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Conn was one of Nelson’s close professional colleagues, having served with him at the Battle of Copenhagen (2 April 1801) and the attack on Boulogne (15/16 August 1801) before also serving for two years as a captain in his Mediterranean fleet (1803–5). In March 1805, Nelson himself wrote, ‘A better or more zealous officer than Captain Conn is not in His Majesty’s Service.’ Later that year, Conn had the distinction of commanding briefly hmsVictory (Nelson’s flagship), hmsRoyal Sovereign (Collingwood’s flagship) and the, on 21 October at Trafalgar itself, hmsDreadnought, a sister-ship of the more famous Temeraire, launched in 1801.
Conn’s family were from Waterford in Ireland but he was baptised at Stoke Damerel in Devon in August 1764. He entered the Navy in February 1778 as a thirteen-year-old volunteer, joining his father, a warrant officer (the gunner) in hmsWeazle. He became midshipman and master’s mate in hmsArrogant in which he participated at the Battle of the Saintes (12 April 1782) when Admiral Sir George Rodney broke through the French line. He passed as lieutenant in June 1788 but had to wait until the war with France before receiving his first commission in June 1793. In the meantime, he married Margaret Nelson, daughter of the Revd Isaac Nelson, at Stoke Damerel in January 1792.
Conn participated as lieutenant in hmsRoyal Sovereign in Admiral Lord Howe’s victory at the Glorious First of June in 1794, and in hmsFoudroyant in Commodore Sir John Borlase Warren’s defeat of a French squadron off Donegal on 12 October 1798. He was promoted master and commander in August 1800 and appointed to the command of the Discovery, one of the bomb vessels engaged during Nelson’s victory over the Danes at the Battle of Copenhagen on 2 April 1802. He subsequently commanded a division of howitzer boats in Nelson’s disastrous attack on the French flotilla in Boulogne on the night of 15/16 August 1801. In April 1802, he was made post captain and later took command of hmsCulloden accompanied by his son, Henry, a first-class volunteer at the tender age of nine.
In April 1803, he became captain of hmsCanopus and spent two years with Nelson in the Mediterranean. Returning to England in the summer of 1805, he became acting captain of hmsVictory while Nelson and Hardy were on leave, and was then ordered to take Victory out to Admiral Cornwallis’s Channel fleet. The Admiralty countermanded this order after learning that the combined Franco-Spanish fleet had arrived in Cadiz, and Conn was instead ordered to take the newly-refitted hmsRoyal Sovereign out to the Mediterranean Fleet where Nelson’s second-in-command, Admiral Collingwood, would exchange it for his flagship, hmsDreadnought. On 10 October, having arrived with the fleet, Conn exchanged ships, taking over the Dreadnought in time to participate as her captain at Trafalgar.
The Dreadnought, which was in Collingwood’s line, entered the battle at about the time Nelson received his fatal wound. She engaged the San Juan Nepomuceno, which was bearing down on the crippled Bellerophon, and attacked with such devastating effect that within about fifteen minutes the Spanish ship had surrendered. Conn organised a prize party to board her and then pursued the Principe de Asturias, flagship of the Spanish commander in chief, Teniente General Don Frederico Gravina. Although Gravina received a wound in the subsequent fighting from which he later died of blood poisoning, his ship was too quick for the Dreadnought and managed to sail away, thus ending Conn’s participation in the battle.
Conn remained captain of the Dreadnought until June 1806 and subsequently commanded the San Josef and the Hibernia before taking up what turned out to be his final command, hmsSwiftsure. While giving chase in that ship off the Bermuda Islands on 4 May 1810, he fell overboard and, although boats were lowered and the utmost endeavours made to save him, these were unfortunately without effect and he was drowned. This was reported to the Admiralty by Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren, who expressed much regret at the loss of ‘so deserving an officer as Captain Conn.’