Charles Napier
Admiral Sir Charles John Napier KCB GOTE RN (6 March 1786 – 6 November 1860) was a Scottish naval officer whose sixty years in the Royal Navy included service in the Napoleonic Wars, Syrian War and the Crimean War, and a period commanding the Portuguese navy in the Liberal Wars. An innovator concerned with the development of iron ships, and an advocate of humane reform in the Royal Navy, he was also active in politics as a Liberal Member of Parliament and was probably the naval officer most widely known to the public in the early Victorian Era.
Napier was the second son of Captain Charles Napier, RN, and grandson of Francis, 6th Lord Napier; he was thus a direct descendant of the great mathematician John Napier. He was born at Merchiston Hall, near Falkirk, on 6 March 1786, and educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh.
In 1821 he financed and participated in the construction of one of the first iron-hulled vessels ever built, and the first designed to venture into open water. The PS Aaron Manby was named after the master of the Horseley Ironworks, Tipton, Staffordshire, where she was pre-fabricated to a design formulated by Napier, Aaron Manby and his son Charles Manby and then assembled at Rotherhithe on the Thames. After trials in May 1822, the Aaron Manby crossed the English Channel to Le Havre under Napier’s command on 10 June 1822, and proceeded up the Seine to Paris, where she caused a great stir and where she was based for the next decade. This has been claimed as the first passage from France to Britain by steam ship, which it was not: but it was the first direct passage from London to Paris by steam ship and the first seagoing voyage by an iron ship anywhere. Napier’s company built five similar steamships but in 1827 he went bankrupt, leaving the family in severe financial difficulty
See Also
Sources of Information
- [1] Wikipedia