page_title: French ship Héros (1778)
section_title: Evolution during the Indian Campaign
hierarchical_section_title: French ship Héros (1778) / Career / Evolution during the Indian Campaign
caption_attribution_description: 18th-century or early 19th-century engraving of the 74-gun Héros, Suffren's flagship.
context_page_description: Héros was a 74-gun ship of the line of the French Navy, known mostly for being the flagship of Pierre André de Suffren de Saint Tropez during the Anglo-French War.
context_section_description: Héros was on station for 27 months and then took 9 months to get back to France, meaning she was away from home waters for almost three years. This made her one of the most heavily engaged French warships of the time, though she was much-changed when she returned to Toulon – she had been dismasted twice (at Providien and Trincomalee) and repaired with modified rigging and masts from other ships and her launch had been so badly damaged by gunfire that Suffren suspended it from the stern at the level of the gallery.
  The good health and discipline of the ship's crew (or at least those who remained on the flagship) is also instructive as to the kind of men being recruited in Brest in March 1781. However, it is difficult to trace changes in personnel over the course of the campaign – for example, the ship's muster does not take into account the presence of slaves, Lascars, and sepoys, who at times formed a considerable proportion of the crew. This was especially true during the final months in the Indian Ocean, when large numbers of the original crew had been killed in action or lost to sickness, wounds, or desertion. The Indian sailors' pay was different and records of their service are incomplete.
  Of the 19 officers and gardes de la marine who left Brest with the ship in March 1781, only eight returned to Toulon aboard her – eight had left the ship during the campaign, two had been killed in combat, and one had died of his wounds. eighty-eight of the seamen were killed in batt. Of that 399, it is recorded that 41 died in hospital, though that is definitely an under-estimate. Forty-nine men deserted. Total losses were 365 out of a complement of 712 men on departure from Brest. Suffren made up these losses by taking men from frigates and transport ships, recruiting locally and redistributing among the squadron the crews of Orient and Bizarre, which both ran aground in 1782. Research is complicated by these crew movements and by the fact that Suffren gave preference to sailors from Provence for the voyage home, so that they could return home more easily to their family, since he chose Toulon not Brest as his destination. It is estimated that around 40% of the original crew did not return to Toulon.
caption: Painting of Héros, reproduced in the 1982 edition of Étienne Taillemite's Dictionnaire des Marins français.
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