Orde, John, Sir, 1751-1824

Sir John Orde (1751-1824) was a British naval officer and politician who served as the governor of Dominica under British colonial rule between 1783 and 1793. Orde joined the British Navy in 1766, eventually gaining the rank of Admiral of the Red in 1810. He was created 1st Baronet Orde, of Morpeth, Northumberland, in 1790. After the death of his brother, Thomas Orde-Powlett, first Lord Bolton, Orde served as Member of Parliament for Yarmouth from 1807 until 1812.

Following his naval service on behalf of Great Britain during the American Revolutionary War, Orde was appointed governor of Dominica after the island was reverted from French to British colonial rule under the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. In Dominica, Orde was charged by the British government with restoring and maintaining British control over the colony and developing the harbor at Prince Rupert's Bay. During Orde's tumultuous term as governor, local inhabitants of Dominica, including enslaved workers, maroon communities armed by the French during France's 1778 conquest of the island, as well as native, French, and mixed race populations, actively resisted the reestablishment of British colonial rule and the extension of the plantation economy. Orde resigned from his position in Dominica in 1793 at the onset of another war with revolutionary France to return to his naval duties.

In 1781 Orde married Margaret Emma Stevens (1759–1790), the daughter of Richard Stevens of Saint Helena in Beaufort County, South Carolina. Following the death of his first wife, Orde married Jane Frere (circa 1773–1829) in 1793, with whom he had two children. His son and heir, John Powlett Orde, married Peter Campbell's eldest daughter, Eliza Woolery Campbell, in 1826. The Campbell family owned several plantation properties in Jamaica, which Orde's daughter-in-law and her sister, Caroline, inherited.