Queen Charlotte (1785 ship)

History
Great Britain
Name:	Queen Charlotte
Namesake:	Charlotte, the queen consort of King George III
Owner:	Etches & Co. (King George's Sound Company)
Builder:	Stockton
Launched:	1785
General characteristics
Tons burthen:	200, or 220, or 240 (bm)
Sail plan:	Snow
Complement:	33

Queen Charlotte was a British merchant ship launched in 1785 at Stockton for Etches & Co. Between September 1785 and 1788 she made a circumnavigation of the world in company with another ship that the company owned, the King George. The two vessels were engaged in the Maritime Fur Trade in the Pacific northwest. They sold their furs in China and returned to England with cargoes that they were carrying back for the British East India Company (EIC). The EIC then employed her for voyage as a packet, sailing to Madras and Bengal, and return.

In 1785 Richard Cadman Etches and partners, including Nathaniel Portlock and George Dixon, formed a partnership, commonly called the King George's Sound Company, to develop the fur trade. Portlock and Dixon had served in the Pacific on James Cook's third voyage. In September 1785 Portlock, in King George, and Dixon, in the smaller Queen Charlotte, sailed from England. They sailed together for most of their three-year voyage. They crossed the Atlantic Ocean, reaching the Falkland Islands in January 1786, and transited Cape Horn to enter the Pacific Ocean. They reached the Hawaiian islands on 24 May and anchored in Kealakekua Bay (where Cook had been killed in 1779), but did not go ashore. They took on fresh food at other Hawaiian islands and proceeded on to what is now Alaska. Dixson named the Queen Charlotte Islands after his ship. After two years of plying the waters, Portlock and Dixon departed North America, reaching Macao in November 1787.

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