Samuel James Ballard (1765-1829)

As a boy and a junior officer Ballard saw action in a number of major battles, yet lacking influence, his experience as a captain was limited, with only a couple of permanent appointments in command of a ship. Although personal glory eluded him, at least his career as a frigate captain was financially enriching.

He was born on 28 March 1765 at Portsmouth, the son of Samuel Ballard and his wife, Lydia Flint. His father had been a junior naval officer who had left the service in 1763 to become a Portsmouth businessman, eventually retiring to Surrey in 1784.

In December 1776 during the early days of the American Revolutionary War, Ballard entered the service at the age of 11. Initially he served under Captain Hon. John Leveson-Gower aboard the Valiant 74, as the ship formed part of the Grand Fleet and participated at the Battle of Ushant on 27 July 1778. He joined the Shrewsbury 74, Captain Mark Robinson, in October 1779, and thus was present at the Moonlight Battle off Cape St. Vincent on 16 January 1780.

The Battle of St. Kitts in 1782

In July 1780 the Shrewsbury arrived in the Leeward Islands, part of Commodore Hon. Robert Boyle Walsingham’s squadron sent to join Admiral Sir George Rodney’s fleet. She was present at the Battle of Fort Royal on 29 April 1781 and led the line at the Battle of Chesapeake Bay on 5 September, during which engagement Captain Robinson lost a leg and was obliged to give up the command. The Shrewsbury, with replacement captain John Knight on the quarterdeck, returned to the West Indies with Rear-Admiral Sir Samuel Hood. At the Battle of St. Kitts on 25/26 January 1782, Ballard’s ship was in the centre division, as Rear-Admiral Hood masterfully slipped his fleet in between the French fleet and the shore and repelled several enemy attacks. After departing from St Kitts, the Shrewsbury was ordered to Jamaica for an overhaul, where Isaac Coffin took command. Here in February 1783, Rear-Admiral Joshua Rowley promoted the 17-year-old Ballard to the rank of lieutenant. He remained with the Shrewsbury until June, when he appears to have joined the Torbay 74, Captain Patrick Leslie. This ship came home from Jamaica to be paid off four months later.

Despite his lack of influence, Ballard was able to obtain a fair amount of employment in the ten years of the peace following the end of the American War of Independence. From September 1786 until June 1790 he served aboard the Astraea 32, Captain Peter Rainier, following Rainier to the Monarch 74, during the Spanish Armament in the latter part of 1790. A further undemanding post aboard the guardship Alfred 74 (Captains Thomas West and John Bazely) followed from October 1791 until February 1793. Once the French Revolutionary War commenced, Ballard obtained a commission aboard the flagship of Rear-Admiral Alan Gardner, the Queen 98, commanded by Captain John Hutt. He served as her first lieutenant at the Battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794, when the Queen sustained the second-most casualties of any British ship: 36 killed (including her captain) and 67 wounded.

On 5 July 1794 Ballard (aged 29) was promoted commander to recognise his services during the recent battle. He may have achieved a coveted promotion, but a command of his own was not immediately forthcoming. Instead, he was employed in a number of temporary postings, including as a volunteer aboard the Queen (there was no official post aboard for a commander), and as a regulating-captain on the Sussex coast, supervising the impressment of seamen. In December he briefly assumed the temporary command of the fireship Megaera in the Channel Fleet for Commander Hon. Henry Blackwood. In yet another short-term appointment he commanded the Tremendous 74 from April until June 1795, when her permanent captain, John Aylmer took over. Reward for undertaking these interim posts finally came when on 10 August 1795 he was posted captain, serving briefly on the Irresistible 74 until the early autumn.

On 20 February 1796 he finally received a permanent command of his own when he was ordered to recommission the 34-year-old twelve-pounder frigate, Pearl 32. Despite her age and relatively small size, the Pearl was a fast and seaworthy vessel, and must have pleased her new captain. However, his command began inauspiciously. Departing for Quebec with a convoy at the end of April, Pearl was forced to part company soon after sailing, allowing at least six of the ships under her charge to be captured by a French privateer brig. When the Pearl returned from Quebec in mid-October with the sickly lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, Major-General John Graves Simcoe, her convoy lost seven of its eleven ships to two French frigates from Rear-Admiral Joseph De Richery’s squadron off the Straits of Belleisle. Her next assignments were more uneventfiul: a convoy north to the Baltic; another convoy returning from Elsinore in Denmark in early January 1797; and escort duty between the Downs and Portsmouth.

On 16 April 1797, in company with the Flora 36, Captain Robert Middleton, the Pearl captured the Bordeaux privateer Incroyable 24 after a long chase in the Bay of Biscay. This was a very large privateer, and despite having to share the prize money with the crew of the Flora, her sale must have provided Ballard with a tidy sum. The crew of the Pearl took part in the mutiny at Spithead in May, but they seem to have been relatively happy with their officers, since only two (the surgeon and boatswain) were unpopular enough to be sent on shore. Once the men returned to duty, she was one of the first ships to leave the fleet and drop down to St. Helens. The ship spent the greater part of the remainder of the year as part of Commodore Sir Richard Strachan’s crack frigate squadron off the French coast.

HMS Pearl – in which Ballard had his most rewarding employment – depicted in an engagement with a Spanish frigate in 1779.

In March 1798 the Pearl sailed for West Africa, where on 24 April she discovered an armed brig underway and five ships at anchor in the Iles de Los off modern-day Guinea. Two of the vessels proved to be the French frigates Vertu 36 and Régénérée 40, returning home from the East Indies. Ballard was in a difficult position – his ship was less powerful than each of his two assailants, and there was no easy escape route. He ran the Pearl between the two enemy frigates, firing at each as he passed, and then took his ship through a shallow passage to the open sea. In the hour-long combat, the Pearl suffered damage both to the rigging and the hull, had two carronades dismounted, and lost one man to a fatal wound. The Régénérée made sail to pursue the Pearl, and hung on her stern for twenty-four hours before the French frigate lost contact.

