HMS Leander was a Portland-class 50-gun fourth rate of the Royal Navy, launched at Chatham on 1 July 1780.

On 23 February 1805, while on the Halifax station, Leander captured the French frigate Ville de Milan and recaptured her prize, HMS Cleopatra.

The resulting "Leander affair" contributed to the worsening of relations between the United States and Great Britain.

At the end of 1781, Leander and the sloop-of-war HMS Alligator sailed for the Dutch Gold Coast with a convoy, consisting of a few merchant-vessels and transports.

The French frigate Fée captured Ulysses and took her into Brest, but not before her captain had weighted the dispatches and thrown them overboard.

Shirley's first lieutenant, Mr. Van court, took the second set in the cartel transport Mackerel, which also carried the Dutch governors of the forts to Europe.

[4] Shirley then sailed to the West Indies where towards the end of 1782 as senior captain he became commanding officer prior to the arrival of Admiral Hugh Pigot.

On 18 January 1783, Leander was escorting a cartel when the two vessels encountered a large French warship at midnight.

[7] Leander was one of the five warships and the armed storeship Sally that shared in the proceeds of the capture on 23 March of the ship Arend op Zee.

Captain Sir James Barclay commissioned Leander in August 1786 and then sailed her for Nova Scotia on 9 April 1787.

[1] Leander joined the Mediterranean Fleet under Earl St Vincent, and was assigned to the squadron under Horatio Nelson.

She was able to exploit a gap in the French line and anchor between Peuple Souverain and Franklin, from which position she raked both enemy ships while protected from their broadsides.

[13] Carrying Nelson's dispatches from the Nile and accompanied by Sir Edward Berry, Leander encountered the 74-gun French third rate Généreux off Crete on 18 August 1798.

[15] Most of the officers returned to Britain on parole but the French detained a number of seamen, and in particular Thomas Jarrat, the carpenter, after he refused to reveal to them the dimensions of Leander's masts and spars.

Captain Lejoille tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to get some of the British crew that he had detained to assist him when a Turko-Russian fleet appeared off Corfu.

[15] The subsequent court-martial aboard HMS America at Sheerness most honourably acquitted Thompson, his officers, and his crew.

On 28 February 1799, the Russians and Ottomans attacked Vido, a small island (less than a kilometer across) at the mouth of the port of Corfu.

Leander and the corvette Brune tried to intervene but were damaged and forced to retreat to the protection of the batteries of Corfu.

[22] She then had three more captains within the year: George Ralph Collier, Oughton again, and from November, John Talbot.

[29][e] At some point Leander pressed a seaman from the crew of Juverna, which was returning to England from Suriname where she had delivered a cargo of slaves.

Thereafter, in recognition of the capture of Ville de Milan and the recapture of Cleopatra, the Admiralty promoted Talbot to command of ship of the line Centaur.

However, in the summer of 1804, the warships began stopping and boarding all American ships going into New York just outside the United States's three-mile territorial limit, and searching them for any French goods.

[35] In May, Captain Salusbury Pryce Humphreys took command of Leander at Halifax as she became the flagship for Admiral George Berkeley.

[1] 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.