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George Johnstone (royal Navy)
George Johnstone (1730 – 24 May 1787) was a Royal Navy officer who saw service during the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence, rising to the rank of post-captain and serving for a time as commodore of a British naval squadron. In a multifaceted career he was also a member of parliament, a director of the East India Company, a member of the Carlisle Peace Commission and the first Governor of West Florida from 1763 until 1767. Johnstone was born into a gentry family in 1730, and embarked on a naval career. Early in his service there occurred several incidents which revealed both positive and negative aspects of his character. He was involved in encounters with the enemy where he was praised for his bravery, and incidents where he was censured for disobedience. He rose through the ranks to his own commands and had some success with small cruisers against enemy merchants and privateers. After the end of the Seven Years' War he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Governor Of La Florida
The colonial governors of Florida governed Florida during its colonial period (before 1821). The first European known to arrive there was Juan Ponce de León in 1513, but the governorship did not begin until 1565, when Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine and was declared Governor and ''Adelantado'' of Florida.Cahoon, BenU.S. States F-K/ref> This district was subordinated to the Viceroyalty of New Spain. In 1763, following the transfer of Florida to Britain, the territory was divided into West Florida and East Florida, with separate governors. This division was maintained when Spain resumed control of Florida in 1783, and continued as provincial divisions with the Spanish Constitution of 1812. The Spanish transferred control of Florida to the United States in 1821, and the organized, incorporated Florida Territory was established on March 30, 1822. This became the modern State of Florida on March 3, 1845. First Spanish period, 1565–1763 British period, 1763–178 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sir James Johnstone, 4th Baronet
Sir James Johnstone, 4th Baronet (23 January 1726 – 3 September 1794)) was a Scottish officer in the British Army and then a politician. He sat in the House of Commons of Great Britain for all but one of the years 1784 to 1794. Sir James was the son of Sir James Johnstone, 3rd Baronet and his wife Barabara, daughter of Alexander Murray, 4th Lord Elibank. In about 1759 he married Louisa Maria Elizabeth Colclough, the widow of Rev. John Meyrick, vicar of Edwinstowe, East Retford, Nottinghamshire. They had no children. He joined the marines in 1748 as a Second Lieutenant, and rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in 1772. Johnstone first tried to enter Parliament at the 1774 general election, when he began canvassing Dumfries Burghs, where the interest of the 3rd Duke of Queensberry was dominant. However, he made little progress and withdrew in favour of Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch, who was also unsuccessful. Queensberry's candidate William Douglas took the seat. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Privateer
A privateer is a private person or ship that engages in maritime warfare under a commission of war. Since robbery under arms was a common aspect of seaborne trade, until the early 19th century all merchant ships carried arms. A sovereign or delegated authority issued commissions, also referred to as a letter of marque, during wartime. The commission empowered the holder to carry on all forms of hostility permissible at sea by the usages of war. This included attacking foreign vessels and taking them as prizes, and taking prize crews as prisoners for exchange. Captured ships were subject to condemnation and sale under prize law, with the proceeds divided by percentage between the privateer's sponsors, shipowners, captains and crew. A percentage share usually went to the issuer of the commission (i.e. the sovereign). Privateering allowed sovereigns to raise revenue for war by mobilizing privately owned armed ships and sailors to supplement state power. For participants, privateeri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gentry
Gentry (from Old French ''genterie'', from ''gentil'', "high-born, noble") are "well-born, genteel and well-bred people" of high social class, especially in the past. Word similar to gentle imple and decentfamilies ''Gentry'', in its widest connotation, refers to people of good social position connected to landed estates (see manorialism), upper levels of the clergy, and "gentle" families of long descent who in some cases never obtained the official right to bear a coat of arms. The gentry largely consisted of landowners who could live entirely from rental income, or at least had a country estate; some were gentleman farmers. In the United Kingdom, the term ''gentry'' refers to the landed gentry: the majority of the land-owning social class who typically had a coat of arms, but did not have a peerage. The adjective " patrician" ("of or like a person of high social rank") describes in comparison other analogous traditional social elite strata based in cities, such as f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
West Florida
West Florida ( es, Florida Occidental) was a region on the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico that underwent several boundary and sovereignty changes during its history. As its name suggests, it was formed out of the western part of former Spanish Florida (East Florida formed the eastern part, with the Apalachicola River as the border), along with lands taken from French Louisiana; Pensacola became West Florida's capital. The colony included about two thirds of what is now the Florida Panhandle, as well as parts of the modern U.S. states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Great Britain established West and East Florida in 1763 out of land acquired from France and Spain after the Seven Years' War. As the newly acquired territory was too large to govern from one administrative center, the British divided it into two new colonies separated by the Apalachicola River. British West Florida included the part of formerly Spanish Florida which lay west of the Apalachicola, as w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carlisle Peace Commission
