He completed his training there in 1864 with a creditable Double Extra Certificate, and then accompanied his uncle, Captain Henry Toynbee, on a voyage on the East Indiaman, Hotspur.

Being the eldest son made Warington financially responsible for maintaining his mother's household, which was probably his motivation for leaving the sea in 1873 and starting legal training.

[9] Warington died from tuberculosis, in Chelsea on 4 April 1921 but is buried in the Eastern Cemetery at St Andrews in Fife on the upper terrace, in his wife's family plot.

[11] From his childhood, Warington Baden-Powell had been an enthusiastic sailor of small boats and later became a pioneer of sailing canoes, which he designed himself based on the "Rob-Roy" type of hybrid canoe-kayaks which had been built by John "Rob Roy" MacGregor.

In July 1869,[12] accompanied by a companion known only as "H", possibly his brother Baden Henry, Warington undertook a canoeing expedition in the Baltic Sea, and published an account of his adventures in 1871.

By the late 1870s, sailing canoes were taking part in organised racing, and providing keen amateur sport at reasonable cost at a time when yachting was an activity for the wealthy.

There followed several other family expeditions in southern England which made a deep impression on Robert, who later recalled that Warington had "infused so much jollity and romance into that early sea-training that it gripped me from the first".

[14][17] In 2011, a Sea Scout Group of the Portuguese Corpo Nacional de Escutas based in The Azores, named their 16-metre sailing yacht Almirante Warrington Baden-Powell in his honour.