John Inglis (1743-1807)

Although born and bred in Philadelphia, North America, John Inglis was a proud Scot who remained loyal to Britain when the War of Independence broke out. In 1777 his American background gained him an unexpected promotion to master and commander. During his later career he spent six months marooned in Norway, and he was wounded at the Battle of Camperdown before retiring from active service after falling out with the Admiralty.

Inglis was born on 20 March 1743 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, John Inglis, was a merchant who had relocated to America from Scotland, and his mother was Catherine M’Call.

At Philadelphia in May 1757 Inglis entered the Navy aboard the Garland 20, Captain Marriot Arbuthnot, and he served briefly on the North American coast before leaving her in July. Taking passage across the Atlantic, in August 1758 he joined the Hussar 28, seeing service in the North Sea and Bay of Biscay, and being present at the sinking of the French Alcion 50 in November. The captain of the Hussar was his aunt’s brother-in-law, John Elliot, an officer who would guide much of his early career.

Inglis was present at the brilliant defeat of Commodore Thurot’s squadron off Carrickfergus in February 1760.

On 1 January 1759 he removed with Elliot and the crew of the Hussar to the frigate Aeolus 32, seeing much active service off the French coast. He was present when Elliot led three ships against Commodore François Thurot’s squadron of three frigates and two corvettes that were landing troops at Carrickfergus on 28 February 1760. Elliot’s force captured the Maréchal de Belleisle 44, Blonde 36, and Terpsichore 24.

In May 1761 Inglis removed with Captain Elliot to the Chichester 70, and after being present at the capture of Belleisle, he was commissioned lieutenant on 22 October, being 18 years old at the time. He remained with the Chichester when she sailed for the Mediterranean in November and continued with her until February 1763, when he took passage home from Gibraltar.

Throughout the first few years of the peace following the end of the Seven Years War, Inglis took leave of absence from the Navy, and he spent time back in Philadelphia where he reportedly found employment in the merchant marine. Returning to duty, he was appointed on 13 July 1768 to the newly acquired revenue cutter Sultana 8, reputed to be the smallest vessel in the Navy. Commissioning her at Deptford and proceeding down the Thames to the Downs on 20 August, she sailed for North America a week later and reached Halifax towards the end of October. For the next six months she patrolled off Rhode Island, attempting to ensure the locals adhered to customs rules; by July 1769 she was at Inglis’s home city of Philadelphia. following a refit at Halifax she was engaged patrolling the coast from the Chesapeake to the Delaware.

Whilst anchored near Mount Vernon, Virginia on 29 July 1770, Inglis and his sailing master dined at the home of George Washington. The Sultana wintered that year at Rhode Island, where the locals were becoming increasingly discontented with the Navy’s suppression of their smuggling activities. She continued to patrol off the American coast in 1771, conveniently spending the winter at Philadelphia while the Delaware River was frozen. She spent the rest of the summer on patrol before sailing for Boston in September where it was decided that she should return to England for repair. Sailing on 13 October with Rear-Admiral John Montagu’s dispatches, she endured a rough passage which on one occasion saw her thrown onto her beam ends, and she eventually reached Spithead on 21 November to be paid off two weeks later.

Going on half-pay, Inglis visited his extended family in Scotland before setting off across the Atlantic to take up a position in the merchant marine at Philadelphia during the autumn of 1773. Sailing between London, the West Indies, and Philadelphia, by October he was back in his home town where he found that one of his brothers had become an increasingly influential figure in the growing movement for independence. During the early part of 1776 he returned to Scotland, where he was to marry a year later.

On 29 April 1777 Inglis was appointed to the Trident 64, Captain Elliot, as her fourth lieutenant, seeing service in the Bay of Biscay and home waters. During April of the following year, this ship was assigned to carry the peace commissioners under the Earl of Carlisle to North America to negotiate with the Continental Congress. When Elliot was given the title of commodore to enhance the prestige of the commissioners, he took the opportunity to obtain a promotion for his follower, John Inglis. Since the Trident now needed a captain, Elliot had Lieutenant Inglis promoted to master and commander (as of 11 April), taking temporary command of the ship over the heads of the more senior lieutenants aboard. Captain Elliot rationalised the unprecedented move on the basis that the Americans would appreciate having a native of Philadelphia commanding a vessel on the North American station. Thus on arriving in America Inglis exchanged vessels with Captain Anthony Molloy of the sloop Senegal 14, gaining a local command suitable to his new rank. Given that he had been a lowly lieutenant for 16 years, the promotion was one that Inglis surely could never have expected. There is no evidence that the Americans were favourably influenced by having a Royal Navy officer born in their country in the vicinity.

