HMS Orontes was a 19th century troopship

Troopship

A troopship is a ship used to carry soldiers, either in peacetime or wartime...

 of 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...

, intended for carrying troops to southern Africa and the West Indies (rather than to India like the of troopships such as Serapis

HMS Serapis (1866)

HMS Serapis was a Euphrates-class troopship commissioned for the transport of troops to and from India. She was launched in the Thames on 26 September 1866 from the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company at Leamouth, London and was the third Royal Navy ship to bear the name...

).

Design

Her displacement was 4,857 tons (or 5,600 tons after her 1876 lengthening). She was 300 feet long (though this was increased in 1876) and her beam was 44½ foot. She had only a nominal armament, of three 4 pounder guns.

History

Her design was produced by the Controller of the Navy. She was launched from Cammell Laird

Cammell Laird

Cammell Laird, one of the most famous names in British shipbuilding during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, came about following the merger of Laird, Son & Co. of Birkenhead and Johnson Cammell & Co. of Sheffield at the turn of the twentieth century.- Founding of the business :The Company...

 shipbuilders at Birkenhead

Birkenhead

Birkenhead is a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral in Merseyside, England. It is on the Wirral Peninsula, along the west bank of the River Mersey, opposite the city of Liverpool...

 on 22 November 1862. In March 1863 she was completed and commissioned. On 11 November 1871 she left Quebec

Quebec

Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....

, bringing the city's last imperial garrison back to Britain In 1879 she brought the body of Louis Napoléon, Prince Imperial, killed earlier that year in the Zulu War, back to Britain. In 1893 she was sold and then broken up for scrap on the River Thames

River Thames

The River Thames flows through southern England. It is the longest river entirely in England and the second longest in the United Kingdom. While it is best known because its lower reaches flow through central London, the river flows alongside several other towns and cities, including Oxford,...

.

Orontes in fiction

She is notable in fiction as the troopship which brought John Watson

John Watson (Sherlock Holmes)

John H. Watson, M.D. , known as Dr. Watson, is a character in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Watson is Sherlock Holmes's friend, assistant and sometime flatmate, and is the first person narrator of all but four stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon.-Name:Doctor Watson's first...

 back to Britain during his convalescence after the 1880 Battle of Maiwand

Battle of Maiwand

The Battle of Maiwand in 1880 was one of the principal battles of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Under the leadership of Malalai Anaa, the legendary woman of Afghanistan, the Afghan followers of Ayub Khan defeated the British Army in one of the rare nineteenth-century victories of an Asian force...

, in the second paragraph of Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...

's 1887 Sherlock Holmes work A Study in Scarlet

A Study in Scarlet

A Study in Scarlet is a detective mystery novel written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, introducing his new character of Sherlock Holmes, who later became one of the most famous literary detective characters. He wrote the story in 1886, and it was published the next year...

.

External links

• Images of HMS Orontes (1862) at the National Maritime Museum
  National Maritime Museum
  The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England is the leading maritime museum of the United Kingdom and may be the largest museum of its kind in the world. The historic buildings forming part of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site, it also incorporates the Royal Observatory, Greenwich,...
  
  
• http://www.freewebs.com/rookfamilytree/111.htm
• Thomas Bush Hardy, HMS Orontes leaving Portsmouth with troops for the East, 1886