Sir Philip Carteret Silvester (1777–1828) was a captain in the Royal Navy He was the son of Rear-admiral Philip Carteret, the circumnavigator, by his wife Mary Rachel, daughter of Sir John Baptist Silvester, M.D., F.R.S. (d. 1789), a Frenchman by birth, a Dutchman by education, and physician to the army in the Low Countries, under the Duke of Cumberland, during the War of the Austrian Succession (cf. Munk, Coll. of Phys. ii. 178). Uncle John Silvester His mother's brother, whose title and name he eventually inherited, was Sir John Silvester (1745–1822), who graduated B.C.L. from St. John's College, Oxford, in 1764, was chosen Common Serjeant of London by the Corporation of London in 1790, and succeeded Sir John William Rose as Recorder of London in 1803. He was elected F.R.S. in 1780, F.S.A. in 1804, and was created D.C.L. by Oxford University in 1818. He was made a baronet on 27 December 1814, and died on 30 March 1822 at Chingford, Essex, where he was buried on 6 April (cf. Gent. Mag. 1822, i. 370; European Mag. January 1815). Career Young Carteret entered the navy in 1792, under the care of his father's old lieutenant, Captain (afterwards Admiral) Sir Erasmus Gower, on board Lion, in which he went out to China, and returned in 1794. He was then with Gower in the Triumph, and was slightly wounded in the partial engagement with the French fleet on 17 June 1795. On 8 October 1795 he was promoted to be lieutenant of the Impérieuse, frigate; he afterwards served in the Greyhound, Britannia, and Cambrian, in the Channel and on the coast of France; and on 29 April 1802 was promoted to be commander of the Bonne Citoyenne sloop in the Mediterranean. She was paid off in 1803, and in 1804 Carteret was appointed to the 18-gun brig Scorpion, in which he was actively employed in the North Sea; and on 11 April 1805 captured a Dutch vessel bound for the West Indies with a cargo of arms and military stores. In December 1805 he was sent out to the West Indies, where, during the greater part of 1806, he was engaged in watching and sending intelligence of the French squadron under Willaumez, so that it was not till his return to England in the spring of 1807 that he received his commission as post-captain, dated 22 January 1806. In 1809 he served