James Marr Brydone

James Marr Brydone (1779 – 29 March 1866) was a Scottish surgeon who served in the British fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar. He is best remembered for being the first person in the main British battle fleet to sight the Franco-Spanish fleet, and did so without the use of a glass. The information was signalled to the fleet flagship.

Biography Brydone was born in Selkirk, Scotland, a descendant of William Brydone, who was town clerk of Selkirk at the time of the Battle of Flodden. He was educated at the local school alongside Mungo Park and Charles Malcolm. He qualified as a doctor of medicine from Edinburgh University and, after local experience, in 1804 found himself serving as assistant surgeon aboard the East Indiaman Calcutta. Whilst at sea the ship met a naval vessel whose surgeon had died. He was transferred over and thus began thirty years of service in the Royal Navy. Brydone later contracted yellow fever while at Calcutta, and was sent home to convalesce.

By October 1805 he was serving as assistant surgeon on

After the war Brydone served as the Surgeon Superintendent aboard the convict ship Eliza, which sailed from England on 12 October 1819, with 160 male convicts aboard, and arrived in Sydney Cove on 20 January 1820, having lost only one man during the voyage. Brydone remained in New South Wales until August 1820, and served as President of a Medical Board assembled by Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Brydone eventually returned to England and joined under Captain James Gordon in 1821. He later served as assistant staff surgeon at Portsmouth and Deptford dockyards, and finally as staff surgeon at Deptford before retiring from the Navy in 1834. After spending the winter on secretarial work for the Colonel he was asked to return to Ireland in 1839 to organise emigration. Most people by now preferred Australia as their destination, and at the end of May 183 people from Limerick sailed on the Waterloo. He then settled at Petworth where he became accountant and later acting land agent for Colonel Wyndham, and died at the age of 86. Walter Marr Brydone Elizabeth Caroline Brydone Henry Gray Brydone was an executor of the Reverend Thomas Sockett's will in 1859. Sockett was James Brydone's brother in law.

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