Edward Vernon

Edward Vernon ("Old Grog") (12 November 1684 – 30 October 1757) was an English naval officer. Born in Westminster, London, Vernon was the second son of James Vernon, secretary of state to William III. Vernon attended Westminster School, then joined the Royal Navy on 10 May 1700 as a Volunteer on HMS Shrewsbury. In March 1701, he was transferred to HMS Ipswich and three months later, joined HMS Mary. On 16 September 1702, Vernon was promoted Lieutenant and appointed to HMS Lennox serving in the Channel Squadron. The ship was later transferred to the Mediterranean and finally paid off in March 1704. He was then appointed to HMS Barfleur, which at the time was the flagship of Admiral Cloudesley Shovell in the Mediterranean. The ship was present at the capture of Gibraltar and the Battle of Malaga. In December, with Shovell, he transferred to HMS Britannia and was present at the capture of Barcelona in 1705.

On 22 January 1706 he was promoted Captain and appointed to HMS Dolphin. However, he was moved ten days later into HMS Rye and remained in the Mediterranean until 1707. With the rest of Shovell’s fleet, he returned to England, but was fortunate to escape the disaster that befell Shovell’s flagship, HMS Association at the Isles of Scilly. In November, he joined HMS Jersey and in April 1708, took command of the West Indies station. In 1710, he successfully broke up a Spanish squadron off Cartegena. At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1712, he returned to Britain.

In March 1715, he was appointed to HMS Assistance, in which he served in the Baltic until 1717 when the ship was paid off. After this, he was put on half pay for the next eighteen months. In March 1719, he was appointed to HMS Mary and returned to the Baltic. Vernon was the commodore of Port Royal in Jamaica in 1720. In 1721, he again went on half pay for five years. During this period, he became the member of Parliament for Penryn and took a leading part in naval debates. In 1726, he was re-appointed to active service in HMS Grafton. This ship served in the Baltic until the winter of 1727 when it was transferred to the fleet at Gibraltar, after Spain had declared war on Britain. In May 1728, peace was made with Spain and Vernon returned to Britain and resumed his Parliamentary duties. He took up the case of Robert Jenkins, a merchant seaman who claimed to have had his ear cut off after his vessel was boarded by Spanish guardacostas in 1731.

During the ensuing War of Jenkins' Ear, Vernon was promoted Vice-Admiral on 9 July 1739, and as he had prominently spoken for both the war and the Navy, he was given the command of a squadron of five ships for the West Indies which on 21 November 1739 captured the Spanish colonial possession of Porto Bello (now in Panama). Vernon was subsequently granted the Freedom of the City of London and commemorative medals were produced. The Portobello areas in both London and Dublin (see Portobello Road and Portobello, Dublin) are named for his victory, and "Rule Britannia" was composed by Thomas Arne during the celebratory frenzy of 1740.

A tower commemorating his victory was erected by members of the Vernon family living at Hilton Hall outside Wolverhampton.

In April 1741, with a much larger fleet and land forces under Major General Thomas Wentworth, 23,000 men and 124 ships, Vernon turned his attention to Cartagena de Indias in Nueva Granada (now Colombia). He had previously tried to bombard this settlement with his small squadron without success. Vernon and Wentworth did not get on and time was wasted in deciding where to land the army. When the army finally attacked, it was repelled by the garrison of just 3,600 men and 6 ships commanded by Blas de Lezo. An epidemic of yellow fever which ravaged the crews of the ships and the soldiers ashore, compounded the problems and the force returned to Port Royal.

George Washington's half-brother, Lawrence Washington, served on Vernon's flagship "Princess Caroline" [80 guns] as a Captain of the Marines in 1741 and named his estate Mount Vernon in honour of his commander.

At the end of May 1741, it was decided to attack Cuba. Vernon captured Guantánamo Bay, briefly renaming it Cumberland Bay. He arrived with a force of eight warships and 4,000 soldiers with plans to march on Santiago de Cuba, but was resisted by local guerilla forces and finally abandoned in December after sickness broke out again. Vernon could no longer hold back his anger at Wentworth’s ineptitude and a bitter quarrel ensued ending in the recall of both parties to Britain at the end of 1742.

While he had been away, Vernon had been elected MP for Ipswich, after having purchased the Nacton estate in Suffolk. Vernon returned to Parliament and continued to harass the government on naval affairs. At this time, many anonymous pamphlets criticising the Admiralty appeared and although Vernon denied he was the author, some have been attributed to him. In 1745, Vernon was promoted to Admiral and appointed to command the North Sea Fleet in response to the threat from the French forces in support of Charles Edward Stuart, "Bonnie Prince Charlie". This was his last operational command. When the Admiralty refused to grant him the status of Commander-in-Chief, he asked to be relieved on 1 December 1745, and the Admiralty removed him from the list of flag officers in 1746.

Throughout his career, Vernon had tried to improve naval procedures and encouraged his captains to improve manoeuvres and gun drill. He introduced new instructions to aid the flexibility of handling fleets in battle and formed the basis of continuing improvement to Admiralty fighting instructions by subsequent naval commanders. Vernon continued to serve in Parliament and remained active in the interest of naval affairs until his death at Nacton on 30 October 1757.

Grog

His enduring claim to fame was his 1740 order that his sailors' rum should be diluted with water. The rest of the Royal Navy rapidly followed his lead, supposedly calling the new drink "grog" after Vernon's nickname "Old Grog". This nickname has been attributed to his habitual wearing of a grogram coat. However, the word grog appears in a book written by Daniel Defoe in 1718, well before Admiral Vernon's West Indian career began, and 22 years before his famous order to dilute the rum ration. Significantly, it is in the 1718 book The Family Instructor, Part II that a little former slave boy, Toby, from Barbados, who is the character using the word, stating that "the black mans" in the West Indies "make the sugar, make the grog, much great work, much weary work all day long." Since Defoe had trading interests which gave him connections at the great seaports of the day, it is likely that he had heard the word used by similar visitors to Britain from the West Indies. At any rate, the word seems to definitely have entered English from the West Indies - it may have an African origin. It is possible, therefore, that "Old Grog"'s nickname came from the drink, rather than from his cloak and that his family put about the story about the grogram cloak to cover up this minor shame. However, while the word "grog" referring to rum antedates Vernon's rations, the use of the word to refer to diluted rum in the Navy may post-date him.

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