Rear-Admiral Sir Charles Brisbane, KCB (1770 – December 1829) was a Royal Navy officer and colonial administrator who served as the governor of Saint Vincent from 1808 to 1829. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, he took part in 1796 in the capitulation of Saldanha Bay, the capture of the Spanish frigate Pomona off Havana, Cuba in 1806, and then in 1807 was in command at capture of the island of Curaçao. He was made governor of St. Vincent in 1808, and served as such until his death in 1829.
Family and early life
Charles Brisbane was born in mid-1770 and baptised on 12 July at Deal in Kent, the fourth but eldest surviving son of Captain (later Admiral) John Brisbane and his wife Mary Young. He was entered on board , commanded by his father, in 1779. He was present at the action of 8 January 1780, and the relief of the Great Siege of Gibraltar in January 1780, and later served in the West Indies. At the end of 1781 he was placed on board with Captain Henry Savage, and was present at the Battle of the Saintes off Dominica, on 12 April 1782, where he was badly wounded by a splinter.
He continued serving during the peace, and after the Spanish armament in 1790 was promoted to the rank of lieutenant on 22 November. In 1793 he was aboard the frigate , in which he went out to the Mediterranean, and was employed on shore at Toulon during the occupation of the city, and afterwards in Corsica, both at the siege of Saint-Florent and at the siege of Bastia. Brisbane was under the immediate orders of Captain Horatio Nelson, and like him sustained the loss of an eye from a severe wound in the head inflicted by the small fragments of an iron shot. He then served for a short time in , bearing the flag of Admiral Lord Hood, by whom he was promoted to the command of the sloop on 1 July 1794, and served in her during the remainder of that and the following year in the squadron acting in the Gulf of Genoa, under the immediate orders of Nelson.
References
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