KBC 12: Everything we know about HMS Trincomalee, answer to 7 crore question that IPS officer Mohita Sharma quit

Launched in 1817, HMS Trincomalee is a Leda-class sailing frigate that has served in Royal Navy in various roles for approximately 80 years. 

Build shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, during WWII, it resumed a training role. Restored as a museum ship in Hartlepool, England, in an interesting twist, the area around the HMS Trincomalee has been organised and set up in a way ports looked like back in the day. 

A Leda-class frigate, one of 47 built between 1800 and 1830, interestingly, the ship was named after the 1782 Battle of Trincomalee off the Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, a port of that name. However, it was built in Bombay (Mumbai), India by the Wadia Group and but unlike the majority of her sister ships, the HMS Trincomalee was made of teak rather than oak, probably due to shortage of oak in Britain during those times. 

The HMS Trincomalee spent years patrolling the Atlantic. Over the next couple of decades, it served all over the world, including during the Crimean War and in the Pacific before being turned into a training and accommodation ship post-1860.

The HMS Trincomalee was constructed at a whopping cost of £23,000 (Rs 22,67,870 approximately). It was Captain Philip Henry who sailed her to Portsmouth Dockyard where she arrived 18 months after her construction was over. The journey cost £6,600 (RS 6,50,701 approximately).

Now listed as part of the National Historic Fleet, the HMS Trincomalee is a centre of attraction for Britishers as well as tourists who visit the National Museum of the Royal Navy based in Hartlepool to get an up, close and personal view of this majestic beauty.