She captured the 24-gun corvette La Coquette on 2 March 1783 and then went on in the same day to participate in the unsuccessful Battle of Grand Turk alongside Horatio Nelson.

Continuing the campaign to capture Dutch possessions in the East Indies, Resistance took Kupang, Timor, on 10 June 1797, but the native population rebelled against the new temporary governor.

On 21 July 1798 Resistance cut out a Malay merchant sloop, and after ascertaining the legal ownership of the vessel, sailed to Bangka Strait to return her to her captain.

From 1751 to 1776 only two ships of this type were built for the Royal Navy because it was felt that they were anachronistic, with the lower (and more heavily armed) deck of guns being so low as to be unusable in anything but the calmest of waters.

[7] She was sent to join the West Indies Station, sailing there from Spithead in control of a convoy of 500 merchant ships on 11 November, the responsibility and stress of which turned King's hair grey.

[14] Resistance continued in company with Duguay Trouin, and on 2 March they were sailing through Turk's Island passage when they discovered two French warships at anchor there.

[15] The chase went on for fifteen minutes before Resistance managed to sail to leeward of La Coquette, at which point the French warship surrendered.

[17] Nelson decided to attempt to take back Grand Turk from the French, and early on 8 March a landing was made by a group of 250 seamen and marines under the cover of the guns of two brigs also attached to the squadron.

[19] After stopping at Jamaica on 13 March, Resistance sailed to Port Royal with Albemarle the next day to undergo a three-month refit, during which time King lived ashore.

[d][10][1][23] She received a repair at Portsmouth Dockyard between July and December 1785 at the cost of £6,945, but was not immediately put back into service, the American Revolutionary War having ended.

[24] On 27 May she left Gibraltar to convey a force including Prince Edward and his mistress Madame de Saint-Laurent to Canada, arriving in the St Lawrence River on 11 August.

With the French Revolutionary Wars having begun, Resistance was pushed quickly into service to fill the gap left by a lack of available 18-pounder frigates, despite her class by this point being completely unsuited to the task.

There they rendezvoused with the 74-gun ship of the line HMS Suffolk, the flagship of Commodore Peter Rainier and joined him in sailing to the East Indies as escort to a large convoy.

[36] Having completed this task, Resistance was detached from Madras on 21 July so that she could take a troop ship and a transport to join the invasion expedition for Malacca, which had already sailed under Captain Henry Newcome of Orpheus.

At 7 p.m. Newcome landed the troops the expedition had conveyed with them, who reached the shore at 9 p.m.; half an hour later a representative of Malacca came onboard Orpheus and surrendered, with little violence having occurred.

[g][42][43][44] By the end of the year Rainier's naval resources were being stretched thin by demands from the Admiralty and to cover his newly captured possessions he left behind Resistance and three sloops on 8 December, as he manoeuvred to concentrate on protecting trade from Macao.

Pakenham presented the Dutch governor of the city with a demand for a peaceful surrender, promising that the freedoms and properties of the population would not be harmed if he agreed.

After a period of confusion because nobody there spoke English, the request was declined and the Dutch prepared to defend the city, but Resistance and her consorts sailed away and instead peacefully took the town of Manado.

[47] On 10 June, cooperating with the 16-gun snow HCS Intrepid, Resistance secured the primary Dutch settlement on Timor, Kupang, after the officials there voted to surrender.

[45][46] The town was almost completely destroyed; the European, mostly Dutch, part of the population had escaped at the first sign of violence, and Pakenham chose to abandon Kupang.

[33][53][54] Towards the end of December Resistance sailed through a storm for four days and began to leak badly, to the extent that several of her guns were thrown overboard to increase buoyancy.

Seeing this supposedly friendly ship, the deputy governor of the town and the captain of a Spanish brig that was sheltering there both took boats out to Resistance, where they were detained.

Bombay met with Resistance off Booloo, one of the Riau Islands, towards the end of January 1798 and finally managed to adequately provision the ship.

[58] In the morning of 21 July Resistance cut out a Malay merchant sloop that had been earlier captured by the pirates, and Pakenham took it with him as they attempted to discover the true ownership of the vessel, with the captain kept on board to ensure that his ship would stay sailing with them.

[70] By this point Major Taylor, the officer commanding the British garrison at Malacca,[71] had been made aware of the fate of Resistance, and asked the Sultan of Lingga to assist in recovering the survivors.

The Sultan quickly succeeded in retrieving the first three men; Alexander M'Carthy (the quartermaster) and John Hutton were given freely to him by the master of the proa they were working in; then Joseph Scott was sold for fifteen rixdollars by the Timor-men who held him.

The final survivor, Thomas Scott, had been kept on board the boat controlled by the leader of the pirates, but was brought to Lingga nine days later where he was sold at the market for thirty-five rixdollars.