HMS Pallas
Lost 1783 - 36-gun Venus-class fifth-rate frigate (Royal Navy)
Image courtesy of the Government of Bermuda.
Little has been published about this site, so some details are uncertain. If you can add to its story, please email [email protected].
History
HMS Pallas was a 36-gun frigate of the Venus class, built at Deptford and launched in 1757. She served through the Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence, a typical cruiser of the Georgian navy.
Her end came in February 1783. Found to be leaking heavily, she was deliberately run ashore and, some days later, set on fire. Bermuda has long counted her among its wrecks: she appears on the 1986 Bermuda shipwreck stamp series, which describes her as running ashore on 'St. George's Island', and the old version of this site listed her with the location 'unidentified, East'.
The Royal Navy record, however, places the loss at Sao Jorge (Saint George) Island in the Azores, not at St. George's, Bermuda - and the similarity of the names is a likely source of the confusion. No wreck site for the Pallas has ever been identified in Bermuda waters, so until better evidence turns up she is best treated as a doubtful Bermuda wreck.
Diving the wreck today
There is no known or diveable site for HMS Pallas in Bermuda. If she was lost here, nothing has been identified on the reefs.