Qualla: HMS Mermaid (1817)

HMS Mermaid (1817): Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She was barely the length of a cricket pitch and a half, a single-masted cutter of around eighty-four tons built on the Hooghly River in colonial India. Yet between 1817 and 1820, this little ship and the men aboard her drew the outline of a continent. HMS Mermaid carried the surveyor Phillip Parker King around the Australian mainland, filling in the long blank stretches of coast that Matthew Flinders had not lived to chart. The irony arrives at the end of the story: the vessel that taught merchant captains where the coral lay was herself torn open on an uncharted reef she never saw coming.

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HMS Mermaid (1817): A Cutter Built for the Edge of the Map

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mermaid was launched at Howrah, across the river from Calcutta, in 1816, and the Royal Navy bought her at Port Jackson the following year. She was small by design. The work King had been sent to do meant threading shallow water, nosing into river mouths, and feeling along reefs w...

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HMS Mermaid (1817): The Ship That Helped Build Brisbane

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hard work wore her out. In 1820 she grounded at Careening Bay in the remote Kimberley, and though her crew floated her off, she limped back to Sydney barely seaworthy. A survey condemned her for further survey duty, and in 1823 the Navy sold her to the colonial government for err...

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HMS Mermaid (1817): Lost on Flora Reef

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By 1829 she had been re-rigged as a two-masted schooner, and on 16 May she left Sydney under Captain Samuel Nolbrow, bound for the far northwest with government dispatches and provisions. She took the inner passage toward Torres Strait, the same waters her charts had helped make ...

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HMS Mermaid (1817): Found Again, Nearly Two Centuries On

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For 180 years she lay where she sank, her timbers worked into the living reef. Then in early 2009 a team of marine archaeologists, led by the Australian National Maritime Museum and working with the Silentworld Foundation, located the wreck on Flora Reef. It was a homecoming of s...

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