HMS Howe was originally the teak-built Indian mercantile vessel Kaikusroo that Admiral Edward Pellew bought in 1805 to serve as a 40-gun frigate.

She made numerous trips, including one notable one to Australia when she brought out Lachlan Macquarie and his family to replace William Bligh as governor of New South Wales.

His guarantor was the Bombay merchant Charles Forbes, who served also as Kaikusroo's agent); her captain was Colin Mackenzie.

Howe and Wellesley, coincidentally, stopped at Saint Helena and stayed in the same building to which Napoleon I of France would later be exiled.

By March 1806 Howe was embarking stores and she sailed from Portsmouth 14 May under Captain Edward Killwick for the Cape of Good Hope.

[c] She was ordered to sail from the Cape of Good Hope to Buenos Aires where she met up with Sir Home Popham's forces on 28 September.

Diana had been built in Boston and sold to a Spanish merchant in Monte Video who had planned to use her as a privateer against the British.

[1] In 1809 Dromedary, under the command of its master, Samuel Pritchard, carried Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie to New South Wales.

When the Macquaries boarded Dromedary, lying off the Isle of Wight on 19 May 1809, they found the vessel critically overcrowded, with insufficient provisions for the voyage, and conditions so cramped that additional wooden berths or cradles had been erected to try to accommodate all the passengers.

Macquarie sent ashore two officers, 50 privates and 41 women and children who were instructed to follow in the next available convict transport.

At 5 pm on 7 March 1810 a fire was discovered to have broken out on Dromedary's lower tier; it was finally extinguished by midnight.

On the voyage, Colonel William Paterson, the former Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales, died off Cape Horn.

[13] On Dromedary's return to England she was refitted at Woolwich 1822-23 and then in 1825, with Richard Skinner as Master, she sailed for Bermuda with 100 convicts.

In 1982 the Bermudian government gave permission for divers to conduct an underwater archaeological dig at the Dromedary anchorage site.

The archaeologists recovered thousands of artifacts: whale oil lamps, pewter mugs, engraved spoons, clay pipes, bottles, buttons, seals, coins, trinkets, charms, rings, beads, gaming pieces, religious items, knife handles and gaming boards.

Clearly, the hulks housed an economy in which convicts carved bone, shell, metal and stone to produce items that they sold to guards, visiting sailors and settlers for tobacco, alcohol, food and money.

HMS Dromedary, described as a "slab-sided transport," appears in Patrick O'Brian's 1983 Napoleonic naval adventure novel Treason's Harbour.

[15] 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.