John McArthur (Royal Navy officer)

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John McArthur (1755–1840) was a British naval officer and writer. He joined the Royal Navy in 1778 as an assistant clerk on HMS Eagle on the North American station. When Eagle returned home, he moved to the cutter HMS Rattlesnake and on 22 March 1779 was promoted to purser of the ship for his gallantry in boarding a French privateer off Le Havre on 14 March during the American Revolutionary War. In November, Rattlesnake helped HMS Tartar capture the Spanish frigate Santa Margarita; when the prize was commissioned for the Royal Navy, McArthur became purser of the prize. During the war he often observed signals.

In 1790 he proposed a new code of signals to the Admiralty, which impressed Lord Hood, the First Sea Lord. In 1791 Hood hoisted his flag in command during the Russian armament and made McArthur his secretary, hoping to test his signals. McArthur is said to have recast his code to align with Howe’s, and after Howe approved it, the code was tested on the cruise of 1792. It was adopted, though by the mid-1790s Home Popham’s code had largely taken over. By 1799 McArthur claimed to be the real author of the code known as Lord Howe’s, though he may have only seen it into print.

In 1793 Hood became commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, and McArthur again served as his secretary, also serving as purser of HMS Victory. His duties were complex: handling correspondence in three languages, acting as interpreter, and overseeing disbursements of public money for British and allied forces. He also acted as prize agent for the fleet. When Hood returned to England and struck his flag, McArthur went back to the Mediterranean as purser of Victory. As soon as the fleet joined, Rear-Admiral Robert Man hoisted his flag aboard, and in the action of 14 July 1795 (the Battle of Hyères Islands) McArthur volunteered to observe the signals in place of the admiral’s secretary. He later served as secretary to Sir Hyde Parker and returned to England with him in early 1796.

In 1803, when Lord Nelson was headed to the Mediterranean, he offered to take McArthur as his secretary, but McArthur declined because Hood’s accounts were being audited. This was likely a pretext, since he was then busy writing. On 22 July 1806 the University of Edinburgh awarded him the degree of LL.D. He lived in London at York Place, Portman Square, later moving to Hayfield near Warblington in Hampshire, where he died on 29 July 1840.

McArthur’s major literary work, with James Stanier Clarke, was The Life of Lord Nelson (1809), in two volumes. In 1799, also with Clarke, he founded the Naval Chronicle, a monthly publication that ran to forty half-yearly volumes. It covered naval matters and biographical notes of leading officers, many of whom supplied material themselves, and it is considered a high-authority source for contemporary events and people. He left a widow and apparently a daughter, Mrs. Conway.