HMS Cyane was a Royal Navy Banterer-class sixth-rate post ship of nominally 22 guns, built in 1806 at Topsham, near Exeter, England.

[9] Then on 30 November she, Vanguard, and several other British warships escorted a convoy of merchant vessels from Helsingborg back to Britain.

[7] On 8 December, Cyane was in company with Vanguard, Tigress, and the hired armed cutter Resolution when they captured the Danish ketch Jeltzomine den Roske.

[7] On 3 June 1808, Staines received a letter from the Captain-General of the Balearic Isles that the citizens of Mallorca had declared their allegiance to Ferdinand II and wished to begin talks with the British.

Staines then notified Rear Admiral Thornbrough who sent Sir Francis Laforey in Apollo to negotiate with the Supreme Junta.

[7] Cyane spent the next ten months patrolling Spain's south coast to harass French shore batteries and shipping.

[7] Whilst the ships were loading the timber, a sergeant, two corporals, and 20 privates came on board, deserters from the French Army.

When the French soldiers made sounds suggesting they were preparing to resist, he fired a musket through the keyhole; the frightened garrison immediately surrendered.

[7] On 26 May Cyane arrived at Milazzo in north-west Sicily where she met up with Admiral Martin in HMS Canopus, who was gathering a fleet.

[7] On 20 June Cyane sailed south with Espoir and 12 Sicilian gunboats to patrol between Procida and Cape Miseno.

The following morning the French 42-gun frigate Cérès, the 28-gun corvette Fama, and a division of gunboats attempted to come out of the bay and force their way to Naples.

[7] At daylight on 26 June, the British spotted 47 enemy vessels and Martin sent Cyane, Espoir, and a flotilla of gunboats to block them from entering the harbour at Naples.

[7] However, during this action, shore batteries subjected Cyane to three hours of bombardment that not only put 23 large shot into her hull but cost her two men killed and seven wounded, one of them mortally.

After two hours of enduring their harassing fire, Staines was fed up and led a landing party that succeeded in spiking the guns and throwing the mortars into the sea, all without British casualties.

[14] In December 1810 Collier volunteered Cyane's boats to assist those of Diana in boarding and setting fire to the French frigate Elize which had run aground at Tatihou island while attempting to escape from La Hogue.

Alcmène had a complement of 319 men under the command of Captain Ducrest de Villeneuve, who was wounded when he brought her alongside Venerable and attempted a boarding.

Cyane continued the chase for over three days until Venerable was able to rejoin the fight after having sailed 153 miles in the direction she believed that Iphigénie had taken.

[27] The action resulted in the award in 1847, to any surviving claimants, of the Naval General Service Medal with clasp "Cyane 16 Jany.

[d] On 20 February 1815, Cyane, under the command of Falcon, and the 20-gun Levant, Captain the Honorable George Douglas, were about 100 miles east of Madeira.

Off Cape Finisterre on 8 February 1815, Charles Stewart of Constitution had learned the Treaty of Ghent had been signed, but realized that before it was ratified, a state of war would still exist.

Although he knew they were outgunned, Douglas decided to fight in the hope of disabling Constitution sufficiently to save two valuable convoys that had sailed from Gibraltar a few days back in company with the two British ships.

[32] The Americans took their prisoners to St. Jago (Santiago) in the Cape Verde Islands and landed them there, but left in a hurry when British ships were reported.

Captain Sir George Collier in Leander caught sight of them off Porto Praya on 11 March and succeeded in recapturing Levant.

The subsequent court martial of Falcon, his officers and men for the loss of Cyane took place on board Akbar at Halifax on 28 June 1815.

[33] The court also praised the crew who, with the exception of three men, resisted the American attempts to "wean them from their allegiance, under circumstances of unprecedented severity exercised towards them.

Trenchard condemned Esperanza and Endymion as prizes as they were in contravention of the US laws forbidding American vessels to engage in the slave trade, but had to let the others go as he felt that he had insufficient grounds to seize them.

In 1820 President James Monroe had the Secretary of the Navy order Cyane, under the command of Perry, to convoy Elizabeth to Africa with the first contingent of freed slaves that the American Colonization Society was resettling there.

[37] Captain Jesse Duncan Elliott took command of Cyane In March 1825 she received as her second lieutenant Uriah P. Levy, a Sephardic Jew who would rise to the rank of commodore in the US Navy.

Levy's courageous act so struck the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro I, that he ordered that no U.S. citizen ever again be impressed into the Brazilian Navy.

[39] This article includes data released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported UK: England & Wales Licence, by the National Maritime Museum, as part of the Warship Histories project.