Commodore William James captures the Maratha fortress of Suvarnadurg on the west coast of India.
Commodore (Royal Navy)
Commodore (Cdre) is a rank of the Royal Navy above captain and below rear admiral. It has a NATO ranking code of OF-6. The rank is equivalent to brigadier in the British Army and the Royal Marines and to air commodore in the Royal Air Force. Commodore has been a substantive rank in the Royal Navy since only 1997. Until then the term denoted a functional position rather than a formal rank, being the title bestowed on the senior officer of a fleet of at least two naval vessels comprising an independent command.
Sir William James, 1st Baronet
Commodore Sir William James, 1st Baronet was a Bombay Marine officer and politician who represented West Looe in the House of Commons of Great Britain from 1774 to 1783. Born in Pembrokeshire to a family of unclear background, James went to sea at a young age and worked onboard merchantships which traded between Britain's Southern Colonies and West Indies, during which he was captured by the Spanish during the War of the Austrian Succession. James eventually returned to England at some point in the early 1740s and possibly married either the landlady of a Wapping pub or a widow named Elizabeth Birch, though historical records are not clear if Birch's second husband was indeed James.
Marathi people
The Marathi people or Marathis are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group who are native to Maharashtra in western India. They natively speak Marathi, an Indo-Aryan language. Maharashtra was formed as a Marathi-speaking state of India on 1 May 1960, as part of a nationwide linguistic reorganisation of the Indian states. The term "Maratha" is generally used by historians to refer to all Marathi-speaking peoples, irrespective of their caste; However, it may refer to a Maharashtrian caste known as the Maratha which also includes farmer sub castes like the Kunbis.
Suvarnadurg
Suvarnadurg is a fort that is located between Mumbai and Goa on a small island in the Arabian Sea, near Harnai in Konkan, along the West Coast of India, in the Indian state of Maharashtra.