Andrew Wray

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Andrew Wray is an English civil servant in the employ of the Admiralty; he occupies the influential post of Second Secretary to the Admiralty as substitute for John Barrow, who is represented as being incapacitated by a long illness. Wray first appears in Desolation Island, where Jack and Stephen detect him in cheating at cards.



SPOILER WARNING:  Plot or ending details for "Desolation Island, Treason's Harbour, The Reverse of the Medal, The Thirteen-Gun Salute"  follow.


Wray is on the surface a charming and cultivated man with an informed interest in music and the arts. However, he also cheats at cards, is a spendthrift, an alcoholic, and a bisexual (he is married to Fanny Harte but frequents a brothel in St. James's, London, opposite Black's Club and has a relationship with Ledward). He is also a traitor who is devoted to Napoleon and acts as a spy for France; as a result of this activity he becomes Stephen's enemy as well as Jack's. His animosity towards the latter is aggravated by the attachment between his ill-used wife, the former Fanny Harte, and Jack's protegé William Babbington.

Stephen, while suspicious of Wray's personal character, long remains ignorant of the man's treason; in Treason's Harbour he co-operates with Wray while striving to break up the French spy network in Malta and disastrously entrusts him with an important letter to Diana. Wray and his fellow-conspirator Ledward are finally unmasked in The Reverse of the Medal; the influence of a highly-placed patron, the Duke of Habachtsthal, enables the two to evade arrest and escape abroad. Wray and Ledward are last seen in The Thirteen-Gun Salute, where they are attached to the French embassy to Pulo Prabang.

Occasionally Wray's first name is given as Edmund.

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