Settled from remote times in the little town of Leigh, in Essex, at the mouth of the Thames, the family of Haddock, we may be sure, took early to the sea, as was befitting their name. There are traces of Haddocks of Leigh to be found as far back as Edward the Third’s days; but we need not search for earlier generations than those which sprang from Richard Haddock, a captain in the Parliamentary Navy. That the family had followed the sea from father to son in bygone times, and had so established a tradition to be observed by their descendants, might be argued from the regularity with which the Haddocks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries served in the Navy for upwards of a hundred years. This regularity is only to be equalled by that with which they named their children Richard, to the perpetual confusion of their biographers. Captain Richard Haddock, to whom reference has been made above, served under the Commonwealth. In 1642 we find him in command of the ship Victory, and in 1652 he received a reward of £40 for good service. He died in 1660 at the age of 79. His eldest son William, also a Parliamentary captain, commanded the ship America in 1650, and the Hannibal in 1653. He survived his father only seven years, dying in 1667, aged 60. Captain Richard Haddock had another son, Richard, who was probably a good deal younger than his brother. He served with distinction in the Dutch war in 1673;[1] and was in all probability the father of William Haddock whom the family papers show to have been a lieutenant in the Cornwall in 1696-1697, and who commanded a ship in the action off Cape Passaro in 1718 (p. 54) and died in 1726.