His first command proved to be a short one indeed, for after being dispatched to the south of New York to look out for Vice-Admiral Hon. John Byron’s incoming fleet, the Senegal was captured by the Toulon Fleet on 14 August during the Rhode Island campaign. Taken to Boston by the French and exchanged, Inglis returned to New York where a court martial on 3 November aboard the Monmouth 64 under the presidency of Captain Thomas Collingwood acquitted him of any blame for the sloop’s loss.

After briefly returning to Scotland, Inglis was appointed to the sloop Delight 14 on 22 May 1779, joining her at Spithead six days later and sailing for North America in July from Cork with a convoy of fifty vessels under the command of Captain Andrew Snape Hamond of the Roebuck 44. Arriving at New York towards the end of September, she patrolled off the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, sharing in a number of prizes before being sent in November to Jamaica with dispatches for Vice-Admiral Sir Peter Parker. Over the winter she remained at Port Royal, and at the end of January 1780 she put to sea with the fleet and a convoy from which she detached on 9 February for New York. En route she captured the American letter of marquee Industry on 18 February without the necessity of firing a shot. Now back in American waters, she took the New London privateer Vengeance 14 on 15 April and the Salem-based Macaroni 14, the following day, both vessels that had been operating off Sandy Hook, New York.

During the autumn of 1780 the Delight was attached to a naval force led by Captain George Gayton of the Romulus 44 supporting a diversionary attack in Virginia. During the landings near Norfolk in November the Delight was damaged when she grounded. Shortly afterwards, Inglis went ashore to negotiate the release of his longboat crew after they had been captured by American troops. In January 1781 he served under Captain Andrew Barkley of the Blonde 32 in an expedition from Charleston to clear the Americans from the Cape Fear River, remaining as the senior officer in support of the Army at Wilmington throughout the spring. On one occasion he was fortunate to survive an ambush after two deserters informed the rebels at Brunswick that he was to come ashore but had mistakenly told them the wrong time.

At the beginning of May 1781, the Delight departed for England with Lieutenant-General Lord Cornwallis’ dispatches, and after evading three attempts to capture her, she reached Spithead on 4 June. After delivering a convoy to the Downs and docking at Sheerness she took another convoy around to Spithead in mid-July. Inglis left the Delight in late August, a fortunate move, since shortly afterwards under another captain she foundered in the North Atlantic with all hands.

Aged 38, Inglis was at last posted captain on 23 August 1781, and he joined his new command, the Squirrel 20 in the Downs. For the next year she was engaged in convoy duty in home waters, with the only break being in October when she carried urgent instructions for Vice-Admiral George Darby in command of the Channel Fleet. While escorting convoys, the Squirrel captured the Granville-based privateer brig Furet 4 on 15 February 1782 after a short chase, and the Brest privateer cutter Aimable Manon 8 on 21 June after a 16-hour pursuit off Land’s End. In early July she arrived at Sheerness and shortly afterwards she was paid off.

Inglis did not see any further employment during the remainder of the American Revolutionary War, nor was he able to obtain a command in the various naval armaments of the 1780s or at the start of the French Revolutionary War in 1793. Instead, he remained in Scotland where he raised a family and developed the estate which he had inherited in September 1785, Redhall near Edinburgh.

On 28 May 1795, after 13 years unemployment, Captain Inglis was appointed to commission the Coromandel 56 at the dock at Blackwall. This vessel, recently built as an East Indiaman, had been bought by the Navy and armed with 28 eighteen-pounders and an equal number of carronades. The Coromandel was intended to join the North Sea Fleet under Admiral Adam Duncan, but her initial cruise to the Texel could not have been more disastrous. When returning in heavy weather on 25 October, she lost all three masts taking the boatswain and seventeen prime topmen overboard in the wreckage. Eventually taken in tow by her consort, the Nassau 64, Captain Herbert Sawyer, she made the neutral port of Egersund on the southwest coast of Norway where eleven men promptly deserted. (They may well have thought they were saving their lives by leaving such an unseaworthy vessel.) After installing a jury rig, the Coromandel put to sea again on 14 November but briefly ran aground on leaving the harbour, and then rolled all three temporary topmasts overboard. She eventually reached sanctuary in the Flekkerøya Islands on the southern tip of Norway and remained there for the next six months waiting for replacement masts, until the Isis 50, Captain Robert Watson, arrived to take her in tow. The Coromandel arrived at the Nore in mid-May 1796, where because of the amount of necessary repair work, she was decommissioned as a warship and handed over to the Transport Board.

The highlight of Inglis’ career was the Battle of Camperdown in 1797 where disdaining the admiral’s signals he resolved to go straight into the fight

Over the next few weeks the captain and the entire crew of the Coromandel transferred to the Belliqueux 64 at Chatham for service in the North Sea Fleet. Inglis’ new command arrived at the Nore in July, and in early August she joined the fleet off the Texel. She remained on this harsh blockade service through to the following year, only occasionally returning to Yarmouth. On 28 December she was in the port when a merchantman was driven from her anchorage in violent winds, but by sending a boat across with his most skilled seamen, Inglis managed to get a hawser aboard the stranded ship and tow her to safety.

