Thomas Gordon (1658-1741) was a Commodore of the Royal Scots Navy and an Admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy.
Biography[]
Thomas Gordon was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1658, and he worked as a merchant in the Barbary States and Scandinavia before joining the Royal Scots Navy in 1703 and serving in the War of the Spanish Succession. He rose to the rank of commodore in 1706, but his Jacobite sympathies led him to resign his commission in 1714 and join the Imperial Russian Navy in 1717. Gordon aided the Jacobites in establishing correspondence with Tsar Peter the Great, and he rose in the ranks as old Russian admirals retired. Gordon commanded a fleet during the 1734 siege of Danzig amid the War of the Polish Succession, and he died in 1741.