Early Life and Military Career
Collins was born in London, the third child of Henrietta Fraser and Royal Marines officer Arthur Tooker Collins (A Compendium of Irish Biography (1878), states he was born in County Offaly, then King's County). His paternal grandfather was the historian Arthur Collins. David went to Exeter Grammar School before joining the Royal Marines as an Ensign at the age of 14. He was promoted second lieutenant on 20 February 1771. He was serving aboard HMS Southampton when Queen Matilda of Denmark was dramatically rescued.
Collins went to North America early in 1775, and fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, where the British suffered heavy casualties, but held the heights of Charlestown. He was promoted to first lieutenant the following week.
By November 1776, he was stationed at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he met and then married Mary (Maria Stuart) Proctor, the daughter of Captain Charles Proctor, on 13 June 1777.
Read more about this topic: David Collins (governor)
Famous quotes containing the words military career, early life, early, life, military and/or career:
“The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and organize.”
—Albert Gore, Jr. (b. 1948)
“There are books ... which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The schoolmaster is abroad! And I trust to him armed with his primer against the soldier in full military array.”
—Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)