of Art at St. Petersburg. He returned to England with a pension in 1802, when many of his plates were lost by shipwreck off Yarmouth. A list of these is given in the catalogue of a sale of his remaining plates and of impressions from the lost plates, at Sotheby's, on 29 Nov. 1822. A portrait of Alexander I was published after his return, on 1 May 1803. Walker is said to have died about 1808, and this is not necessarily inconsistent with the fact that a number of his mezzotints were published for the first time in 1819, and one, ‘The Triumph of Cupid,’ after Parmegiano, in 1822.
[Redgrave's Dict. of Artists; Chaloner Smith's British Mezzotinto Portraits, iv. 1429.]
WALKER, JAMES (1764–1831), rear-admiral, born in 1764, was son of James Walker of ‘Innerdovat’ in Fife, by his wife Mary, daughter of Alexander Melville, fifth earl of Leven and fourth earl of Melville. He entered the navy in 1776 on board the Southampton frigate, in which he served for five years, at first in the West Indies, and afterwards in the Channel. He was then appointed to the Princess Royal, the flagship of Sir Peter Parker (1721–1811) [q. v.], by whom, on 18 June 1781, he was promoted to be lieutenant of the Torbay, one of the squadron which accompanied Sir Samuel (afterwards Viscount) Hood [q. v.] to North America, and took part in the action off the Chesapeake on 5 Sept., as also in the operations at St. Christopher in January 1782, and in the battle of Dominica on 12 April, when she sustained a loss of ten killed and twenty-five wounded. Walker, whose father was an intimate friend of Rodney, was on the point of being promoted, when Rodney was superseded by Admiral Pigot, and the chance was gone; he was still in the Torbay when, on 17 Oct. 1782, in company with the London, she engaged and drove ashore in Samana Bay, in the island of Hayti, the French 74-gun ship Scipion. After the peace, Walker spent some years on the continent, in France, Italy, and Germany. While in Vienna in 1787 he had news of the Dutch armament, and immediately started for England. On the way, near Aschaffenburg, the diligence, which was carrying a considerable sum of money, was attacked by a party of robbers. Walker jumped out and rushed at them; but as he received no support from his fellow travellers he was knocked on the head, stripped, and thrown into the ditch. When the robbers had retired, he was picked up and carried into Aschaffenburg, where his wounds were dressed; but the delay at Aschaffenburg, and afterwards Frankfort, prevented his reaching England till after the dispute with Holland had been arranged; so he returned to Germany. In the following year he was offered the command of a Russian ship, but the admiralty refused him permission to accept it [cf. Trevenen, James]. In 1789 he was appointed to the Champion, a small frigate employed on the coast of Scotland; from her he was moved to the Winchelsea; and in 1793 to the Boyne, intended for the flag of Rear-admiral Affleck. As this arrangement was altered, and Sir John Jervis hoisted his flag in the Boyne, Walker was moved into the Niger frigate, attached to the Channel fleet under Lord Howe, and one of the repeating ships in the battle of 1 June 1794.
On 6 July he was promoted to the rank of commander. After a short time as acting-captain of the Gibraltar, and again as commander of the Terror bomb, he was appointed in June 1795 acting-captain of the Trusty of 50 guns, ordered to escort five East Indiamen to a latitude named, and, ‘after having seen them in safety,’ to return to Spithead. The spirit of his orders took Walker some distance beyond the prescribed latitude, and then, learning that some forty English merchant ships were at Cadiz waiting for convoy, he went thither and brought them home, with property, as represented by the merchants in London, of the value of upwards of a million, ‘which but for his active exertions would have been left in great danger at a most critical time, when the Spaniards were negotiating a peace with France.’ It was probably this very circumstance that made the government pay more attention to the complaint of the Spanish government that money had been smuggled on board the Trusty on account of the merchants. Walker was accordingly tried by court-martial for disobedience of orders and dismissed the service. When the war had broken out, and it was no longer necessary to humour the caprices of the Spaniards, he was reinstated in March 1797. Shortly after, he was appointed to a gunboat intended to act against the mutineers at the Nore; and, when that was no longer wanted, as acting-captain of the Garland, to convoy the Baltic trade as far as Elsinore. Returning from that service, he was appointed, still as acting-captain, to the Monmouth, which he commanded in the battle of Camperdown, on 11 Oct. As they were bearing down on the enemy, Walker turned the hands up and addressed them: ‘My lads, you see your enemy; I shall lay you close aboard and give you an opportunity of washing the stain off your characters [alluding to the recent
