author
Cooper Willyams
1762–1816
An Anglican clergyman with an artist’s eye, he turned wartime travel into vivid illustrated books. His firsthand accounts of the West Indies campaign and the Mediterranean made him an unusual witness to the age of Nelson.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in Essex in June 1762, Cooper Willyams was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and took holy orders before building a career in the Church of England. He served as vicar of Exning in Suffolk and was also known for combining clerical work with drawing, printmaking, and travel writing.
Willyams became closely associated with the Royal Navy, serving as a naval chaplain in the 1790s. Sources describe him as chaplain of HMS Boyne and later linked with Lord St Vincent and Nelson’s Mediterranean world. What makes him especially memorable as an author is that he wrote from direct experience, publishing illustrated accounts of the British campaign in the West Indies and of naval life and travel around the Mediterranean.
He died in London on July 17, 1816. Today he is remembered less as a conventional literary figure than as a lively eyewitness: a clergyman, artist, and travel writer whose books preserve scenes of war, landscape, and empire from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.