Qualla: HMS Brisk (1851)

HMS Brisk (1851): Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arthur H. Clark, Public domain. She started her career carrying a colonial governor to Jamaica and ended it bankrupt in a London auction house, sold off as a failed telegraph experiment. Between those two scenes, HMS Brisk witnessed the eruption of a Kamchatka volcano, captured a slave clipper with more than 800 men, women and children locked in her holds, searched the Zambezi delta for the missing Dr. Livingstone, ferried British troops into the bloodiest phase of the New Zealand Wars, and was finally laid to rest in Woolwich. For a fourteen-gun wooden sloop, she lived a great deal.

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Image: Arthur H. Clark | Public domain

HMS Brisk (1851): From Drawing Board to White Sea

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arthur H. Clark, Public domain. Brisk was ordered on 25 April 1847 from Woolwich Dockyard, designed by the Royal Navy's Committee of Reference as an enlarged version of HMS Rattler - the Royal Navy's first purpose-built screw-propelled warship. Her keel was laid in January 1849. She was originally meant to moun...

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Image: Arthur H. Clark | Public domain

HMS Brisk (1851): The Emanuela

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arthur H. Clark, Public domain. After the Crimean War she went to Africa. The Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, working under treaties signed across two generations, was intercepting ships that still carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic decades after Britain had outlawed the trade. On 15 September 185...

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Image: Arthur H. Clark | Public domain

HMS Brisk (1851): The New Zealand Years

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arthur H. Clark, Public domain. By 1865 Brisk was at the other end of the world. Sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, she reached Sydney on 15 January and was promptly ordered on to Auckland. The New Zealand Wars had entered a brutal phase, with British and colonial troops fighting Māori forces over land, sove...

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Image: Arthur H. Clark | Public domain

HMS Brisk (1851): The Last Idea

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. She left the Australia Station in September 1868 and was decommissioned on 19 January 1869. Then, on 31 January 1870, she was sold to a company with a curious name and a curiouser idea: the International Mid-channel Telegraph Company Ltd. Submarine telegraph cables were the new w...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain