Ancestors

James Irwin

James Irwin was a ship's captain and merchant at Calcutta in the 1740s, in the service of the East India Company. Where he came from is not known. Wikipedia's account of his son Eyles calls him a native of Ireland, and his son's estates later lay in Fermanagh and Westmeath, which points the same way.

A biography of the Company director Laurence Sulivan, published in 2006, says that James Irwin traded in India on his own account from the early 1730s. Before that, it says, he had spent time on St Helena, the East India Company's island in the South Atlantic.

He was a country captain, the master of a ship in the country trade, which carried goods between ports in Asia rather than home to England. In January 1742 the "Ship Phazzee Salam Capt. James Irwin" called at Tellicherry on the Malabar coast, bound from Bengal to Bombay.

At Calcutta the Company gave him posts. On 10 January 1748, after the death of Captain Edward Frederick Read, the council at Fort William appointed "Captain James Irwin being a proper and well qualified person" its Gunner and Master of Arms. Fort William was the Company's fort and seat of government at Calcutta. In August 1749 the Company took him on as a junior merchant, a rank in its civil service, and told him to "write to his friends to give the usual security." In August 1750 he was sent with divers and lascars, Indian seamen, to salvage the wrecked Indiaman Lynn. The same year he applied to be Sub-Accomptant and was passed over.

On 22 July 1745 "Captn. James Irwin and Mrs. Mary Palmer" were married at Calcutta by Gervas Bellamy. Every baptism of their children names the mother as Sarah. She was Sarah Beale, a native of St Helena and the widow of Captain Henry Palmer, a private merchant who had died in 1743. "Mary" is most likely a clerk's or a copyist's slip. The Sulivan biography places the wedding on St Helena instead, "sometime between 1743 and 1751".

Three children were baptized at Calcutta. James, born on 11 October 1748, was baptized on 22 November. Sarah Gambier, "daughter of Mr. James Irwin, Merchant," was baptized on 23 October 1749. Eyles was baptized on 23 February 1751. Sarah married Thomas Pearson at Calcutta on 2 December 1767 and died on 9 September 1768, aged nineteen. Her monument is the oldest in Calcutta's South Park Street cemetery. Eyles became a Company servant at Madras, a traveller and a writer.

In 1752 he held a pass for the country ship Mary. He died at Calcutta on 20 June 1752 and was buried there the same day. In January 1754 the Company's directors in London wrote of "the Mary, a country ship in the service of the late Mr. Irwin." No will of his was proved at Canterbury. His widow married the Rev. Robert Mapletoft, a chaplain at Calcutta, on 31 March 1753. She lived through the siege of Calcutta in 1756. In 1758 "her three Irwin children had a provision."

The Dictionary of National Biography calls Eyles Irwin's father "James Irwin, H.E.I.C.S., of Hazeleigh Hall." The letters stand for the Honourable East India Company's Service. The Sulivan biography goes further and says that "Before his demise he had bought the estate of Hazeleigh in Essex." The Hazeleigh description most likely belongs to his son. Morant's account of the manor of Hazeleigh, published in 1768, has no Irwin in it. The younger James Irwin, Esq., was a director of the East India Company in 1795 and was dead by March 1798, and a Mrs. Irwin was patron of Hazeleigh rectory in 1830. The Dictionary probably ran father and son together.

If James Irwin is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "James Irwin (d. 1752)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/james-irwin-1752-bb56bf.