Half-length polychrome female bust figurehead of HMS 'Daphne', an 18-gun corvette built at Pembroke Dock in 1838 and sold for breaking to Castle's, on the lower Thames at Charlton, in 1864. On 'Daphne's' completion in 1838 she was commissioned for the Mediterranean under Captain John W. Dalling. Her second lieutenant, who quickly succeeded as first, was (later Admiral Sir) Edward Gennys Fanshawe, 1814-1906, whose sister subsequently married Dalling. In late 1848, after further posting elsewhere, Fanshawe in turn became captain of 'Daphne' on a commission in the Pacific, based at Valparaiso, until 1852. A great deal is therefore known of parts of her service from the privately published memoir of Fanshawe, edited from his journals and letters by his daughter in 1904, and because Fanshawe's album of drawings recording his Pacific cruise is also in the collection (PAI4604). Late in that cruise, which took the ship as far west as Fiji and Samoa, it was totally dismasted in a hurricane off Mazatlan on the Pacific coast of Mexico, and would have been lost had its anchors not held. Fanshawe managed to obtain a new mast from a wrecked schooner and, having jury-rigged the ship, returned to Britain round Cape Horn with cargo of Mexican silver for the Bank of England.