Palinure was a Palinure-class 16-gun brig

Brig

A brig is a sailing vessel with two square-rigged masts. During the Age of Sail, brigs were seen as fast and manoeuvrable and were used as both naval warships and merchant vessels. They were especially popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries...

 of the French Navy

French Navy

The French Navy, officially the Marine nationale and often called La Royale is the maritime arm of the French military. It includes a full range of fighting vessels, from patrol boats to a nuclear powered aircraft carrier and 10 nuclear-powered submarines, four of which are capable of launching...

, built by Caudan at Lorient

Lorient

Lorient, or L'Orient, is a commune and a seaport in the Morbihan department in Brittany in north-western France.-History:At the beginning of the 17th century, merchants who were trading with India had established warehouses in Port-Louis...

 and launched in 1804. In French service she captured before captured her in turn. Taken into the Royal Navy

Royal Navy

The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...

 as HMS Snap, she participated in two campaigns that qualified for the Naval General Service Medal (NGSM). She was broken up in 1811.

French service

Palinure was commissioned on 20 May under Capitaine de frègate Jance. She then took part in Allemand's expedition of 1805

Allemand's expedition of 1805

Allemand's expedition of 1805, often referred to as the Escadre invisible in French sources, was an important French naval expedition during the Napoleonic Wars, which formed a major diversion to the ongoing Trafalgar campaign in the Atlantic Ocean...

.

On the morning of 22 April 1808 in Grande Bourg Bay at Marie Galante Palinure and Pilade encountered . In the resulting engagement Goree lost one man killed and four wounded; the French lost eight killed and 21 wounded. After about an hour Palinure and Pilade made off when they saw the schooner Superieur coming to Goree's assistance, followed a little while later by the frigate Circe

HMS Circe (1804)

HMS Circe was a Royal Navy 32-gun fifth-rate Thames-class frigate, built by Master Shipwright Joseph Tucker at Plymouth Dockyard, and launched in 1804. She served in the Caribbean during the Napoleonic Wars, and participated in an action and a campaign for which in 1847 in the Admiralty authorized...

 and the brig-sloop Wolverine

HMS Wolverine (1805)

HMS Wolverine was a Royal Navy 18-gun Cruizer-class brig-sloop, launched in 1805 at Topsham, near Exeter. Early in her career she was involved in two fratricidal incidents, one involving a British frigate and then a newsworthy case in which she helped capture a British slave ship...

. Superieure exchanged some shots with the French brigs but the other two British vessels arrived too late actually to engage.

On 3 October 1808, Palinure captured the 18-gun Carnation. Carnations capture was due in part to the cowardice of a large part of her crew after the loss of her captain and heavy casualties. The British later recovered and burnt Carnation during their invasion of Martinique.

On 31 October, Circe captured Palinure at Diamond Rock

Diamond Rock

Diamond Rock is a 175 meter high basalt island located south of Fort-de-France, the main port of the Caribbean island of Martinique. The uninhabited island is about three kilometers from Pointe Diamant. The island gets its name from the reflections that its sides cast at certain hours of the day,...

 off Fort de France. Palinure, under the command of M. Fourniers tried to take shelter under the guns of a battery on Pointe Solomon, but the battery was so high above the vessels that Circe did not fire at it as she came up. After a short engagement Palinure struck. She had lost seven men killed and eight wounded out of 79 men on board, most from the 83rd Regiment; Circe lost one man killed and one man wounded.

British service

On 13 November she was commissioned as HMS Snap under Commander James Pattison Stewart.

She took part in the British capture of the French and Dutch West Indies, including the capture of Martinique in February 1809. In 1847 the Admiralty authorized the issue of the Naval General Service Medal with the clasp "Martinique" to all remaining survivors of that campaign.

In August 1809, Commander Thomas Barclay took command of Snap, after having briefly commanded . In 1810 she was part of the force under Brigadier Harcourt that took the Dutch colony of Sint Maarten. There she provided cover for the troops landing at Little Cool Bay to encourage the Dutch governor to surrender his part of the island. Her participation in the campaigns would qualify her crew for the NGSM with the clasp "Guadaloupe".

Captain Frasier Douglas replaced Barclay, and was in turn replaced by Captain Robert Lisle Coulson.

Fate

Snap arrived in Portsmouth on 20 January 1811 and was paid off on 15 February. She was broken up in June at Sheerness.