John Hatley
British naval officer
Captain John Hatley (c. 1762 – 12 December 1832) was an officer of the British Royal Navy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hatley is most noted for being one of the junior officers on board Captain James Cook's third voyage in HMS Resolution, aged approximately 14. He later went on to serve in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, receiving promotion after helping to thwart a mutiny in 1797 and later commanding frigates in several campaigns.
Military service
Hatley, born in c. 1762, joined the Royal Navy at a young age and in his first posting was attached to Captain James Cook's ship HMS Resolution. This vessel had secretly been ordered to search what is now the Alaskan Coast for the Northwest Passage. Leaving Britain in 1776, the ship reached Tahiti the following year and returned Omai, Captain Cook's translator and guide, to his home. From there, the vessel sailed north and visited the Hawaiian Islands, the Sandwich Islands and was the first European ship to visit and chart the coastline from California to Alaska. During 1778, Cook's behaviour became gradually more unpredictable, until in 1779 he returned to Hawaii to effect repairs on his ship prior to returning to Europe. There he was killed by Hawaiian warriors during a dispute over stolen goods. The survivors of the expedition finally returned to Britain in 1780.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Hatley” 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.