Having spent a few months on patrol off West Africa the Pearl was ordered across the Atlantic to Barbados. Patrolling off Antigua, Ballard captured the privateers Scevola 10 in October, and Independence 12 in December. The Pearl eventually returned home in June 1799, escorting a large convoy of 170 ships in company with the Vengeance 74, Captain Thomas Macnamara Russell.

In October 1799 the Pearl sailed from Portsmouth for Minorca with General Henry Fox, the newly appointed lieutenant-governor for the recently captured island. On arrival in December, she was sent to join Rear-Admiral Lord Nelson’s squadron at Palermo in Sicily. After capturing a couple of brigs in January 1800, she drove a 14-gun Genoese polacre ashore off Narbonne early in February, although the vessel’s crew were able to get safely to land. At this point Genoa was occupied by the French, and her merchant ships were fair game for British cruisers. This was the start of a long run of captures of French, Spanish and Genoese merchant vessels off the Mediterranean coast of France. Between January 1800 and April 1801, Ballard and the Pearls (sometimes cooperating with other warships) took, burned or sank about fifty vessels, making the frigate one of the most successful cruisers in the Mediterrranean. The proceeds from these successes filtered down to her crew — a petty officer of the Pearl is recorded as having received 90 guineas in prize money and wages, though he was unfortunately robbed of his money on the same day he received it.

In early 1801, the Pearl was one of more than 60 warships escorting Vice-Admiral Lord Keith’s armada of troopships to Alexandria to begin the invasion and conquest of Egypt. In April the Pearl was despatched to warn Admiral Lord Keith off Egypt that Rear-Admiral Honoré Ganteaume was at large with seven sail of the line, having left Brest on 7 January, however another frigate reached the commander-in-chief before her. The Pearl was in sight off Elba in August when the Pomone 40, Captain Edward Leveson-Gower, took the French frigate Carrère, 40. Even though she did not fire her guns, her crew would have shared in the prize money from this capture. Giving passage to Captain Sir Thomas Williams of the Vanguard 74, she returned to Portsmouth where she was put into quarantine (plague being endemic in some Mediterranean ports) on 3 December. The Pearl was paid off a few weeks later.

War resumed in 1803 — Ballard spent the next six years in a less demanding role commanding the Essex Sea Fencibles, a volunteer anti-invasion naval militia. He returned to service afloat when he joined the Sceptre 74 in October 1809 after her previous captain, Joseph Bingham, had been invalided ashore with Walcheren Fever. On 8 November he sailed in his new command (with the Alfred 74, Captain Joshua Rowley Watson) for Barbados to join the Leeward Islands squadron under Vice-Alexander Sir Alexander Cochrane. Appointed commodore by Cochrane, Ballard took command of a squadron off Guadeloupe. His force (the Sceptre, five frigates and three sloops) destroyed the French frigates Loire 40 and Seine 40, both armed en-flute, and the shore battery protecting them on 18 December. During the first two months of 1810 he directed some of the landings and commanded a brigade of naval artillery at the reduction of Guadeloupe, prior to the island’s surrender on 6 February. As the senior officer, Commodore Ballard represented the Navy during discussions on the terms of the French capitulation. In the course of these duties he spent two months spent ashore, during which the newly promoted Captain Edward Dix acted in his place aboard the Sceptre. Ballard had resumed his command when the ship returned to England with a merchant convoy from St. Thomas, arriving at Portsmouth in late September. After delivering the convoy, the ship moved to Plymouth for a thorough repair, completed in mid-December.

Towards the end of December 1810 Captain Ballard (the post of commodore was only temporary) and the Sceptre joined the Channel Fleet. For the next six months she blockaded Brest, occasionally returning to the fleet’s base at Plymouth to revictual, or when blown off station, as she was in April 1811. For reasons that are not clear (perhaps ill-health) for the next year several acting captains substituted for Ballard: Captain Edward Dix, Captain Sir Edward Berry (in September 1811), and from January 1812 Captain Thomas Harvey. Ballard was evidently in command when the boats of the Sceptre captured a French merchant sloop and five chasse marées (small trading vessels) on the coast of France in September 1811 . In 1812 when the Sceptre was involved in the blockade of Brest, Ballard refused a shore appointment to superintend the paying of the crews of ships at Spithead, on the basis that ‘he did not choose to be superseded at sea, while blockading an enemy’. Some months later Ballard returned to Portsmouth, gave up the Sceptre, and apparently did not see any further service.

He was promoted rear-admiral on 4 June 1814, in the general promotion following the defeat of the French; on 27 May 1825 was promoted vice-admiral. Received at Court by the new King George IV in May 1820, he spent much of his retirement in Bath, where he owned a house at 29 Park Street. His other residence, Coates Hall in Yorkshire, was inherited from his wife’s family.

Vice-Admiral Samuel James Ballard died at Exmouth, Devon on 11 October 1829, aged 64. Captain Edward Dix, a close friend who had temporarily replaced Captain Ballard several times, was a beneficiary of his will.

In 1797 Ballard married a first cousin, Maria Flint of Faversham, Kent, who died aged 48 in November 1821. They had eight children; two daughters and a son were living at the time of his death. His second marriage was to a widow, Catherine Crawley, nee Boevey, of Flaxley Abbey, Gloucestershire, on 2 December 1822.