French frigate Cléopâtre (1781)
Cléopâtre was a 32-gun Vénus class frigate of the French Navy. She was designed by Jacques-Noël Sané, and had a coppered hull. She was launched in 1781, and the British captured her in 1793. She then served the Royal Navy as HMS Oiseau until she was broken up in 1816.
Cléopâtre at Start Point, Devon in 1793
A plan of the Oiseau taken in 1793
Jacques-Noël Sané was a French naval engineer. He was the creator of standardised designs for ships of the line and frigates fielded by the French Navy in the 1780s, which served during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars and in some cases remained in service into the 1860s. Captured ships of his design were commissioned in the Royal Navy and even copied.
Lithograph portrait of Jacques-Nöel Sané by Julien Léopold Boilly.
Bust by Louis-Joseph Daumas, on display at the Musée national de la Marine in Paris.