William Falconer Biography

William Falconer (1732–1769) was a Scottish poet.

Falconer was the son of a barber in Edinburgh, where he was born, became a sailor, and was thus thoroughly competent to describe the management of the storm-tossed vessel, the career and fate of which are described in his poem, The Shipwreck (1762),[1] a work of genuine, though unequal, talent. The efforts which Falconer made to improve the poem in the subsequent edition which followed the first were not entirely successful. The work gained for him the patronage of the Duke of York, through whose influence he obtained the position of purser on various warships.

Falconer was one of the three survivors of a trading ship on voyage from Alexandria to Venice and in 1751 he wrote and published a poem on the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales. He had also contributed poems to the Gentleman's Magazine. The poem The Shipwreck was dedicated to the then rear-admiral Duke of York where the poem states:

From regions where Peruvian billows roar,

To the bleak coasts of savage Labrador.

Falconer was a midshipman on the Royal George for a short period of time and then in 1763 became purser of the frigate Glory aboard which he wrote the political satire Demagogue. In 1767 he was purser of the Swiftsure. In 1769 he published The Universal Marine Dictionary. Falconer was purser on the frigate Aurora when it was lost after rounding the Cape of Good Hope on a voyage when it left from London on September 20, 1769.

Falconer's poems were used by Patrick O'Brian in his Aubrey-Maturin series. One of his lesser characters is a nautical poet but his poems are Falconer's.

The lines

With living colours give my verse to glow:

The sad memorial of a tale of woe!

(from The Shipwreck, Canto I) were used as a motto for Tafereel van de overwintering der Hollanders op Nova Zembla in de jaren 1596 en 1597 (1820) by the Dutch poet Hendrik Tollens (1780–1856).