Last Years
In 1847, Admiral Brown visited his native Foxford accompanied by his daughter.
After the fall of the Rosas regime, many naval officers found themselves discharged, but not the Commander of the Navy. Brown remained honoured for his long and loyal service to the nation. Retiring to his villa, Casa Amarilla at Barracas, Brown was visited by Grenfell, his opponent in the Brazilian war, who remarked how ungrateful the Republic was to its good servants; the old Admiral replied: "Mr Grenfell, it does not burden me to have been useful to the mother country of my children; I consider the honours and the wealth superfluous when six feet of earth are enough to rest so many difficulties and pains."
On 3 March 1857 he died and was buried with full military honours. The Argentine government issued a comuniqué stating that "With a life of permanent service to the national wars that our homeland has fought since its independence, William Brown symbolized the naval glory of the Argentine Republic". During his burial, General Bartolomé Mitre famously said: "Brown in his lifetime, standing on the quarterdeck of his ship, was worth a fleet to us". His grave is currently located in the Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires.
Read more about this topic: William Brown (admiral)
Famous quotes containing the word years:
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—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)