These days, the name Hermione invariably brings up Hermione Granger, the character in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Much further down the list of Hermiones on Wikipedia are ships that bore the name of the original character from Greek mythology.
There were lots of them, 12 incarnations for France alone, but the most famous one is the Hermione that took Lafayette to America for his gig in the Revolutionary War. Some folks just finished a rebuilt of Lafayette's ship and will sail it to the U.S., so you'll see more of it in 2015.
The story of Lafayette brought back an interesting tidbit of history most Germans do not know about. Well, most Americans don't either, so it's okay. The part Americans do know about is that the English troops in the North American colonies included a large number of Germans from several German states, rented or sold to the English.
However, the French who came to the assistance of the American revolutionaries also included a substantial German contingent hidden behind French unit names. The Regiment Royale Deux-Ponts from the Dutchy of Zweibrücken (engl. two bridges, fr. deux ponts) had been established several decades before the expedition to America for the very same reason other German noblemen sold their men to the English, namely as a way to raise money for the noble coffers and to get rid of "unusable" or "undesirable" subjects of said nobility.
And so it was that the "French" assault on redoubt 9, held by Hessian soldiers fighting for England, in the final days of the decisive siege of Yorktown was really Germans in blue uniforms fighting German redcoats.
As the new Hermione sails to the United States, let's hope it will succeed in banishing Freedom Fries once and for all.
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