Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 27.djvu/269

 captured or destroyed, to the great advantage of the English trade; and for the closer blockade of Martinique, as well as for harassing the enemy's cruisers, the Diamond Rock was occupied, armed with five heavy guns, and commissioned as ‘a sloop of war’ (, iii. 245). Hood's services were acknowledged by complimentary addresses from the legislative assemblies of the islands, and the present of plate of the value of three hundred guineas; he was also nominated a K.B. Early in 1805 he returned to England, and continuing in the Centaur was sent off Rochefort in command of a squadron of six sail of the line. On 25 Sept. he fell in with a French squadron of five large frigates and two brigs bound for the West Indies with troops, and succeeded in capturing the four largest; the other, with the brigs, got away. In this skirmish the loss of the English was six killed and thirty-two wounded, including Hood, whose right elbow was smashed by a musket-shot, entailing the amputation of the arm; he was afterwards granted a pension of 500l. per annum as compensation. In 1807 the Centaur was one of the fleet under Lord Gambier at Copenhagen [see ]. On 2 Oct. Hood was advanced to the rank of rear-admiral, and with his flag in the Centaur had the naval command of the force which reduced Madeira, 26 Dec. 1807. In the following year, still in the Centaur, he was second in command of the fleet in the Baltic, under Sir James Saumarez; and on 26 Aug., being then, with Captain [q. v.] in the Implacable, attached to the Swedish fleet, which at the time was ten miles to leeward, he cut off the 80-gun ship Sewolod from the Russian line, and captured her after a stubborn defence, in which she lost, it was said, upwards of three hundred killed and wounded: the ship herself had to be burnt. This brilliant achievement won for him a complimentary letter from the king of Sweden, with the grand cross of the order of the Sword.

In January 1809 he commanded in the second post at Corunna during the re-embarkation of the army. He was created a baronet on 13 April 1809, and for the next two years he commanded a division in the Mediterranean. On 1 Aug. 1811 he was advanced to be vice-admiral, and towards the end of the year was appointed commander-in-chief in the East Indies, where he arrived in the early summer of 1812. His command was uneventful, the war having been brought to an end with the reduction of Java and Mauritius; and the time was mainly occupied in regulating and reforming points of organisation or discipline and the methods of victualling, in which he introduced some substantial reforms, effecting a saving to the government of something like thirty per cent. He died at Madras on 24 Dec. 1814, carried off by a fever, after three days' illness. In 1831 a subscription monument to his memory, in the form of a column 110 feet high, was erected on a hill at Butleigh in Somersetshire (Gent. Mag. 1832, vol. cii. pt. i. p. 190). In the church is another monument with a long inscription by Southey (, Poetical Works; cf., 1758–1798).

Although essentially a war officer, whose whole life, with few and short intermissions, was spent in active service, Hood is described as well versed in the more theoretical branches of his profession, and as having an exceptional knowledge of navigation, geography, shipbuilding, fortification, and mechanical philosophy: he is also said to have ‘studied the language, laws, and customs of every country he visited.’ There is, at any rate, reason to believe that he was a good French and Spanish scholar. He married in 1804 Mary, the eldest daughter of Lord Seaforth; but dying without issue, the baronetcy, by a special clause in the patent, passed to the son of his brother Alexander, in whose family it now remains. His portraits by Beechey, before he lost his arm, and by Hoppner and Downman when armless, have been engraved. 

HOOD, SAMUEL, (1724–1816), admiral, born on 12 Dec. 1724, was the eldest son of Samuel Hood, vicar of Butleigh in Somerset and prebendary of Wells, and of his wife Mary, daughter of Richard Hoskins of Beaminster, Dorsetshire. , viscount Bridport [q. v.], was his brother. He entered the navy on 6 May 1741 on board the Romney as captain's servant with Captain (d. 1762) [q. v.], popularly known as ‘Tom of Ten Thousand,’ and after-