HMS ''Prince'' was a

Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by Kingdom of England, English and Kingdom of Scotland, Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were foug ...

storeship purchased in 1854 from mercantile owners and lost in a storm off

Balaklava Balaklava ( uk, Балаклáва, russian: Балаклáва, crh, Balıqlava, ) is a settlement on the Crimean Peninsula and part of the city of Sevastopol. It is an administrative center of Balaklava Raion that used to be part of the Cr ...

in November that year during the

Crimean War The Crimean War, , was fought from October 1853 to February 1856 between Russia and an ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom and Piedmont-Sardinia. Geopolitical causes of the war included t ...

. She was purchased from the General Screw Steam Shipping Company for £105,000 by Admiralty Order dated July 1854 and commissioned under Commander Benjamin Baynton. She sailed for the Crimea, carrying 150 persons and a cargo of much needed winter uniforms. The loss of the ship and its cargo caused a public outcry in Britain because of the severe winter conditions being endured by troops in unsuitable clothing. She was destroyed at a deep water anchorage outside Balaklava by a hurricane-force storm that tore her from her anchorage and dashed her onto rocks: she broke up completely within ten minutes and only six of her 150 crew were saved. Correspondent

William Howard Russell Sir William Howard Russell, (28 March 182011 February 1907) was an Irish reporter with ''The Times'', and is considered to have been one of the first modern war correspondents. He spent 22 months covering the Crimean War, including the Sieg ...

considered her officers to have been negligent in losing her bower

anchor An anchor is a device, normally made of metal , used to secure a vessel to the bed of a body of water to prevent the craft from drifting due to wind or current. The word derives from Latin ''ancora'', which itself comes from the Greek ...

s. Commander Bayntoun, her commanding officer, perished in the wreck. Twenty-nine other Allied transport ships were wrecked during the same storm. A Ukrainian maritime archeological team led by Sergei Voronov, of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences discovered the wreck in 2010 off Balaklava.Ukrainians uncover Crimean British Navy vessel
/ref>

Citations

References

External links

* Storeships of the Royal Navy Maritime incidents in November 1854 1854 ships {{UK-mil-ship-stub