Ordered: 27 August 1841
Builder: Portsmouth Dockyard
Cost: £16,137, plus £9,312 for fitting out
Laid down: April 1842
Launched: 16 May 1843
Completed: 1 September 1843
Commissioned: 27 June 1843
HMS Eurydice was a 26-gun Royal Navy corvette which was the victim of one of Britain's worst peace-time naval disasters when she sank in 1878.
Designed by Admiral the Hon. George Elliot, the second Eurydice was a very fast 26-gun frigate designed with a very shallow draught to operate in shallow waters. She originally saw service on the North American and West Indies station between 1843 and 1846 under the command of her first captain, George Augustus Elliot (the eldest son of her designer). Under Captain Talavera Vernon Action, her second commission between 1846 and 1850 was spent on the South African ("Cape of Good Hope") station. Her third commission, under Captain Erasmus Ommanney (between 1854 and 1855) and then Captain John Walter Tarleton (1855 to 1857) saw her first sent briefly to the White Sea during the Crimean War and then to the North American and West Indies station again. The Eurydice saw no further seagoing service in the next twenty years; she was converted into a stationary training ship in 1861. In 1877, she was refitted at Portsmouth and by John White at Cowes for seagoing service as a training ship.
After being recommissioned under the command of Captain Marcus Augustus Stanley Hare, Eurydice sailed from Portsmouth on a three-month tour of the West Indies and Bermuda on 13 November 1877. On 6 March 1878, she began her return voyage from Bermuda for Portsmouth. After a very fast passage across the Atlantic, on 24 March 1878 Eurydice was caught in a heavy snow storm off the Isle of Wight, capsized and sank. Only two of the ship's 378 crew and trainees survived, most of those who were not carried down with the ship died of exposure in the freezing waters. One of the witnesses to the disaster was a young Winston Churchill, who was living at Ventnor with his family at the time. The wreck was refloated later in the year but had been so badly damaged during her period submerged that she was then broken up. Her ship's bell is preserved in St. Paul's Church, Gatten, Shanklin.
An inquiry found that the vessel had sunk through stress of weather and that her officers and crew were blameless for her loss.
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