“while on service with the army,” under Lord William Bentinck[1].
WILLIAM GEORGE CARLILE KENT, Esq.
[Commander.]
Second son of the late John Kent, Esq. Steward of the Royal Naval Hospital at Plymouth, who was appointed to that situation by Earl St. Vincent, in 1803; at which period he had served as a purser in the navy upwards of twenty years. Some genealogical particulars of his family will be given in our memoir of his eldest son. Commander Bartholomew Kent.
The subject of the present sketch is a native of Lanarkshire, N.B., and was born about the year 1788. He commenced his naval career in July, 1798, as midshipman on board le Tigre 80, commanded by Sir W. Sidney Smith, with whom we find him successively proceeding to Constantinople, the coast of Egypt, and St. Jean d’Acre. During the memorable siege of that Syrian fortress, by the French army under Napoleon Buonaparte, he appears, although so very young, to have been employed on shore; and we are told that he was with Captain Wilmot, of the Alliance 20, when that gallant officer was shot by a rifleman, whilst mounting a howitzer on the north-east angle of the town wall, April 8th, 1799[2].
In March, 1800, after having witnessed a variety of important operations on the Egyptian coast, Mr. W. G. C. Kent was removed to the Theseus 74, Captain John Stiles, under whom he served at the blockade of Genoa, and returned home in the month of November following. He then joined the Atlas 98, Captain (afterwards Admiral) Theophilus Jones, in which ship, attached to the Channel fleet, he continued until Jan. 1802. He shortly afterwards sailed for the East Indies and New South Wales, in the Buffalo store-ship, commanded by his uncle. Captain William Kent; and if we mistake not, he received an order from Governor
