He is chiefly remembered, however, for his role in the failure of the Blockade of Porto Bello, for which poor Government orders were largely responsible, during which he died of disease alongside thousands of his sailors.

Captain Francis Hosier was only 26 years old in 1699, when he arranged for the Greenwich residence today known as The Ranger's House to be built,[2] by which time he had commanded only one ship, the Winchelsea, of 74 guns.

[6] Viscount Townshend, Secretary of State, consulted the former privateer Woodes Rogers, who was in London at the time, as to the probable means and route the Spaniards would adopt to get their treasure home.

"He (Hosier) accordingly arrived at the Bastimentos[9] near Porto Bello, but being employed rather to overawe than to attack the Spaniards, with whom it was probably not our interest to go to war, he continued long inactive on that station, to his own great regret.

This brave man, seeing his best officers and men thus daily swept away, his ships exposed to inevitable destruction, and himself made the sport of the enemy, is said to have died of a broken heart.

Hosier's body was given a temporary burial-place in the ballast of his flagship, the Breda, where it remained, until it was despatched to England, late in the year, on board the snow the Happy Return, under Commander Henry Fowkes.

Vernon's success prompted the poet Richard Glover in 1740 to write the ballad Admiral Hosier's Ghost, sung to the tune of Come and Listen to my Ditty.

In 1743, a William Hosier made a benefaction of £300 in South Sea annuities to the Deptford St Nicholas Charity School established in 1723, to educate 4 children.