Admiral of the Fleet Sir Fairfax Moresby GCB (29 November 1786 – 21 January 1877) was a Royal Navy officer. As a junior officer he took part in the unsuccessful expedition to capture Ferrol in Spain during the French Revolutionary Wars. He later saw action during the blockade of Brest during the Napoleonic Wars before becoming commanding officer of a sloop which was sent to the Aegean Sea to defend the population of Malta from pirates; the grateful people presented him with a sword. He then sailed to the Adriatic Sea where he led a naval brigade providing artillery support to the Austrian forces during the siege of Trieste. He went on to be senior naval officer at the Cape of Good Hope and then senior officer at Mauritius, with orders to suppress the slave trade: he concluded the Moresby Treaty with Seyyid Said, the imam of Muscat, restricting the scope of local slave trading and conferring on English warships the right of searching and seizing local vessels. Moresby later became Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Station. His main responsibility was to protect British commercial interests in Valparaíso in the face of unrest among the people of Chile. He also took an interest in Pitcairn Islands at this time and planned the emigration of the islanders to Norfolk Island. Early career Moresby was born on 29 November 1786 in Calcutta, part of the Bengal Presidency in British India, the son of Mary (née Rotton, 1767–1830) and Lieutenant Colonel (with 2nd Stratfordshire Militia) Fairfax Moresby Sr (1753-1820) of Lichfield. He joined the Royal Navy in December 1799. He was assigned to the second-rate HMS London as an able seaman but was promoted to midshipman and took part in the unsuccessful expedition to capture Ferrol in Spain in August 1800 during the French Revolutionary Wars. He transferred to the first-rate HMS Royal George later that year, to the sixth-rate HMS Alarm in the Channel Squadron in March 1802 and to the fifth-rate HMS Amazon in the Mediterranean Fleet in November 1802. In HMS Amazon he took part in the pursuit of the French Fleet, under the command of Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve, to the West Indies and back in Summer 1805. He became a master's mate in the third-rate HMS Puissant at Portsmouth in December 1805 and then transferred to the first-rate HMS Hibernia, flagship of the Earl St Vincent, and saw action during