Post Captain
Promoted post-captain on 14 April 1802, he appears to have been placed on half pay. He married Emily Ives Drake, sister of Lady Boston (and hence his sister-in-law), on 1 December 1803. He was appointed in command of a unit of the Sea Fencibles in the Essex District in 1805, and on 7 August 1807 his wife died giving birth to a son. He returned to sea to command HMS Amelia in December 1807, serving under Rear Admiral Stopford on the Home Station. On 24 February 1809 he took part in the Battle of Les Sables-d'Olonne, which drove three large French frigates aground and destroyed them, gaining the special approval of the Admiralty. In 1811, in company with HMS Berwick and HMS Niobe, he destroyed the French frigate Amazone near Barfleur. He became the senior officer on the West Africa Squadron in later the same year, and this ended in 1813 with the battle between Amelia and the French frigate Aréthuse. Captain Irby was seriously wounded and after 1813 he saw no further active service.
Read more about this topic: Frederick Paul Irby
Famous quotes containing the words post and/or captain:
“A demanding stranger arrived one morning in a small town and asked a boy on the sidewalk of the main street, “Boy, where’s the post office?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then, where might the drugstore be?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about a good cheap hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say, boy, you don’t know much, do you?”
“No, sir, I sure don’t. But I ain’t lost.””
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“So universal and widely related is any transcendent moral greatness, and so nearly identical with greatness everywhere and in every age,—as a pyramid contracts the nearer you approach its apex,—that, when I look over my commonplace-book of poetry, I find that the best of it is oftenest applicable, in part or wholly, to the case of Captain Brown.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)