In 1804 the EIC sold Sir Edward Hughes to the British Royal Navy, which commissioned her as a 38-gun frigate.

[5] She was named after Admiral Sir Edward Hughes, the outgoing Commander-in-Chief, East Indies Station, who retired in 1784.

Outward bound, she crossed the Second Bar on 26 December, reached St Helena on 19 March 1789, and arrived at the Downs on 17 May.

[1] Captain Robert Anderson left the Downs on 14 March 1790, reached Madras on 1 July and Penang on 15 August, before arriving at Whampoa on 4 October.

[1] Captain Anderson left Falmouth on 15 February 1792, reached Madras on 9 June, Penang on 29 July, and Malacca on 30 August.

She left Tellicherry on 18 January 1795, reached St Helena on 18 March, and arrived at the Downs on 23 July.

[6][7] After numerous starts aborted by weather issues, the fleet sailed on 20 March, to invade St Lucia, with troops under Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby.

[1] Urmston sailed Sir Edward Hughes from Portsmouth on 2 April 1799, and arrived at Bombay on 23 July.

Captain Urmston was still in command of Sir Edward Hughes when she sailed from the Downs on 18 April 1802.

[3] Barrow sailed from Portsmouth 26 October 1803, with destination Madras and with the EIC intending her to remain in the Far East.

[4] However, the notice of her capturing Jeune Clementine in July still refers to Sir Edward Hughes as belonging to the EIC.

[4] Immediately Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Pellew, Commander-in-Chief of the East Indies Station, had her escorting convoys.

[19] On 19 September Sir Edward Hughes and Scorpion were in company and so shared in the proceeds of the capture on that day of the Danish ship Christle.

On 12 August, Wood received orders take on convicts, carry them to Van Dieman's Land, and then sail to New Zealand to gather timber and spars for the Navy.

Wood had been captain of HMS Buffalo when she had wrecked at Mercury Bay off Whitianga in 1840, on an identical mission.

The actual task of identifying trees to be cut down, and marking them, was the responsibility of the Navy's Purveyor of Timber, Thomas Laslett, who had accompanied Wood in Buffalo.

[21] Tortoise departed Plymouth on 26 October, and arrived at Hobart on 19 February 1842, having travelled via the Cape.

Tortoise sailed to the Bay of Islands to gather Kauri wood (Agathis australis) for spars for the Navy.

While she was at Te Karo Bay on 6 May, Able Seaman William Sampson drowned when her jolly boat overturned in the surf.

[24] In 1842, Major Bunbury, of the 80th Regiment of Foot, took 40 to 50 men, half of the force he had brought in 1840 to Auckland from Sydney, and launched a punitive expedition against the Te Arawa tribe at Tauranga.

The Acting Governor of New Zealand exercised some mediation and then withdrew his force when he realised that it was too small to prevail and that the Māori resented the English interfering in their intertribal wars.

After the British left, the locals ate some of their prisoners, which is the last recorded incident of this kind in New Zealand.

After her return to Britain in October 1843, Tortoise was at Chatham where between December and March 1844, she underwent fitting out as a receiving ship for Ascension Island.

He had been appointed Administrator of the island, but resigned due to poor health after a few months, and was replaced by Commander Arthur Fleming Morrell that October.

On 12 November 1846, Captain Frederick Hutton replaced Morrell in command of Tortoise and as Administrator of Ascension Island.

[27] The island was a supply depot for the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, which had the task of suppressing the slave trade.

Her crew and men from the garrison worked for four days and nights before they could clear all the hold and subdue the fire.

Instead, between 18 May and 22 July, 111 men, crew from Tortoise and 24 Africans, removed 800 tons of cargo from The Abyssinian, uncovering the leak, which they fixed.

[4] However, in 1979, a Royal Navy team of divers searching the waters around Ascension Island for any trace of William Dampier's ship Roebuck, found a number of other wrecks.

[4] 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.