He entered the navy in June 1800, in the Penelope, with Captain Henry Blackwood, with whom he was also in the Euryalus at Trafalgar, and in the Ajax, till moved, in January 1807, to the Ocean flagship of Lord Collingwood in the Mediterranean.
The Prometheus was an extremely dull sailer, incapable of improvement, so that any vessel she chased left her hopelessly astern; and it was owing only to the good fortune and judgment of her commander that she managed to pick up some prizes.
From September 1817 to the end of 1820 he commanded the Favourite on the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena station, and afterwards on the east coast of South America.
In 1856 he made a yachting voyage to the Salvages, a group of barren rocks midway between Madeira and the Canaries, on one of which a vast treasure, the spoil of a Spanish galleon, was said to be buried.
A further search was rather the excuse than the reason for revisiting the islets in the yacht, but the voyage gave him an opportunity of writing ‘Seadrift,’ a small volume of reminiscences (8vo, 1858, with portrait).