Admiral Sir Charles John Napier (6 March 1786Priscilla Napier (1995), who is not elsewhere free from error, gives the birth year as 1787 (p. 1, and book title), but provides no evidence. All other authorities agree on 1786. – 6 November 1860) was a British naval officer and politician who served for sixty years in the Royal Navy, seeing action in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, War of 1812, Syrian War and Crimean War. For a period he also commanded the Portuguese Navy during the Liberal Wars. An innovator concerned with the development of ironclads, and an advocate of human reforms in the Royal Navy, Napier was also active in politics as a Liberal Member of Parliament and was probably the naval officer most widely known to the public in the early Victorian era.

Military career French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Napier became a midshipman in 1799 aboard the 16-gun sloop , but left her in May 1800 before she was lost with all hands. He next served aboard , flagship of Sir John Borlase Warren.Priscilla Napier states (p. 3) he was made midshipman in 1800 and "entered on the books of" HMS Martin, but never actually served in her, because she was lost before he could join her; but Edward Elers Napier (p. 6) quotes a contemporary account showing he was made midshipman in 1799 and sailed in Martin from Leith Roads in November of that year. Martin disappeared, presumed lost with all hands, in October 1800, therefore 5 months after Napier left her for Renown. After this, in November 1802, he transferred to the frigate under Captain William Hoste. The following year, he moved to Égyptienne for a voyage to St Helena escorting a convoy of ships and then in the English Channel and off the coast of France. (In later years, feeling he had been badly treated as a midshipman by her captain, Charles Fleeming, Napier challenged that officer to a duel, though they were eventually reconciled by their seconds.)Edward Elers Napier, Life and Correspondence, Vol. I, p. 12. In 1804–5 he served briefly on Mediator before moving to off Boulogne. He was promoted lieutenant on 30 November 1805. He was appointed to , and was present in her in the West Indies at the action in which the squadron under Admiral Warren took the French Marengo (80 guns) and Belle Poule (40 guns), on 13 March 1806. After returning home with Warren, he returned to the West Indies in and having been promoted to commander on 30 November 1807, he was appointed acting commander of the brig of 16 guns, formerly the French privateer Austerlitz. In August 1808 he became captain of the brig-sloop (18 guns), and in her fought a hot action off Antigua with the French sloop Diligente (18 guns), in which his thigh was smashed by a cannonball.

In April 1809, Napier took part in the capture of the Caribbean island of Martinique, and subsequently distinguished himself in the pursuit of three escaping French ships of the line, handling the small Recruit so well that the British were able to capture the French flagship D'Hautpoul. As a result, he was promoted acting post captain and briefly given the command of the captured 74-gun ship-of-the-line.

His rank was confirmed on 22 May 1809, but he was put on half-pay, when he came home as temporary captain of the frigate escorting a convoy. While on half-pay he spent some time at the University of Edinburgh.

Napier, still on half-pay, then went to Portugal to visit his three cousins, (all colonels serving in Wellington's army, and one of whom was Charles James Napier, the future conqueror of Sindh). He took part in the Battle of Buçaco, during which he saved his cousin Charles's life and was himself wounded.

In 1811, he was appointed captain of the frigate (32 guns) and served in the Mediterranean Fleet under Sir Edward Pellew, disrupting enemy shipping. Among his principal exploits was the 1813 capture of the island of Ponza, which was a possible haven for corsairs.From this exploit he took the pseudonym of "Charles, Conte di Ponza" (Charles, Count of Ponza) when he commanded a Portuguese naval squadron during the Liberal Wars. In 1813 he moved to command the frigate (36 guns), operating mainly off the French and Spanish Mediterranean coast.

War of 1812 and Hundred Days

After the surrender of Napoleon and his first period of exile in 1814, Napier and his ship were transferred to the coast of North America, where the War of 1812 with the United States was still in progress, now commanded by Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane. In the Chesapeake Bay campaign, he took part in the August expedition up the Potomac River to Alexandria (southeast of the American national capital), Arriving several days after the Burning of Washington and the Battle of Bladensburg under Maj. Gen. Robert Ross and Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn, he was second in command to Captain James Alexander Gordon. The British squadron took 10 days to travel upriver, with many strandings and damage from a tornado/thunderstorm (after the Washington fires), but on 28 August 1814 before attempting a bombardment, they captured Fort Washington on the north shoreline which was blown up by the Americans prior to the attack. The town of Alexandria capitulated with a ransom paid and the shipping there was seized. The squadron successfully withdrew downriver with their prizes despite frequent harassing American attacks from the shores downstream. During the withdrawal, Napier was wounded in the neck.

