A List of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. Navy Office, 1st October 1794.

Large octavo (230 x 150 mm), in the original Admiralty-style binding of straight-grain red morocco with elaborate gilt border incorporating stars, wreaths and cornerpieces, spine gilt in six compartments; inner dentelles; all edges gilt; original marbled endpapers; engraved title-page with date in manuscript 1st October 1794 (although the list has additions to 1801); 200 pp., each with an identical engraved heading, with manuscript entries in black and red ink below, set out in tabular form within red-ruled lines; mostly written in one hand, with occasional alterations or additions in a second; remarkably fresh throughout.

A record of the ships in Nelson’s Royal Navy from 1794-1801 with a distinguished Royal provenance, being a manuscript copy prepared for Ernst Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and King of Hanover (1771-1851), fifth son of George III.

The register classifies ships by rating; within each rating, vessels are arranged alphabetically. The entries include dimensions, date built, draught, complement of men, armaments, shipwright or origin (e.g. “Taken from the French”; “Taken from the Dutch”), and, occasionally, fate (e.g. “Lost 1790”; “Taken 1801”). The might of the Royal Navy in the early stages of the long wars with France is demonstrated statistically by the sheer number of vessels that are indicated as having been captured from the French.

The presence (or, indeed, absence) of the following vessels in the register is of specific Australian interest: the First Fleet store ship Supply (the third HMS Supply), which was decommissioned in April 1792, is not listed, but its namesake (the fourth HMS Supply) – originally the American mercantile ship New Brunswick, purchased by the Admiralty in October 1793, then renamed and sent out to Botany Bay to replace her predecessor – is; the other First Fleet naval vessel, HMS Sirius, was wrecked in March 1790, and so does not appear in the register; HMS Gorgon, the 44-gun fifth-rate ship which sailed to New South Wales as part of the Third Fleet, is recorded.

The most notable vessel with an Australian connection, however, is HMS Investigator, listed under the rating ‘Sloops rigged as Ships’. She was originally the mercantile Fram, launched in 1795, which the Royal Navy purchased in 1798 and renamed HMS Xenophon, before she was converted to a survey ship in 1801 under the name HMS Investigator. In 1802, under the command of Matthew Flinders, she would become the first ship to circumnavigate the Australian continent. Interestingly, an annotation in red ink in the entry for Investigator records that she was bought in 1798 as Swan – clearly a clerical error for Fram.