as acting-captain of her; the promotion was confirmed by the admiralty to 22 May 1809, the date of their receiving Cochrane's despatch. He was afterwards appointed to the Jason frigate, in which he returned to England with convoy.
Much to his disgust, he was then placed on half-pay; and during the session 1809–1810 he attended classes in Edinburgh; but dancing, driving, or hunting, probably occupied more of his time. At the end of the session, resolving to pay a visit to his cousins, then in the Peninsula, he got a passage out from Portsmouth, landed at Oporto about the middle of September, and joined the army just in time to take an amateur's share in the battle of Busaco, in which he received a smart flesh wound in the leg. He afterwards accompanied the army in its retreat to the lines of Torres Vedras, and remained with it till November, when he made his way southward to Cadiz, stayed some weeks with his brother there in garrison, took lessons in French and Spanish under more charming professors than at Edinburgh, and so returned to England.
Early in 1811 he was appointed to the Thames frigate, and in her for the next two years was actively engaged on the west coast of Italy, and more especially of Naples, stopping the coasting trade, intercepting the enemy's supplies, and destroying their batteries. Sometimes alone, sometimes in conjunction with other frigates or sloops, the Thames during these two years captured or destroyed upwards of eighty gunboats and coasting vessels, generally after a sharp engagement with covering batteries or musketry on shore; Napier also reduced the island of Ponza, which, though strongly armed and with a garrison of 180 regular troops besides militia, yielded in confusion when the Thames, followed by the Furieuse, ran the gauntlet of the batteries under a press of sail, and anchored within the mole. It was probably the credit of this success which led to Napier's transference in the following month to the Euryalus, a much finer frigate. The change took him away from his familiar cruising ground to the south coast of France; but the work was of the same nature, and was well or, in some instances, brilliantly performed. Having driven all the coasting trade from Toulon to the eastward into Cavalarie Bay, where it was protected by batteries and a 10-gun xebec, on 16 May 1813 the boats of the Euryalus and of the 74-gun ship Berwick went in, destroyed the batteries, and brought out the xebec and twenty-two trading vessels, large and small, with the very trifling loss of one man killed and one missing. In June 1814 the Euryalus was one of a squadron convoying a fleet of transports to North America, where Napier took a distinguished part in the expedition against Alexandria, and in the operations against Baltimore. In the summer of 1815 he returned to England, and on 4 June was nominated a C.B.
Shortly after this he married Frances Elizabeth, daughter of Lieutenant Younghusband, R.N., and widow of Lieutenant Edward Elers, R.N.; by Elers she had four young children, who afterwards took the name of Napier. For a few weeks he and his bride lived at Alverstoke, in Hampshire, but, on the news of the occupation of Paris by the allies, they started thither in a curricle, which they took across the Channel. They afterwards settled for a time at Versailles, where they were joined by the children; and, tiring of that, drove on—always in the curricle, the children, with their nurse, following in a four-wheeled carriage—as far as Naples, where they spent a great part of 1816. Afterwards they went back through Venice to Switzerland, where they stayed some time; and in the winter of 1818 they returned to Paris. Here Napier took a house, and, having succeeded to a handsome fortune, lived in good style. In 1819 he entered into a speculative attempt to promote iron steamers on the Seine, and being the moneyed man of the company, and at the same time quite ignorant of business, was allowed to spend freely for the good of the concern, without receiving any profit.
In 1820 he took a house near Alverstoke, and for the following years led an unsettled life, sometimes at Alverstoke, sometimes in Paris, St. Cloud, or, later on, at Havre. In 1827 ‘the steam-boat bubble completely burst,’ and left Napier a comparatively poor man. He settled down at Rowland's Castle, near Portsmouth, but, after many endeavours to get employed in the navy, was appointed in January 1829 to the Galatea frigate, and, by special permission, was allowed to fit her with paddles worked by winches on the main deck. During the commission he carried out a series of trials of these paddles, as the result of which it appeared that in a calm the ship could be propelled at the rate of three knots, and that she could tow a line-of-battle ship at from one to one and a half; the paddles could be shipped or unshipped in about a quarter of an hour, and were on one occasion shipped, turned round, and unshipped again in twenty minutes. Of the many attempts that were made to render a ship independent of the wind this seems to have been the most suc-
