William Alexander Mouat
English Mariner (1821-1871)

William Alexander Mouat (9 April 1821 – 11 April 1871) was a British seafarer. Born in London, he spent much of his career with the Hudson's Bay Company in British Columbia on the west coast of Canada. He became master of several merchant ships including the Otter and the Labouchere. His last posting was at Fort Rupert where he died in a canoe accident. He was married to Mary Ann Ainsley and they had eight children.
Early life
William Alexander Mouat was baptised on 1 July 1821 in Eastcheap, in the City of London. He was born into a seafaring family. His father William Mouat – born 1774 in Kirkwall, Orkney – was a master mariner and later a coal merchant and a coal meter in the City of London. William Alexander's mother was Elizabeth Ingles born 1796 in East London. He had two older siblings: Elizabeth Ann Mouat who married John Edward Foster, a master mariner, and John Ingles Mouat who, according to a statement by his great nephew, drowned at sea off the coast of Madagascar.
“William Alexander Mouat” enters the record as english Mariner (1821-1871). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what William, Alexander and Mouat can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Alexander Mouat” 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.