Frederick Marryat

Captain Frederick Marryat (1792–1848) was born in Westminster, London, the son of a West India merchant and Member of Parliament, and entered the Royal Navy at fourteen in 1806, serving under the daring Lord Cochrane aboard the frigate Imperieuse in actions off the French and Spanish coasts before further service, during the War of 1812, off the North American coast; he retired in 1830 with the rank of captain, having repeatedly risked his own life to save men overboard. In 1817 he published his Code of Signals for the Merchant Service, a system of flag signalling that became a standard reference for British and American shipping for decades. He married Catherine Shairp in 1819, and the couple had eleven children, among them the novelist Florence Marryat. Turning to fiction in his late thirties, he drew on his own naval career for Frank Mildmay (1829), Peter Simple (1834) and the semi-autobiographical Mr Midshipman Easy (1836), and later wrote for children, including Masterman Ready (1841), conceived partly as a corrective to what he considered the unrealistic desert-island survivalism of The Swiss Family Robinson, and The Children of the New Forest (1847). His health failed after the loss of a son at sea in December 1847, and he died the following year at Langham, Norfolk.