HMS Providence (1791)

Sloop of the Royal Navy

HMS Providence was a sloop of the Royal Navy, famous for being commanded by William Bligh on his second breadfruit voyage between 1791 and 1794.

The Admiralty purchased Providence on the stocks from Perry & Co, Blackwall Yard in February 1791. She was launched on 23 April 1791 and commissioned under Bligh that month. She was coppered at Woolwich for the sum of £1,267, and then again at Deptford for £3,981.

Rated as a sixth rate, Providence sailed for the Pacific on 2 August 1791 on Bligh's Second Breadfruit Voyage. Bligh completed a mission to collect breadfruit trees and other botanical specimens from the Pacific, which he transported to the West Indies. Specimens were given to the Royal Botanic Gardens in St. Vincent. Providence returned to Britain in August 1793, having been re rated as a sloop on 30 September 1793. Serving as midshipman on board was Matthew Flinders. Then a teenager, later in his career as a captain, Flinders would determine that Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) was an island, would be the first to circumnavigate Australia, and be the first to call it Australia. This voyage was Flinders' first direct association with the island continent. In Adventure Bay, Tasmania, third lieutenant George Tobin made the first European drawing of an echidna.

In 2008, a diving survey conducted by the Okinawa Prefectural Buried Cultural Properties Center found the remains of a foreign ship, believed to those of Providence, in Yabiji. Iron ingots believed to be cargo or belongings of Providence′s crew, ceramics from China and Europe, glass bottles, and glass beads have been discovered at the shipwreck site.