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For Admiral Horatio Nelson, frigates were crucial scouting warships, but in 1798 he could not get enough. ‘Was I to die this moment, “Want of Frigates” would be found stamped on my heart,’ he said.
Frigates were speedy and versatile, but the origins of the type are uncertain. One school of thought is that it arose among the 17th-century Spanish as a nimble ship with a single gundeck; another holds that it was developed in England from a swift, heavily armed privateering craft in the same century. Yet another credits the 18th-century French.
Whatever the case, the frigate was intended to be fast, powerful, and manoeuvrable. Its basic design characteristics in the Age of Sail were one continuous gundeck and square sails on three masts.
The etymology of the term is obscure, too. It was in English usage by the 16th century, and probably came from the French frégate and Italian fregata. The derivation before then isn’t clear.
A frigate command was desirable because the ship often sailed independent of the main battlefleet (a lightish frigate wasn’t suited to fight in the line of battle) and take enemy prizes, thereby making its captain rich. Fittingly, frigate captains were often captivating figures, and in Jane Austen’s 1817 novel Persuasion, the very eligible bachelor Captain Frederick Wentworth has done quite well.
While duelling frigates are closely associated with the Napoleonic Wars, two of the greatest frigate contests occurred in the contemporaneous War of 1812. In August 1812, USS Constitution stunned Britain when it clobbered the overmatched HMS Guerrière. The next June, the Royal Navy avenged itself when HMS Shannon soundly defeated USS Chesapeake.
The term ‘frigate’ survived into the ensuing Age of Steam, and by the time of the Second World War the Royal Navy applied it to a category of light warships assigned to convoy-escort duties.
