George Pocock

George Pocock commanded the fleet at Havana and had already fought the three largest naval actions of the war in Indian waters. He was a chaplain's son who went to sea at fourteen under an uncle, made post captain in the West Indies, and was sent to the East Indies as commander-in-chief in 1755. There he fought Comte d'Ache three times off the Coromandel coast, at Cuddalore in 1758, Negapatam in 1758 and Pondicherry in 1759, in engagements that were tactically indecisive and strategically conclusive: the French squadron withdrew to Mauritius after the third, leaving the French settlements in India without naval support at the moment Coote was destroying their army ashore. He court-martialled several of his own captains for failing to engage. Returning home a rich man from prize money, he was given the naval half of the Havana expedition in 1762 and made the decision the campaign turned on - taking a fleet of more than fifty warships and a hundred and fifty transports through the Old Bahama Channel, a shoal-strewn passage nobody had attempted at that scale, with small boats anchored ahead as marks. It cut weeks off the approach and arrived before the Spanish knew a fleet was coming. He supported the siege for two months while yellow fever destroyed the army ashore and much of his own crews. He was knighted, took a fortune in prize money, sat briefly in Parliament, and was passed over for the Mediterranean command in 1766, at which he resigned and never served again. He had married a wealthy widow and lived out his last twenty-six years in London. His flag captain at Havana was Augustus Keppel's brother, which was the kind of arrangement that made the expedition's command list read like a family list. He is buried in Twickenham.

• Lived: 1706 CE – 1792 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: military