HMS Hannibal was originally planned as a 90-gun second rate ship of the line, to be built at Woolwich Dockyard.

This ship was also named HMS Hannibal, and used the new screw propulsion technology.

She was a 91-gun second rate, built at Deptford Dockyard by Charles Willcox, Master Shipwright, and launched on 31 January 1854.

She served in the Crimean War, commanded by John Charles Dalrymple Hay.

In November a smallpox epidemic broke out, and in ten days 90 men from this ship and at least one other had caught the disease.