When the Mutiny in the North Sea Fleet broke out on 27 May 1797, the Belliqueux’s men joined the insurrection reluctantly, but eventually sailed to join the other mutinous ships at the Nore. Although his ship was one of the last vessels to return to duty, Inglis was resolute in defending his men from the Admiralty’s wish to bring the chief mutineers to account, and despite several demands he only nominated two men for prosecution. In the end, they were not court-martialled but pardoned and transferred to other vessels.

Following his crew’s return to duty, Inglis commanded the Belliqueux at the Battle of Camperdown on 11 October 1797. One account says that just before the battle, he became so frustrated with the blizzard of flag signals from the commander-in-chief’s ship, that he threw down his signal book, bellowing (in broad Scots) ‘Damn…Up wi’ the hel-lem and gang into the middle o’ it.’. This anecdote (probably apocryphal) suggests Inglis’ fiery personality. That apart, the Belliqueux’s part in the battle has largely been undocumented, but a letter to The Times from one of her officers claimed that she was late into the action due to her poor sailing qualities. When she did reach the enemy line, she found herself in a close action between two enemy ships, one of which dropped away after about an hour and a half, only for another (flying a rear-admiral’s flag) to take her place. After another hour the second of her enemies struck her flag and dropped away, and the rear-admiral’s flagship was silenced before it drifted ahead out of range. By now the Belliqueux had become unmanageable, and at the end of the battle her casualties of twenty-five men killed and seventy-eight wounded were the second highest in the fleet. Inglis was one of those wounded, receiving splinter wounds that briefly saw him hospitalised in Norwich before he was released in early November to continue his convalescence at home in Scotland. In his absence, Captain Henry Inman held the acting command of the Belliqueux.

Inglis recuperated in Scotland, and by February 1798 was well enough to join Admiral Duncan in a parade through Edinburgh celebrating the Camperdown victory. He rejoined the Belliqueux on 21 April at the Nore. A week later a pilot ran his ship aground in the Swin Channel, and at the resultant court-martial the man was sentenced to the Marshalsea Prison for four months and prohibited from ever again serving as pilot for a King’s ship. Rejoining the North Sea fleet off the Texel, the Belliqueux briefly flew Duncan’s flag in July.

The poor behaviour of the crew continued to be a major issue and was indirectly the reason that Inglis active service came to an unsatisfactory end. A dispute arose between Captain Inglis and his first lieutenant, John Richardson, over the court-martial of a seaman who had allegedly cut the breeching ropes on several cannons, thereby threatening the safety of the ship. With only one witness to the crime coming forward, Inglis was reluctant to pursue the case, but his first lieutenant insisted on doing so and received Admiralty authorisation to proceed. Once the court-martial had taken place and the perpetrator had been found guilty, Inglis attempted to bring Lieutenant Richardson himself to a court-martial for impertinence and disrespect. Not surprisingly, the Admiralty refused to allow this proceeding to go forward. Accordingly, Inglis requested permission to resign his command, which was granted – he was succeeded by Captain Rowley Bulteel on 10 March 1799. The episode reinforces the impression that he was a man with a fiery temper, reckless when crossed. His short temper was apparently exacerbated by his injuries at the Battle of Camperdown.

Inglis made several applications for further appointment but received little encouragement from the Admiralty. Instead, he turned his hand to farming and the improvement of his estate. In accordance with his seniority, he was promoted rear-admiral on 1 January 1801 and a vice-admiral on 9 November 1805.

Vice-Admiral John Inglis died at Edinburgh on 11 March 1807.

He married his cousin, Barbara Inglis, the co-heiress of Auchindinny and Langbyres on 21 January 1777. The couple had three sons and two daughters: his eldest son, John, became an attorney, and the second son, George Inglis, entered the navy, achieving the rank of lieutenant before falling foul of the Admiralty for his ‘persistently irregular behaviour’. The youngest son, Archibald, became a lieutenant-colonel in the Madras Army, and his eldest daughter, Jane, married Captain James Coutts Crawford.

After marrying, Inglis first lived at Auchindinny House near Penicuik in Midlothian before succeeding to the estate of Redhall near Edinburgh in September 1785. In 1802 he purchased a property in the exclusive George Square in Edinburgh.

• For much of the information in this biography I am indebted to Jim Tildesley, whose biography of Inglis titled ‘I am determined to live and die on my ship: The Life of Admiral John Inglis an American in the Georgian Navy’ was published on 28 May 2019, and is a must for anyone wishing to gain an insight into the day-to-day difficulties facing a King’s officer.