Built as a wooden schooner by the Cuthbert yard at Darling Harbour, Sydney for who it is not clear. Bought in 1872 by the Royal Navy and named HMS ALACRITY.
Tonnage 85 tons (bm). Dim. ?
Armament 1 – 12pdr. gun.
Crew 27
She was bought for approx. £2.800
04 Nov. 1872 commissioned.
She was one of a class of fast sailing schooners, stationed in the Australian Station of the Royal Navy; the others were the BEAGLE, CONFLICT, RENARD and SANDFLY to suppress “Blackbirding”. The kidnapping of Pacific Islanders to provide labour for the Queensland sugar plantations and the pearling industries in northern Australia.
Watercraft Philately July 1991 page 4 gives the following on ‘blackbirding’.
Under this practice, islanders were kidnapped, and sometimes gotten drunk, confused, or bamboozled by sailors, impersonating missionaries, or by a native pretending to be a prosperous ex-plantation worker, into working for pitiful wages on farms and cotton plantations, mostly in Australia and Fiji. Rebellious or argumentative victims, children, and the elderly might well be killed or thrown overboard on the voyage, and conditions at their destinations could be very variable indeed. Death rates might be as high as 75%.
When their term of employment was over, the “blackbirds” might well never return to their homes. Some islands were stripped of most of their male populations even before imported diseases laid them waste.
After the ALACRITY was commissioned she was used for some time by the flagship HMS CLIO on the Australian station as a tender.
Then the ALACRITY for some three years used in “blackbirding” patrols in the western Pacific. The little ships were very effective in their anti kidnapping roll, and when not more needed used as a survey vessels in the Pacific waters off Fiji and Solomon Islands.
December 1879 under command of Commander W.H.Moore, she visited New Zealand for a three months recuperative period, before sailing to Sydney and a refit.
Then again used for survey work.
1882 Sold at Sydney to the New South Wales government for use as a powder hulk.
Her ultimate fate unknown.
Kiribati 1989 40c sg 297, scott 513
Source: Watercraft Philately. Ships on the Australian Station by John Bastock.