Sir Peter Parker, 2nd Baronet (1785 – 31 August 1814) was a British Royal Navy officer, the son of Vice-Admiral Christopher Parker and Augusta Byron.
Biography
Parker was the descendant of several Royal Navy flag officers. His father was the son of Admiral Sir Peter Parker, and his mother the daughter of Vice-Admiral John Byron. Educated at Westminster School, he entered the Royal Navy in 1798, serving under his grandfather and his grandfather's friend, Lord Nelson in Victory. He rapidly rose through the ranks, and was promoted in May 1804 to Commander. The next year he took command of the brig Weazel. The Weazel was the first British vessel to sight the Franco-Spanish fleet leaving Cádiz, an action that precipitated the Battle of Trafalgar. For this service he was promoted to Captain.
Parker was briefly a Member of Parliament. He was returned unopposed as a Tory for the Irish borough constituency of Wexford at a by-election held on 3 March 1810. He resigned the seat in 1811 and was replaced at a by-election on 1 July 1811.
In 1810, he was given command of the frigate , which he commissioned. Within weeks of commissioning she was involved in the suppression of a mutiny aboard Africaine. The notoriously brutal Captain Robert Corbet had been appointed to command Africaine and the crew had protested and refused to allow him to board. The Admiralty sent three popular officers to negotiate with the crew and ordered Menelaus to come alongside. If the crew of Africaine refused to agree with the appointment of Corbet, Parker had been ordered to fire on the ship until they submitted. The crew eventually agreed to allow Corbet aboard and Menelaus did not have to fire on Africaine. In the summer of 1810, Parker sailed for the Indian Ocean to reinforce the squadron operating against Île de France, where he participated in the capture of the island in December 1810.
In 1812, Menelaus was part of the blockade of Toulon in the Mediterranean and operated against coastal harbours, shipping and privateers off the southern coast of France with some success. In 1813, the frigate was transferred to the Atlantic for service convoying merchant ships to Canada in the War of 1812. Menelaus was subsequently employed in raiding American positions along the Maryland coastline, destroying a coastal convoy in September. In 1814, Parker was ordered to operate against French ships in the Atlantic and recaptured a valuable Spanish merchant ship in January.
In 1814, following the French surrender, Menelaus was assigned to the North American Station and sent to Bermuda, which had been identified in 1783, on the independence of the United States, as potentially Britain's most important North American naval base (safer than Halifax against both naval and overland attack, and in a position, 640 miles off North Carolina, to dominate the Atlantic Seaboard) where the Royal Navy had been operating since 1795 from St. George's Town (with the Admiralty House nearby at Mount Wyndham, in Hamilton Parish), at the East End, while the Royal Naval Dockyard was under construction at the West End. With the outbreak of the American War of 1812, the blockade of the American Atlantic coast (from which New England, where support for the war was low and upon which Britain relied for grain, was at first spared) was orchestrated from Bermuda throughout the war. In August 1814, a force of 2,500 soldiers under General Robert Ross freed from the Peninsular War arrived in Bermuda aboard , three frigates, three sloops and ten other vessels, intended to be used for diversionary raids along the coasts of Maryland and Virginia. In response to Sir George Prévost's request for an attack in retaliation for the "wanton destruction of private property along the north shores of Lake Erie" by American forces under Colonel John Campbell in May 1814, the most notable being the Raid on Port Dover) to draw United States forces away from the Canadian border., they were instead used, along with the naval and military units already on the station, to strike at Washington, D.C. in the Chesapeake Campaign, resulting in British victory at the Battle of Bladensburg, the Burning of Washington, and the Raid on Alexandria, and a failed attempt on Baltimore.