Captain Sir William Hoste, 1st Baronet KCB was a Royal Navy officer. Best known as one of Lord Nelson's protégés, Hoste was one of the great frigate captains of the Napoleonic Wars, taking part in six major engagements, including the capture of the heavily fortified port of Kotor during the Adriatic campaign of 1807–1814. He was, however, absent from the Battle of Trafalgar, having been sent with gifts to the Dey of Algiers.

The Adriatic campaign was a minor theatre of war during the Napoleonic Wars in which a succession of small British Royal Navy and Austrian Navy squadrons and independent cruisers harried the combined naval forces of the First French Empire, the Kingdom of Italy, the Illyrian Provinces and the Kingdom of Naples between 1807 and 1814 in the Adriatic Sea. Italy, Naples and Illyria were all controlled either directly or via proxy by the French Emperor Napoleon I, who had seized them at the Treaty of Pressburg in the aftermath of the War of the Third Coalition.