HMS Porcupine (1844)

HMS Porcupine was a Royal Navy 3-gun wooden paddle steamer. It was built in Deptford Dockyard in 1844 and served as a survey ship.[3]

Bringing a dredge trawl back aboard HMS Porcupine, by Sir Charles Wyville Thomson
History
United Kingdom
Name:	HMS Porcupine
Ordered:	11 November 1843[1]
Builder:	Deptford Dockyard
Cost:	Hull £7,997, fitting out £7,050[1]
Launched:	17 June 1844[1]
Commissioned:	19 August 1844[1]
Fate:	Survey ship 1862 Sold 1883[1]
General characteristics
Class and type:	Steam vessel, re-classified in 1844 as first-class steam gunvessel
Displacement:	490 tons[2]
Tons burthen:	381 68/94 bm
Length:	141 ft (43 m) (keel) 124 ft 7.5 in (37.986 m) (gundeck)
Beam:	24 ft 1.5 in (7.353 m)
Depth of hold:	13 ft (4.0 m)
Installed power:	132 nominal horsepower 285 ihp (213 kW)[1]
Propulsion:	2-cylinder side lever steam engine[Note 1] Tubular boilers Single screw[1]
Crew:	80[1]
Armament:	1 x 32-pdr (26cwt) on pivot 2 x 32-pdr (17cwt) carronades

Porcupine was chartered by the Royal Society in 1869 to investigate the deep sea bed to the west of Ireland with the intention of looking for living organisms below 600 m depth. The azoic theory of Edward Forbes hypothesised that life could not exist below this depth due to the great pressure. The Porcupine expedition disproved this theory by bringing up animals from 3000 m. This led to the funding of the Challenger expedition to survey deep sea around the world. The Porcupine Bank, an area of seabed to the west of Ireland partly detached from the continental shelf by a failed rift event, was discovered by this expedition and is named after this ship.[4]