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The orders of battle on this article have Cornwallis as 44 gun 5th rate with Captain James Caufield, while HMS Cornwallis (1805) has 54 gun 4th rate with Captain William Fisher. Can someone please check this out from sources, to which I have no ready access. Perhaps only a dyslexic typo. Thanks, Benyoch (talk) 17:08, 30 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It's not a typo, the sources used do say 44 guns and under Caulfield. Fisher was not actually a post-captain, and so able to take command of a post-ship like Cornwallis except in acting capacity. Caulfield however was. He appears to have taken over from Montague and commanded the ship during the campaign. Fisher superseded him on 10 December, after the end of the campaign, and with orders to take the ship to Madras carrying troops that had been involved in the successful expedition (Fisher had previously commanded the Racehorse between 1809-10, employed in surveying in the Mozambique). So it is accurate here to say Caulfield was in command. As to the guns and rating, Akbar (as she was then) was not surveyed and registered until her arrival in Britain in July 1812. She appears on an order of battle for the East Indies station in June 1809 as an 38-gun 18-pdr ship. This doubtless a hold over from her days as a East India Company cruiser. She was officially rated as a 50-gun fourth rate only in 1813, when her full armament of 30 24-pdrs on the maindeck, and 26 42-pdr carronades on her spar deck were fitted. (You will note that despite this amounting to 56 guns she was rated as a 50-gun ship, a quirk of the RN's system at the time). 44 guns is therefore not improbable for the Cornwallis at the time of the invasion, and is made even more likely that if she was carrying troops, her armament may have been reduced to fit them and their stores. Both articles are therefore correct, the Cornwallis article is merely slightly incomplete. Benea (talk) 01:49, 31 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Benea, I understand how the senario works (I take it you meant Fisher was not actually a post-captain, and so NOT able ... ). It will be good to see what the views of others are, too; certainly your assessment seems plausible and quite probable on the face of it.
On giving some thought Akbar here, and the talk on Cornwallis naming, I am suspicious that there was another Akbar prior to and apart from Cornwallis being re-named HMS Akbar. Can this be entertained for the sake of research, and looked into? I have no source resources to do so.
It's not so much my view as what is in the sources. The removal of guns for her trooping role is my supposition, all the rest you can find in books on the topic. A previous Akbar, possibly to have been built along the lines of the Vengeur class design, was laid down on 4 April 1807 at Prince of Wales Island, Penang. The shipyard collapsed two years later from a lack of resources and manpower, resulting in the cancellation of the putative Akbar on 12 October 1809. No other ship, projected or otherwise, had been named Akbar prior to Cornwallis/Akbar (you can find this in the comprehensive listings of both volumes of Colledge's Ships of the Royal Navy and the relevant volumes of Winfield's British Warships in the Age of Sail). As to your final query, WP:EMAIL has information of relevance. Benea (talk) 16:15, 31 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Aftermath - Governor Robert Townsend Farquhar of Île Bourbon
A notice appears in the London Gazette, dated March 2, 1811, [1] for the official appointment of Robert Townsend Farquhar as Governor of the Islands of Mauritius and Bourbon and their dependencies. Leboite (talk) 01:08, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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