Byron, John

John Byron, (born Nov. 8, 1723—died April 10, 1786, England), British admiral, whose account (1768) of a shipwreck in South America was to some extent used by his grandson, the poet Lord Byron, in Don Juan.

The second son of the 4th Baron Byron, he was a midshipman on board the Wager in 1741 when it was wrecked off the coast of Chile during George Anson’s voyage round the world. After unparalleled hardships Byron eventually reached a Spanish prison and was repatriated in 1745. He was appointed to the command of the frigate Dolphin in 1764 and sent out to the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to discover the supposed southern continent, but he made only a fruitless circumnavigation lasting 22 months. Appointed governor of Newfoundland in 1769, he reached flag rank in 1775 and became vice admiral in 1778.

In 1779 he lived up to his nickname “Foul-weather Jack” when, in command of a fleet sent to relieve British forces in America, he encountered one of the worst Atlantic gales on record. It is to this that Lord Byron alludes in his “Epistle to Augusta”:

A strange doom is thy father’s son’s, and past

Recalling, as it lies beyond redress;

Reversed for him our grandsire’s fate of yore,

He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore.

As commander in chief of the West Indies, John Byron fought an inconclusive battle with the Count d’Estaing off Grenada in 1779.