Dos Amigos

Type

Clipper

Period

19th Century

Nation

United States

Overview: Dos Amigos was a fast, low-slung Baltimore-clipper-type brigantine/schooner built in the United States and used by Spanish/Cuban interests to run enslaved Africans from West Africa to Cuba's sugar plantations in the early 1830s. She is notable both for her role as a slaver and for her dramatic second career as a Royal Navy anti-slavery cruiser, HMS Fair Rosamond, after her capture. Specifications: Sources give her length as roughly 83 feet and tonnage around 172 tons, built in the Baltimore clipper style prized for speed and shallow draft to slip in and out of African slaving ports. As a slaver she carried a single carronade, a crew of about 34, and was not coppered; on 9 November 1830 she was taken with a reported 567 captives aboard. Once purchased into Royal Navy service and renamed Fair Rosamond, she was coppered at Ascension Island, rearmed with an 18-pounder pivot carronade and a 6-pounder field gun, and crewed by about 35 officers and men under Lieutenant Henry Huntley. Service History: Dos Amigos was captured off West Africa by HMS Black Joke, herself a former slaver turned Royal Navy anti-slavery brig, and condemned by the British and Spanish Court of Mixed Commission at Sierra Leone. Commodore Jonathan Hayes purchased her for the Royal Navy and renamed her Fair Rosamond, and she went on to serve with the West Africa Squadron, capturing further slavers including La Pantica in 1834 and El Esplorado and La Mariposa in 1836, before being broken up in 1845. Notable Facts: Naval historians disagree on her exact origin: Howard Chapelle held she was Baltimore-built (possibly at Portsmouth, Virginia), while other researchers such as Footner suggested Bermuda, the Caribbean, France, or Britain, and Basil Lubbock simply described her as an American pilot-boat type of the "deep Baltimore" style. In 1832 the Royal Navy took her lines off in dry dock at Portsmouth, and those plans, now held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, later formed the basis for Chapelle's reconstruction drawings used by modelers. A detailed cutaway model depicting her slave-deck arrangement is held by The Mariners' Museum, a related model is at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and kit manufacturers such as Occre and the old Marine Model Company/Scientific Models have produced kits of the ship, making original build logs a useful supplementary reference.