Robert Corbet

Captain Robert Corbet was a Royal Navy officer who served in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and was killed in action in highly controversial circumstances. Corbet was a strict disciplinarian who regularly beat his men for the slightest infractions: so brutal was his regime that he provoked two mutinies, one simply at the rumour he was coming aboard a ship. These uprisings caused him to become even more vicious in his use of punishments and when he took the frigate HMS Africaine into action off Île Bourbon in September 1810, his men failed to support him and may even have murdered him. In addition to his obsession with discipline and obedience, Corbet was regarded as an inefficient commander, whose standards of gunnery and training were so poor that when his ship did go into action it was ill-equipped to fight the French frigates stationed in the Indian Ocean.