Proserpine was a 38-gun Hébé-class frigate of the French Navy launched in 1785 that HMS Dryad captured on 13 June 1796. The Admiralty commissioned Proserpine into the Royal Navy as the fifth rate, HMS Amelia. She spent 20 years in the Royal Navy, participating in numerous actions in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, capturing a number of prizes, and serving on anti-smuggling and anti-slavery patrols. Her most notable action was her intense and bloody, but inconclusive, fight in 1813 with the French frigate Aréthuse. Amelia was broken up in December 1816.
HMS Amelia Chasing the French frigate Aréthuse. Painted in 1852 by John Christian Schetky
HMS Dryad vs Proserpine
St Fiorenzo and Amelia, close in on three French frigates and a gun vessel off Belle-Île, 9 April 1799
HMS Amelia in action with the French Frigate Aréthuse, by John Christian Schetky, 1852
HMS Dryad was a fifth-rate sailing frigate of the Royal Navy that served for 64 years, at first during the Napoleonic Wars and then in the suppression of slavery. She fought in a notable single-ship action in 1796 when she captured the French frigate Proserpine, an action that would later earn her crew the Naval General Service Medal. Dryad was broken up at Portsmouth in 1860.
HMS Dryad taking the French frigate Proserpine as a prize, 13 June 1796, by Thomas Whitcombe
Capture of La Clorinde, by Robert Dodd, 1 March 1817, Dryad second left in the picture
Portsmouth Harbour 1851, the Dryad hulk in the foreground