James Gordon (Royal Navy officer)

Admiral of the Fleet Sir James Alexander Gordon, KCB, RN (6 October 1782 – 8 January 1869) was a distinguished British officer in the Royal Navy. His 75 years in the service, from Midshipman to Admiral of the Fleet was unprecedented in its duration. He served in the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. Historian Bryan Perrett has suggested that his career was the model for events in the Horatio Hornblower novels of C. S. Forester.

Early career

Gordon came of a family of minor Highland gentry of Jacobite sympathies, the Gordons of Beldorney and Wardhouse. He was born the eldest son of Charles Gordon of Wardhouse, Aberdeenshire, and his wife, a daughter of Major James Mercer, of Auchnacant, Aberdeenshire, at Kildrummy Castle, Kildrummy, Aberdeenshire

He entered the Royal Navy in 1793 as a Midshipman in HMS Arrogant (74). He transferred in 1795 to the frigate Révolutionnaire, which was part of Alexander Hood's fleet in the Battle of Groix on 23 June 1795. In 1796 Gordon moved to the ship-of-the-line HMS Namur (90), in which he was present at the Battle of Cape St Vincent, 13/14 February 1797. Later in 1797 Gordon became Master's Mate aboard HMS Goliath (74), which on 1 August 1798 formed part of the fleet under Horatio Nelson which inflicted a crushing defeat on the French fleet commanded by François-Paul Brueys d'Aigalliers in the Battle of the Nile. In 1800 he was appointed second Lieutenant of the sloop Bordelais which on 29 January 1801, while escorting a convoy to the West Indies, fought a smart action with three French brigs, capturing one. In the Caribbean later that year Gordon, on an independent mission, was captured by the Haitian government of Toussaint L’Ouverture and spent four months in prison before being released by cartel. He was made first Lieutenant of the brig HMS Raccoon (18) in 1802 and returned to the West Indies. Raccoon's capture of the French corvette Lodi on 11 July 1803 led to Gordon's promotion to Commander and command of Raccoon on 22 October.

Frigate captain

Gordon was created Post Captain in May 1805 and assigned command of the frigate Laegera (28), but was unable to take up the position because of illness. He was without a command until 1807, when he took over the frigate HMS Mercury (28), engaged in blockade duties off Cádiz, and was part of a hard-fought action between three British ships and the combined forces of a Spanish convoy, 20 gunboats and land artillery off the town of Rota on 4 April 1808. On 27 June he became captain of the frigate HMS Active (38) at Gibraltar and spent the next three years in operations in the Mediterranean and Adriatic. Active was one of the four ships under the command of William Hoste that successfully defeated a much larger French squadron at the first Battle of Lissa, 13 March 1811, and on 28 November she was one of three that defeated three more powerful French frigates off Pelagosa. In this latter action Gordon’s left knee was shattered by a cannon ball and his leg had to be amputated; he used a wooden leg for the remainder of his life. He recuperated in Malta and was able to take Active back to England in June 1812, where he married. He then took command of the frigate Seahorse, escorting convoys for the West Indies and enforcing the blockade of France. In 1814 she transferred to the American station, where the War of 1812 was still under way. Gordon, with Charles Napier as his second in command, distinguished himself as commodore leading the successful expedition up the Potomac, 17 August to 6 September, and also took part in the Battle of Baltimore and the attack on Fort McHenry, 12–14 September.

Postwar career

Gordon was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1815 for his activities in the American war. He was lucky after the cessation of hostilities against the USA and Napoleon to continue for a while in seagoing commands, as captain of the frigate Madagascar in 1815–1816 and then of the frigate Meander in the latter year. In 1819 he rejoined his old command, HMS Active, and was again her captain until 1821. After this he held no further seagoing command. He was appointed Superintendent of the Naval Hospital at Plymouth in 1828, and in 1832 moved on to become Superintendent of Chatham Dockyard. He attained the rank of Rear Admiral in 1837, and in 1840 became Lieutenant-Governor of the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich; he would remain associated with the running of that institution and the care of old seamen until his death. He became a Vice-Admiral in 1848 and full Admiral in 1853, in which year he succeeded to Sir Robert Stopford as Governor of the Greenwich Hospital. On 30 January 1868, aged 86, he attained the rank of Admiral of the Fleet. He died at Greenwich just under a year later and was buried in the Hospital grounds. An obituary in Macmillan’s Magazine hailed him as "The Last of Nelson’s Captains".

Posthumous reputation

By the time of his death Gordon was largely forgotten, and his only modern biography trades heavily on the thesis that his career was the principal model for that of C. S. Forester’s hero Horatio Hornblower. It is clear that Forester was familiar with the facts of Gordon’s life, and it may be significant that in his history of the War of 1812 he very nearly avoids mentioning Gordon at all while giving full details of most of the other officers involved. There are indeed many parallels between Gordon’s career and Hornblower’s, but many divergences also, and it remains likely that the exploits of Forester’s hero are an amalgam of those of several leading officers of the Napoleonic War period, notably including Thomas Cochrane (whose exploits were also used by Patrick O'Brian in his Aubrey–Maturin series).

References

• Bryan Perrett, The Real Hornblower: The Life and Times of Admiral Sir James Gordon, GCB (London, 1998) ISBN 1-55750-697-3