Admiral Thomas Graves, 1st Baron Graves, was a British officer of the Royal Navy and a colonial official. He served in the Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence. He was also the Commodore-Governor of Newfoundland for a period of time. With the end of the Seven Years' War, Labrador came under his responsibility as French fishing fleets returned to the French Shore and St. Pierre and Miquelon. Graves strictly enforced the treaties to the extent that the French government protested. Graves' governorship ended in 1764. He returned to active service during the American War of Independence and became commander-in-chief of the North American Squadron in 1781. when Mariot Arbuthnot returned home. During the American Revolution, his fleet was defeated by the Comte de Grasse in the Battle of the Chesapeake at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay on 5 September 1781, leading to the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.

In September 1782, a fleet under his command was caught in a violent storm off the banks of Newfoundland. The captured French ships from the Battle of the Saintes Ville de Paris and HMS Glorieux , and the British ships HMS Ramillies and Centaur foundered, along with other merchant ships, with the loss of 3,500 lives. In 1786 Graves became Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth. With the French Revolutionary Wars, Graves was second in command to Admiral Richard Howe at the British victory over the French at the Battle of the Glorious First of June 1794. Graves became a full admiral and was awarded an Irish peerage as Baron Graves, of Gravesend in the County of Londonderry. Following several battle injuries, Graves retired to his Devon estate in 1794, and died in February 1802, aged 76.