After her purchase, the Navy spent between 26 August 1815 and 22 March 1816 fitting Speedwell at Sheerness for eventual service as a tender to the flagship in the West Indies.

The trio broke up a pirate establishment at Bahia Honda Key on 28–30 September capturing four vessels.

In connection with one or the other of these actions Lieutenant William Geary of Speedwell discovered bills of lading and coffee bags from Vittoria, which pirates had captured and looted some weeks earlier.

Speedwell shared with the frigate Tyne in the capture of two pirate schooners on 5 November, Union and Constantia (alias Esperanza), and in the destruction of Hawke and Paz.

[b] Between 24 March and 24 May 1824, the frigate Hussar, Captain George Harris, and Speedwell, with Icarus in company, destroyed a pirate felucca at the Isle of Pines, Cuba, and captured her crew.

In his confessions before being executed on 11 January 1830 in the military fortress at La Puerta de Terra, San Fernando, a few miles south of Cadiz, the pirate Nicholas Fernandez, recalled an incident:- "We arrived at the coast of Cuba and learned that His Majesty's schooner Speedwell, accompanied by several barges from other vessels of war, was engaged in securing a key near Cayo Romano off the north Coast of Cuba where a number of pirates had secreted themselves in the woods.

Bennett was unable to get the ship afloat and so took the freed captives aboard Speedwell, as well as the master of Orestes, Don Jose Ramon Munio (or Mutio), the mate, and a passenger.

Planeta, Salvador Feliu, master, had gathered enslaved people along the "River Cameroons" on the Calabar Coast.

Under the command of Juan Ferrer y Roig, master, she too had acquired enslaved people on the Calabar Coast.

[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.