Edward Ives was a British physician and traveller, who served in the navy as surgeon of the Namur in the Mediterranean from 1744 to 1746, and returned to England in the Yarmouth.
He was afterwards for some time employed by the commissioners for sick and wounded, and from 1753 to 1757 was surgeon of the Kent, bearing the flag of Vice-admiral Charles Watson as commander-in-chief in the East Indies.
According to John Knox Laughton in the Dictionary of National Biography, Ives's presence at many of the transactions which he describes and his personal intimacy with Watson give his historical narrative an unusual importance, and his accounts of the manners and customs of the inhabitants, and of the products of the countries he visited, are those of an enlightened and acute observer.
[1] Ives married, firstly, Rebecca Mary Otto Bayer in February 1745, at Rowner, Hampshire.
[2] Ives next married about 1751 Ann, daughter of Richard Roy of Titchfield, by whom he had issue a daughter, Eliza, and three sons, the eldest of whom, Edward Otto, was in Bengal at the time of his father's death; the second, Robert Thomas, had just been appointed to a writership; the third, John Richard, seems to have been still a child.