Henry Wolsey Bayfield
British Royal Navy officer and surveyor (1795-1885)
Admiral Henry Wolsey Bayfield (21 January 1795 – 10 February 1885) was a British naval officer and surveyor.
Early life and career
Bayfield was born in Kingston-upon-Hull, to John Wolsey Bayfield and Eliza Petit. His family was an ancient one, who at one time lived at Bayfield Hall in Norfolk. Henry was inspired by the naval victories of Admiral Lord Nelson, who died at the scene of his greatest victory, the Battle of Trafalgar, the year before Henry joined the Navy. While his education is unknown, he joined the Royal Navy on 6 January 1806 at the age of 10, as a volunteer on HMS Pompee. That same year, he was on the ship when it defeated a French privateer.
At Cádiz, Bayfield was transferred to HMS Queen, and shortly after to HMS Duchess of Bedford. In this particular ship, he was wounded in a battle with two Spanish ships near Gibraltar; for his good work in this episode, he was transferred as a first class volunteer to HMS Beagle, on 29 September 1806, on which over the next four years he was involved in a number of battles. He was rated midshipman in 1810, and saw Canada for the first time in the same year, at the age of 15.
In April 1811, Bayfield transferred to HMS Wanderer, and worked in many different places, including the coast of North America, the West Indies and Spain.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Henry Wolsey Bayfield” as british Royal Navy officer and surveyor (1795-1885). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3133164. VIAF identifies the subject as 54569385. The Library of Congress control number is n80137573. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1795, 1885, 1806 and 1810.
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This entry incorporates text from “Henry Wolsey Bayfield” 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.