HMS Minden was a 74-gun Ganges-class third-rate ship of the line of Royal Navy. Launched on 19 June 1810 at Bombay, she was named after 1759 Battle of Minden. in Bombay, India, and was built of teak.
The Bombay Courier, 23 June 1810 wrote:<blockquote>“On Tuesday last His Majesty’s Ship, the Minden built in the new docks (Bombay) by Jamsetji Bomanji Wadia was floated into the stream at high water, after the usual ceremony of breaking the bottle had been performed by the Honorable Governor Jonathan Duncan. Also In having produced the Minden, Bombay is entitled to the distinguished praise of providing the first and only British ship of the line built out of the limits of the Mother Country; and in the opinion of very competent judges, the Minden, for beauty of construction and strength of frame, may stand in competition with any man-o-war that has come out of the most celebrated Dockyards of Great Britain. For the skill of its architects, for the superiority of its timber, and for the excellence of its docks, Bombay may now claim a distinguished place among naval arsenals”.</blockquote>
Service history
Minden sailed from Bombay on 8 February 1811 on her first cruise, and manned by the crew of the . In March she sailed from Madras to take part in the invasion of Java. On 29 July two of her boats, under the command of Lieutenant Edmund Lyons, with only 35 officers and men aboard, attacked and captured the fort covering the harbour of Marrack, to the westward of Batavia. "In the summer of 1814 [Admiral Hood] made a voyage, in his majesty’s ship Minden, to the eastern parts of his station.” He eventually arrived at Semarang, Java on 29 June 1814. Hood then "sailed on the Minden from Batavia on 1 August 1814 for Madras, where he [later] died on 24 December of that year.”. The Minden remained in the East Indies until September 1815 when she returned to England, arriving at Portsmouth on 4 February 1816.
[A number of blogs and articles on the internet repeat an old myth that HMS Minden saw service during the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake Bay and that Francis Scott Key was aboard her when he wrote the words which became the lyrics for "The Star-Spangled Banner".
Such claims have been proven wrong by over 100 official British documents, newspaper accounts from that time, and from personal first-hand accounts. (See preceding paragraph and also these sources:) ]
In late July 1816 Minden sailed from Plymouth Sound, as part of an Anglo-Dutch fleet that made an attack on Algiers on 27 August.
A typhoon destroyed the shore-based Royal Naval Hospital at Hong Kong on 22 July 1841, and Minden was commissioned at Plymouth in December 1841 to serve as a hospital ship there.