SS Patna is a fictional ship in the novel Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, originally published in Blackwood's Magazine from October 1899 to November 1900.
There was also a real three-master rebuild to use steam and sail in combination, the steamship named SS Patna built by William Denny and Brothers, Dumbarton, and launched on 21 April 1871.
She was a single-screw passenger ship owned by British India Steam Navigation Company Glasgow & London and scrapped at Bombay in 1901.
The fact that he had a merchant-marine career in France and 15 years in Great Britain means that probably he heard of or even had seen the real SS Patna.
In the Alien 3 novelization by Alan Dean Foster, the "rescue" ship that Bishop II arrives in is called the Patna.