HMS Fly (Sloop)
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Launched from Pembroke Dockyard in August 1831, the 18-gun sloop HMS Fly was responsible for charting much of Australia's north-east coast and nearby islands.
After commissioning in January 1832, the Fly served in North American waters and the West Indies station until September 1835, on the South America station, including the continent's Pacific Coast. (1838 to 1840).
Recommissioned in December 1841 under the command of Francis Price Blackwood, she was dispatched to survey the Torres Strait in company with the cutter Bramble. On that voyage, Blackwood charted locations around Australia's north-east coast, including Whitsunday Island and the Capricorn Islands, and Harden Sidney Melville produced the first official hydrographic survey of Australia's north-east coast. Geologist and naturalist Joseph Jukes and the naturalist John MacGillivray were members of the Fly's crew on the expedition, which identified the Fly River during a survey of the Gulf of Papua.
On 2 September 1844, she rescued the survivors of the merchant ship Lady Grey, wrecked on Alert Reef on a voyage from Sydney to Singapore.
After the vessel returned to England in June 1846, she was recommissioned for a four-year survey in the Pacific and New Zealand waters in October 1847, and returned to Plymouth Sound in December 1851.
The vessel then served as a coal hulk at Devonport before she was finally broken up in 1903.
Sources:
Wikipedia: HMS Fly (1831) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Fly_(1831)
Image:The English corvette Fly off Sydney (Tinted lithograph; National Library of Australia Didital Collections https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-135231731/view
Frederick Lenz (publishers), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HMS_Fly_(1831).jpg
