William Gordon (Royal Navy officer, born 1784)
Scottish naval commander and Tory politician (1784-1858)

Vice-Admiral William Gordon (18 December 1784 – 3 February 1858) was a Scottish naval commander and Tory politician.
Naval career
Gordon was the second son of George Gordon, Lord Haddo, son of George Gordon, 3rd Earl of Aberdeen. His mother was Charlotte, daughter of William Baird, while Prime Minister George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, and Sir Robert Gordon were his brothers. He joined the Royal Navy in 1797 and went on to be Fourth Naval Lord from 1841 to 1846 and Commander-in-Chief, The Nore from 1854 to 1857.
He was elected at a by-election in September 1820 as the member of parliament (MP) for Aberdeenshire,
and held the seat until August 1854, when he resigned by taking the Chiltern Hundreds.
Gordon died in February 1858. Cape Gordon on Vega Island in the Antarctic is now named after him.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13529913. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1784, 1858, 1797 and 1841.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Gordon (Royal Navy officer, born 1784)” 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.