[1] On 29 August 1800 the vessels of the British blockading squadron, which was under the command of Sir John Warren, sent their boats into the harbour at Vigo to attack and cut her out.

[1] Now named HMS Wasp she was commissioned in July 1801 under Commander Charles Bullen, and sent to Sierra Leone at the end of the year.

[1] At Freetown, Bullen landed guns and sailors to reinforce soldiers and militias composed of free blacks resettled from Nova Scotia and Jamaica (the Maroons), who were engaged in a campaign against the local Temne people.

After the Temne signed a peace treaty in December and the situation had settled down, in March 1802 Wasp sailed from Sierra Leone.

[1] Wasp recommissioned again in May 1803 under Commander Frederick Whitworth Aylmer, and on 19 July that year captured the privateer Despoir.

[1] The slave ship Lancaster, Robinson, master, was sailing from Africa to the West Indies when on 30 November a French privateer captured her.

Four days later the convoy encountered a French squadron consisting of five ships of the line and four sailing frigates, as well as nine other vessels that were too far away for assessment.

The letter writer to the Naval Chronicle surmised that the distant vessels were the Africa squadron that Lark had escorted and that the French had captured.

On 24 May she came across the former British cutter HMS Dominica, which had been taken by mutineers four days earlier and delivered to the French, who had immediately commissioned her under the name Napoléon and sent her out to capture some merchant vessels at Roseau.

That evening the packet ship Duke of Montrose engaged Impériale, which enabled Cygnet, which had been in company with Wasp, to come up.