Description
Autograph Letter Signed, to Edward Magrath, soliciting his vote for Burnett, making him aware of a cabal intent on hostility to Burnett’s election 4 pp. 7 x 4 inches, in good condition, strip of brown paper along the upper edge where formerly mounted. Somerset House (Medical Department), 16 April 1833. Sir James Prior (c.1790–1869), Irish naval surgeon and writer. He entered the Royal Navy as a surgeon, and sailed from Plymouth in the frigate HMS Nisus on 22 June 1810. His ship was stationed at Mauritius from November 1810 to April 1811, when he had charge of the wounded; and, after visiting the Seychelles Islands, Madras, Mauritius, Java (at the reduction of which by the British in September 1811 he was present), and Batavia, returned to the Cape of Good Hope. His next expedition, also in the Nisus, was to Table Bay (February 1812), St. Helena (January 1813), Rio de Janeiro (October 1813), and Pernambuco (December 1813). By 1815 he was on the coast of La Vendée, and was present at the surrender of Napoleon on 15 July. His works included Voyage in the Indian Seas in the Nisus frigate during 1810 and 1811, published by Sir Richard Phillips in 1820, and included in the first volume of a collection of New Voyages and Travels, and Voyage along the Eastern Coast of Africa (1819), included in the second volume of Phillips’s Voyages. Prior’s major works were biographies of Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith. Edward Magrath (1799-1856), Secretary of the Athenaeum Club.