British Tar was built in 1797 in Plymouth (probably Plymouth, Massachusetts). She never enters Lloyd's Register under that name, suggesting that she may have been an American vessel that only came to Bristol, and was renamed, shortly before she sailed from Bristol in 1805. In 1805 she made a slave trading voyage during which the French captured her. She became the privateer Revanche, out of Guadeloupe. Revanche fought an inconclusive single-ship action in 1806 with HMS Curieux. The British captured Revanche in 1808.