HMS Miranda (1851)

Her initial armament consisted of fourteen Monk's ‘C’ 1839 32-pounder 42 hundredweight (cwt) muzzle-loading smoothbore (MLSB) 8.5-foot solid-shot guns on broadside trucks.[1] She commissioned at Sheerness on 25 February 1854 under the command of Captain Edmund M. Lyons RN, for service in the Baltic Sea during the Crimean War.[4] She did not sail for the Baltic; instead she joined Captain Erasmus Ommanney's Squadron for service in the White Sea.Not finding any Russian ships, the Squadron destroyed the port of Kola on 24 August before withdrawing before the onset of winter.On 3 June 1855, during the Siege of Taganrog, Boatswain Henry Cooper and Lieutenant Cecil William Buckley of Miranda landed destroying equipment and set fire to government buildings, despite the town being under bombardment and garrisoned by 3,000 Russian troops.Captain Edmund Moubray Lyons of Miranda reported on 29 May 1855 that in the first four days of the squadron entering the Sea of Azov, the enemy had lost four steamers of war and 246 merchant vessels, together with corn and flour magazines to the value of at least £150,000.[5] During the early 1860s she took part in the New Zealand Wars; in 1863 being used to land troops at Pūkorokoro, Waikato (later renamed Miranda in her honour).