Ship Name Generator

What the ship name generator does

You need a ship. Something for a campaign, a vessel for chapter four, a name for a boat you have just bought and have been calling "the boat" for three weeks.

Press the button and you get one.

These are not invented. They are real names off the Royal Navy's books, which means some of them are going to look wrong to you. Amsterdam. Galicia. Peruvian. Vincejo. There is a reason a British navy sailed a ship with a Spanish name, and the reason is not a nice one.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One if you are deciding, a batch if you are browsing.
2. Press Generate. A fresh draw every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

The ship they called Vincey Joe

On 19 March 1799, in the Mediterranean, a British ship called Cormorant was on her way to meet another ship when she sighted a brig on the horizon.

She chased it for four hours.

The brig was the Vencejo, a Spanish naval vessel, almost new, built at Port Mahon. Vencejo is Spanish for swift, the bird, which is a very good name for a fast little ship and had been chosen by somebody who thought so.

Cormorant caught her, and that was that.

Here is the part that matters. The Royal Navy did not break her up. They did not rename her after an admiral or a virtue or a place in Kent. They took her into service, put her on the books, and kept the Spanish name.

So the Royal Navy now had a warship called Vincejo.

The crew could not pronounce it. British sailors looked at Vencejo, did what British sailors have always done to a foreign word, and called her Vincey Joe, and that stuck well enough that it turns up in the record. There is something wonderful about a Spanish swift being turned into a bloke from Portsmouth by men who could not be bothered.

And Vincey Joe went to work. Under British colours she captured a French privateer. She captured a French naval brig. She was part of the fleet at a squadron action and took her share of the money. She ran secret missions along the French coast, and on one night in August 1803 she put a party of French royalists ashore at the foot of the cliffs at Biville, men who intended to remove Napoleon and did not manage it.

But the best moment came in June 1799, three months after her capture, off Genoa.

She sailed too close to the shore and the batteries opened fire on her.

So she hoisted Spanish colours.

And the guns stopped.

Read that again. A Spanish-built ship, with a Spanish name, in British service, escaped Spanish-allied gunfire by running up a Spanish flag. It worked because it was not really a lie. Everything about her except the men on deck was still Spanish. The gunners on shore looked through their glasses at a Spanish brig called Vencejo and stopped shooting at a Spanish brig called Vencejo. The Navy had captured the hull and the name, and the name still worked for the other side.

Her ending is the whole business in miniature. In May 1804, becalmed in Quiberon Bay, she was surrounded by French gunboats and taken. The French put her into their own navy and renamed her Victorine. Then they sold her, and she became a privateer called Comte de Regnaud, and in 1810 the British caught her again.

One small ship. Three navies. Four names. Nobody ever sank her. She just kept changing hands.

Why anybody bothered

None of this happened because captains enjoyed chasing brigs for four hours. It happened because capturing a ship was how a sailor got rich, and the arrangement was formal, legal and enormous.

When you took an enemy vessel you did not simply own it. You brought it in, and a court of admiralty decided whether it had been lawfully taken. That is what a prize was: not loot, a legal category, with judges and paperwork and appeals. Once the court agreed, the ship and everything in it was sold, and the money was split among the crew according to rank, by a formula everybody on board knew by heart.

The numbers are difficult to believe.

The largest sum ever paid for a single capture came from the Spanish frigate Hermione, taken on 31 May 1762 by the frigate Active and the sloop Favourite. The two captains received around sixty-five thousand pounds each. In 1762.

But that is not the number that matters. Every ordinary seaman and Marine aboard those two ships got somewhere between £482 and £485.

An able seaman earned somewhere in the region of twelve to fourteen pounds a year.

So an ordinary man, with no rank, no education and no prospects, who happened to be standing on the right deck on the right afternoon, walked away with something like forty years of wages. In an afternoon. Once.

That is why the Navy could man its ships. That is why frigate command was the job every ambitious officer wanted, because frigates sailed alone and a lone ship did not share. And that is why a captain would chase a strange sail for four hours in the hope it was foreign.

The whole machine ran on it, and the machine left its fingerprints all over the language.

What that did to the list of names

Now go back and look at the names again with that in mind.

Amsterdam. Galicia. Peruvian. Vincejo. These are not the Admiralty being cosmopolitan. Every one of them is a receipt. Somebody took a Dutch ship, a Spanish ship, a ship from somewhere, and the ship came into the Navy still wearing the name its builders gave it, and there it sat on the Navy List for the rest of its life, a foreign word in an English column, because renaming it would have been extra work and nobody could see the point.

The Navy accumulated other people's vocabulary the way it accumulated other people's ships, which is to say by taking it.

And then there is Dover Prize, which is in the list, and which is the whole thing said out loud.

That is not a place. That is a captured ship with the legal category welded onto the name. The Navy already had a Dover, so when the prize court finished with this one they needed to tell the two apart on paper, and the way they did it was to write down what she was. Not what she was called. What she was. A prize.

Somewhere a clerk wrote that in a ledger, purely to keep his columns straight, and two hundred years later it is still sitting in the record with the word attached, telling you exactly how the Navy came to have her.

So when this hands you something that does not sound English, that is usually not a mistake in the list. That is usually the point. The name came aboard with the ship.

Where these come from

The names are drawn from a list our team researched and checked by hand against the historical record, so these are vessels that existed rather than plausible inventions. Your browser picks from them at random. Nothing you do here leaves your device.

Questions people ask

Should I put HMS in front?

Only if you mean a British warship. HMS stands for His or Her Majesty's Ship and the letter changes with the monarch, which is a small administrative headache the Navy has cheerfully carried for centuries. Other navies use their own: USS, HMCS, HMAS, and so on. A merchant vessel or a private boat gets none of them.

Why are ships called "she"?

Nobody knows, and every confident explanation you have been told is folk etymology. The convention is old, it is not universal, and it has been quietly dropped by a fair number of publications and shipping registers in recent decades. Use whichever you like. People will tell you it is wrong either way.

Is it bad luck to rename a ship?

Sailors have thought so for a very long time, and there are rituals for doing it properly if you feel the need. Worth noticing that the Royal Navy renamed captured ships whenever it suited them and stopped whenever it did not, which suggests the superstition was less binding on the Admiralty than on the men who had to sail her.

Why do the same names keep coming back?

Because in the Royal Navy the name is the thing that persists, not the hull. A ship is broken up and the name goes into store and comes out again on something new, sometimes centuries later. The ship is temporary. The name is the part that is meant to last, and it carries the whole record of everything the previous holders did.

Why are some of them so strange?

Because ships were commissioned in classes, and classes were named to a theme, and once you have committed to a theme you have to see it through even when you run out of dignified options. That is how a navy ends up with a warship named after a folk dance. Somebody had a list, and the list had to be finished.

Can the same name come up twice?

Not within a single draw. Ask for ten and you get ten different ones. Press again and everything is back in play.

References

1. HMS Vincejo (1799). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vincejo_(1799)
2. Vincejo / Vincego, 1799. Naval Database, 1801 to 1900. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~pbtyc/18-1900/U/05069.html
3. Prizetaking. A People's History 1793 to 1844, from the newspapers. https://houghton.hk/prizetaking/