HMS Satellite, 1855-1879
HMS
Satellite was a corvette-class vessel of 1,327 tonnes, with 21 guns. Prevost captained it for its time on the Pacific Station, from 1857-60, and
it appears in dozens of despatches, mostly in 1858.
It was launched from a Devonport dockyard in 1855 and sailed in South America and
China, in addition to its work on the West Coast, where it acted, in 1858, as a
guard-ship and licence-checker for miners on the Fraser River. It was broken up in
1879, but its memory lives on in
the Salish Sea in at least three geographical place names: Satellite Channel, Passage,
and
Reef.
- 1. Andrew Scott, The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2009), 526.
- 2. Ibid.
- 3. Ibid.