HMS Euryalus (1853)

HMS Euryalus was a fourth-rate wooden-hulled screw frigate of the Royal Navy, with a 400HP steam engine that could make over 12 knots. She was launched at Chatham in 1853, was 212 feet long, displaced 3125 tons and had a complement of 515 (this varied slightly as the Naval Standards varied). At the time of the Bombardment of Kagoshima she carried 35 guns, not counting approximately 16 carronades. Seventeen of her guns were breech-loading Armstrong Guns. She carried 230 tons of coal, and provisions for about three months, together with over 70 tons of shot and shell.

Service history
In December 1853 G. Ramsay was appointed captain, and the ship served in the Baltic Campaign in 1854-1855. Under the command of J.W. Tarleton, she served in the Mediterranean in 1858.

She arrived at Yokohama on 14 September 1862, the date of the Namamugi Incident, and served as Admiral Sir Augustus Kuper's flagship during the bombardment of Kagoshima in August 1863 and the bombardment of Shimonoseki in September 1864. During the bombardment of Kagoshima the captain of Euryalus, John James Steven Josling, was killed, as was his second-in-command, Commander Wilmot, both decapitated by the same cannonball. It was at Shimonoseki that Duncan Gordon Boyes won his Victoria Cross at the remarkably young age of 17. The captain and commander of the ship at Shimonoseki was Captain John Hobhouse Inglis Alexander, who was severely wounded in the ankle as he led the assault on the batteries onshore.

Fate
Euryalus was paid off at Portsmouth on 23 September 1865. She was broken up in 1867.