She spent most of her career in Home waters, though during the later part of her life she sailed further afield, to the British stations in North America and West Africa.
[a] She had been completed at Sheerness by 18 July 1782, having been first commissioned in March that year under Commander Robert Mostyn, for service in the English Channel.
[2] She served under Woodley in the Irish Sea and the English Channel until Commander Philip Charles Durham succeeded him on 12 February 1793.
She carried six swivel guns, twelve stand of small arms, fifty pistols, and 25 swords, all for a crew of 21 men.
[9] Durham was promoted to post captain on the frigate Narcissus on 24 June, and Commander James Cook replaced him on Spitfire.
[2] Seymour would spend the next four years as Spitfire's commander and, like Durham before him, enjoyed considerable success in actions against small French raiders.
[17] Spitfire was active off the English and Irish coasts during the French attempt to invade Ireland in early 1797 and on 12 January 1797, about 30 leagues west of Ushant, she captured Allègre (or Allegrer), one of the expedition's storeships.
[18] Seymour followed this success by capturing the privateer cutter Bons Amis, of six guns and 32 men, off the Eddystone on 2 April 1797, and after a five-hour chase.
[30] On 12 April, orders arrived at Plymouth for Seagull to take on board 183 French prisoners from Ethalion and Spitfire for onward conveyance to Portsmouth.
[35] On 3 November, she brought into Plymouth the Guernsey smuggling lugger Endeavour, with her cargo of 299 ankers of spirits and 23 bales of tobacco.
[40] Spitfire captured a French privateer brig Heureux Courier, of Granville on 19 June, ten leagues SSE of Scilly.
[43] Her three captures were two Newfoundland brigs and a Portuguese schooner, Nostra Senora del Carno, De Casta Pinto, master.
[56] In July, a court martial on board HMS Cambridge in the Hamoaze tried Spitfire's purser, Mr. Banfield, for disobeying Keen's orders.
The charge was fully proven, however several naval officers testified to Banfield's excellent character; the board reinstated him as purser but ordered him mulcted of a year's pay.
On the way, while three men were aloft trimming the sails, two in the hold stowing the cable tier, one at the helm, and the prize-master having breakfast, the Americans, armed with pistols, seized the steersman and the prize master.
[62] On 21 January a messenger came by express from the Admiralty to Plymouth with orders for a fast sloop to be ready to sail at a moment's notice with dispatches for the Straits.
Four days later the French privateer General Aujereau, of Bayonne, and of 16 guns and 120 men, captured them about 120 miles west of Cape Clear.
While in the Channel under the command of Lieutenant R. Parry (acting), on 28 December she recaptured the English trading brig Friendship, from Mogadore that the French privateer luggers Deux Freres and Espoir had captured, and sent her in to the Downs.
She nevertheless put up a fight and did not surrender till she had lost her captain, H. Trebon, and her third officer killed, and four men wounded out of her crew of 55.
[2] In 1814, Spitfire received a grant from His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, for what should have been her share of Danish ships detained at Sheerness between 26 and 29 August and on 1 September 1807 on the outbreak of war with Denmark.
[72] On 22 October 1808, Spitfire and Basilisk (1801) sailed to the assistance of the sloop Cygnet, which the Dowlaw signal station, near Dunbar, reported had cut away her masts and bowsprit and thrown some of her guns overboard.
On 11 January 1811, Ellis and Spitfire towed into port Economy, which had fought off or out-sailed several privateers and lost her rudder in a gale and was trying to steer by sails.
[75] Lastly, when news of the outbreak of the War of 1812 reached Britain, the Royal Navy seized all American vessels then in British ports.
Spitfire was among the Royal Navy vessels then lying at Spithead or Portsmouth and so entitled to share in the grant for the American ships Belleville, Janus, Aeos, Ganges, and Leonidas seized there on 31 July 1812.
There they chased the 44-gun American frigate USS President and her consort, the privateer schooner Scourge, away from a British convoy out of Archangel.
Captain John Rodgers of President excused his fleeing the British by claiming that he had fled from a ship of the line and a frigate.
When she arrived, Captain John Maxwell, captain of the sloop HMS Favorite and governor of the Sierra Leone station, sent Spitfire to the Gallinas River where an English slave trader called Crawford was working with a Spanish schooner carrying slaves that Crawford had gathered.
[82] The schooner also enslaved the black crew on Kitty, including two freed Negroes from Sierra Leone, and sold them into slavery at Havana.
[83] On 22 February Spitfire's boats narrowly missed capturing Crawford, though they were able to seize his trade goods and free Kitty's crew.
[84] Finally, the "Principal Officers and Commissioners of His Majesty's Navy" offered the "Spitfire sloop, of 422 tons", "lying at Portsmouth", for sale on 11 July 1825.