Sir Charles Knowles, 2nd Baronet
officer of the British Royal Navy (1754-1831)
Sir Charles Henry Knowles, 2nd Baronet, GCB (24 August 1754 – 28 November 1831) was an officer of the Royal Navy, who saw service during the American War of Independence, and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, eventually rising to the rank of Admiral. He was an extraordinary figure and a great tactical innovator. Highly intellectual, he authored a number of signal books and had the chance to put his ideas into practice during his naval career. Knowles was at times beset by problems with discipline aboard his ships, often due to large proportions of raw recruits and untrained seamen. This may have been a factor in his rocky relationship with his superior, Sir John Jervis, which eventually led to Knowles's retirement from active service after the Battle of Cape St Vincent, and his concentration on scholarly studies of the issues affecting the naval service.
Family and early life
Knowles was born at Kingston, Jamaica on 24 August 1754, the second son of the Governor of Jamaica Admiral Sir Charles Knowles and his wife Maria Magdalena Theresa de Bouget. He received his initial education at Eton College circa 1764–6, and then subsequently at Glasgow and Edinburgh. He joined in navy in 1768 as a midshipman aboard the 36-gun frigate HMS Venus, which was then serving in the English Channel under the command of Captain Samuel Barrington. He was then aboard the Spithead guard ship the 74-gun HMS Lenox under Captain Robert Roddam, before joining the 32-gun HMS Southampton under Captain John MacBride, where he served at Plymouth and in the Channel.
West Indies
Knowles was appointed as acting-lieutenant without pay aboard the sloop HMS Diligence by Sir George Brydges Rodney in 1773, and Knowles went on to serve in this capacity aboard HMS Princess Amelia, HMS Portland and HMS Guadeloupe under Captain William Cornwallis at Pensacola and from Jamaica.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sir Charles Knowles, 2nd Baronet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.