The Carlisle Peace Commission was a group of British peace commissioners who were sent to North America in 1778 to negotiate terms with the rebellious Continental Congress during the American Revolutionary War. The commission carried an offer of self-rule, including parliamentary representation within the British Empire. The Second Continental Congress, aware that British troops were about to be withdrawn from Philadelphia, insisted on demanding full independence, which the commission was not authorised to grant. The Peace Commission marked the first time that the British government formally agreed to negotiate with Congress. A previous informal attempt at negotiation, now known as the Staten Island Peace Conference, had taken place in 1776. Background The first attempt at negotiation between Great Britain and the rebellious Thirteen Colonies after the outbreak in April 1775 of the American War of Independence took place in September 1776, when a committee from the Second Con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
East India Company
The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia), and later with East Asia. The company seized control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent, colonised parts of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world. The EIC had its own armed forces in the form of the company's three Presidency armies, totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British army at the time. The operations of the company had a profound effect on the global balance of trade, almost single-handedly reversing the trend of eastward drain of Western bullion, seen since Roman times. Originally chartered as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies", the company rose to account for half of the world's trad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
East India Company Directors
East or Orient is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from the fact that east is the direction where the Sun rises: ''east'' comes from Middle English ''est'', from Old English ''ēast'', which itself comes from the Proto-Germanic *''aus-to-'' or *''austra-'' "east, toward the sunrise", from Proto-Indo-European *aus- "to shine," or "dawn", cognate with Old High German ''*ōstar'' "to the east", Latin ''aurora'' 'dawn', and Greek ''ēōs'' 'dawn, east'. Examples of the same formation in other languages include Latin oriens 'east, sunrise' from orior 'to rise, to originate', Greek ανατολή anatolé 'east' from ἀνατέλλω 'to rise' and Hebrew מִזְרָח mizraḥ 'east' from זָרַח zaraḥ 'to rise, to shine'. ''Ēostre'', a Germanic goddess of dawn, might have been a personification ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Member Of Parliament
A member of parliament (MP) is the representative in parliament of the people who live in their electoral district. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, this term refers only to members of the lower house since upper house members often have a different title. The terms congressman/congresswoman or deputy are equivalent terms used in other jurisdictions. The term parliamentarian is also sometimes used for members of parliament, but this may also be used to refer to unelected government officials with specific roles in a parliament and other expert advisers on parliamentary procedure such as the Senate Parliamentarian in the United States. The term is also used to the characteristic of performing the duties of a member of a legislature, for example: "The two party leaders often disagreed on issues, but both were excellent parliamentarians and cooperated to get many good things done." Members of parliament typically form parliamentary groups, sometimes called cauc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Post-captain
Post-captain is an obsolete alternative form of the rank of captain in the Royal Navy. The term served to distinguish those who were captains by rank from: * Officers in command of a naval vessel, who were (and still are) addressed as captain regardless of rank; * Commanders, who received the title of captain as a courtesy, whether they currently had a command or not (e.g. the fictional Captain Jack Aubrey in '' Master and Commander'' or the fictional Captain Horatio Hornblower in ''Hornblower and the Hotspur''); this custom is now defunct. In the Royal Navy of the 18th and 19th centuries, an officer might be promoted from commander to captain, but not have a command. Until the officer obtained a command, he was "on the beach" and on half-pay. An officer "took post" or was "made post" when he was first commissioned to command a vessel. Usually this was a rated vessel – that is, a ship too important to be commanded by a mere commander – but was occasionally an unrated one. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against France. The modern Royal Navy traces its origins to the early 16th century; the oldest of the UK's armed services, it is consequently known as the Senior Service. From the middle decades of the 17th century, and through the 18th century, the Royal Navy vied with the Dutch Navy and later with the French Navy for maritime supremacy. From the mid 18th century, it was the world's most powerful navy until the Second World War. The Royal Navy played a key part in establishing and defending the British Empire, and four Imperial fortress colonies and a string of imperial bases and coaling stations secured the Royal Navy's ability to assert naval superiority globally. Owing to this historical prominence, it is common, even among non-Britons, to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sir John Johnstone, 6th Baronet
Sir John Lowther Johnstone, 6th Baronet (1783–1811) was a British army officer and politician. Life He was the son of George Johnstone, who died in 1787, and his wife Charlotte Dee. His mother married again, in 1790, to Charles Edmund Nugent. Johnstone was brought up in the expectation of inheriting from his paternal uncle, the wealthy Sir William Pulteney, 5th Baronet, a property developer who died in 1805, and who had changed his surname from Johnstone. He left one child, Laura Pulteney, 1st Countess of Bath, who died in 1808. In consequence of his uncle's death, Johnstone became 6th Baronet, and inherited a Scottish estate in Dumfriesshire. Johnstone had joined the Coldstream Guards in 1800, with rank of ensign, and fallen into bad company. Through the Duke of Cumberland he was given a staff position with General Richard Vyse, but continued to run up heavy debts and make unwise associations. In 1806 Johnstone left the army, aiming to enter politics. He was defeated for in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