He next distinguished himself in the following attack on Baltimore, Maryland, by a British Army accompanied by 16 warships, 12–14 September 1814, under Admirals Cochrane, and Cockburn. HMS Euryalus was involved in the bombardment of Fort McHenry, protecting the city on the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River that began early in the morning of the 13th. At. the same time, earlier on the 12th, Gen. Ross had been put ashore to the southeast at North Point with his regiments to attack the town from the east. He was shot in a brief skirmish just before his troops met the City Brigade regiments of the Maryland Militia under Brig. Gen. John Stricker at the Battle of North Point that afternoon. After pausing for the night to tend to the substantial wounded and now under the command of Col. Arthur Brooke, the regiments waited outside the substantial American dug-in fortifications with opposing approx. 20,000 troops and 100 artillery at old Loudenschlager's Hill in present-day Hampstead Hill in western Patterson Park until the naval forces were able to subdue the fort and move upriver to attack the eastern land redoubts. The critical period of the attack developed shortly after midnight when a picked British force in longboats armed with scaling ladders under Napier's command penetrated the Middle or Ferry Branch of the river along the southern opposite shore, today's Brooklyn and Fairfield areas of southern Baltimore and Anne Arundel County to the west of the fort with the intention of storming it from the rear flank. Before they could land, however, they were detected and subjected to a withering fire from the still active guns of Fort McHenry and two smaller forts to the west, batteries Covington and Babcock. The British fought back strongly with cannon and rockets, but Napier's force eventually retreated to the warships with substantial casualties, and Cochrane's fleet later withdrew on the morning of the 14th.

Euryalus proceeded to Halifax, Nova Scotia for refitting and then took part in the ongoing blockade of the eastern seaboard of the U.S.A.. Bored by such duties, Napier issued a challenge to the American frigate , which had been lying in on the Elizabeth River harbor near the U.S. Naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, (since making her only war cruise during the first year of the War) to come out and fight a single-ship duel. The challenge was accepted and due arrangements were made 'in the most gentlemanly fashion',Diplomacy and Duels on the High Seas Littleton Waller Tazewell and the Challenge of HMS Euryalus By Stuart Butler but Euryalus was made part of the squadron that Admiral Cochrane took to Florida and Louisiana in December 1814 in the operations that climaxed in the Battle of New Orleans on 8 January 1815, and before she could return to fulfil her engagement with Constellation news of the peace treaty of Ghent reached the USA.

With Napoleon's escape from Elba and brief return to power, the Hundred Days, Euryalus returned to Britain. Napier's last mission of the Napoleonic wars was to land troops at the mouth of the River Scheldt to guard against the French advance into Belgium.

Personal life At the end of the war Napier was made a Companion of the Bath (4 June 1815). He married Frances Elizabeth Elers, née Younghusband, generally referred to as Eliza, whom he had known and loved in Edinburgh while still a teenager. In the meantime Eliza had married a Lieutenant Edward Elers and been widowed. She had four children whom Napier adopted as his own. Of these the second son, Charles Elers Napier, became a naval officer. The eldest, Edward Elers Napier, entered the army, rising to the rank of major-general: he also wrote books of travel and reminiscence, as well as the authoritative biography of his stepfather. Frances also gave Napier two children of his own, a son born in Rome and a daughter born by Lake Geneva. The son, Charles, died as a result of an accident aged five. The first years of his leisure Napier spent in Italy, Switzerland (where he briefly took up farming), and in Paris. He had inherited considerable wealth from his mother's side of the family and spent it freely.

Steam and iron During these years Napier began a voluminous and indefatigable correspondence with the Admiralty on the urgency for naval reform, which lasted for the rest of his career. He sought to persuade successive civil administrations of the need for innovative ship-design and tactics, the development of steam ships and the use of iron in ship construction, the proper training of officers, and decent living conditions for ordinary seamen. He held that the use of the press gang and of flogging should be abolished, and that seamen should receive proper wages and pensions. In all this he was far ahead of his time. His advocacy had little effect: on the contrary, successive administrators considered him an eccentric nuisance. He had been interested in steam navigation since its beginnings, and began investing his considerable resources in a steam vessel service that would ply along the River Seine. In 1821 he financed and participated in the construction of one of the first iron-hulled vessels ever built, and the first designed to venture into open water. The Aaron Manby was named after the master of the Horseley Ironworks, Tipton, Staffordshire, where she was pre-fabricated to a design formulated by Napier, Manby and Manby's son Charles and then assembled at Rotherhithe on the Thames. After trials in May 1822, the Aaron Manby crossed the English Channel to Le Havre under Napier's command on 10 June 1822, and proceeded up the Seine to Paris, where she caused a great stir and where she was based for the next decade. This has been claimed as the first passage from France to Britain by steam ship, which it was not: but it was the first direct passage from London to Paris by steam ship and the first seagoing voyage by an iron ship anywhere. Napier's company built five similar steamships but in 1827 he went bankrupt, leaving the family in severe financial difficulty. (Sold off, the ships gave 30 years further service.)

Portugal

At the beginning of 1829, he was appointed to command the 42-gun frigate . The Admiralty gave him permission to fit her with paddles of his own design, worked by winches on the main deck. He carried out trials that proved that ships could travel independently of the wind. The Admiralty, however, did not adopt this innovation.