HMS Nassau (1866)

HMS Nassau was a Cormorant-class wooden-hulled gun vessel of the Royal Navy.^[1] She was the sixth and to date last Royal Navy ship to bear that name.

Powered by screw propulsion with a displacement of 877 tons, she was launched at Pembroke Dockyard on 20 February 1866^[2] and completed into a survey ship that July.^[1]

Her first commander was Captain Charles Richard Mayne and her first mission to re-survey the passage north into the Pacific and the Straits of Magellan in South America,^[1] as recorded in her log kept at The National Archives.^[3] Robert Oliver Cunningham was aboard as naturalist on that voyage and collected the holotype of Maynea on the voyage, naming it after Captain Mayne.^{[citation needed]}

She then moved on to surveying on the China Station under Commander William Chimmo (1870–1873), mostly carrying out sub-surface temperature measurements and deep-sea soundings,^[2] though also sending men ashore in boats to destroy a pirate stronghold in the Sulu Archipelago in 1872. During that posting she also experienced a typhoon on 28 September 1870 whilst anchored at Hong Kong. Next she moved to the East Indies Station under Lieutenant Francis John Gray (1873–1875)^[1] surveying East Africa^[2] and joined with HMS London's boats and fellow gun vessel HMS Rifleman in 1875 to bombard Mombasa. Her final posting was a brief period back on the China Station^[2] before being broken up in 1880.^[1]