesday the 6th.

All the 65 boxes with Thorvaldsen's artworks had been marked with either A for the Art Academy ("Akademiet"), K for the Church of Our Lady ("Kirken") or S for Christiansborg ("Slottet").

This made it easy to transfer them to different barges and sail them as close to their final destination as possible: Nyhavn for the academy, Frederiksholms Kanal for the Church of Our Lady and the Arsenal Dock for Christiansborg.

Another five boxes with works by other Danish artists as well as a couple of marble blocks for the sculptor Herman W. Bissen were also picked up in Livorno.

The scientists on board were Didrik Ferdinand Didrichsen (physician and botanist), Bernhard Casper Kamphǿvener (botanist), Carl Emil Kiellerup (entomologist), Hinrich Johannes Rink (geologist), Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Behn (zoologist) and Johannes Theodor Reinhardt (zoologist).

The primary first hand account of the expedition is due to the captain in the book St. Billes Beretning om Corvetten Gaiatheas Rejse omkring Jorden from 1853.

In 1848-49 Galathea participated in the first Schleswig War, where she patrolled the western Baltic and served in the blockade of the German harbours.

[4] Later the same year Galathea together with the brig HDMS St. Crois blocked the German port in Pillau, where they took part in the fighting with the Prussian steamer SMS Preussischer Adler, which was forced to withdraw to Danzig.