Governor of the Isle of Man before and after the Revestment, in office from the early 1760s until the later 1770s.

His surviving letters to the Duke of Atholl run from 1762 to October 1764, and much of their business is money. They record the remittances sent over regularly to the Lord of Man, among them £1,100 British despatched with the Michaelmas abstract by Charles Lace, who was held by contrary winds and storms long after the sailing and reached Liverpool safely in the end. The quarterly abstracts of imports were the instrument by which the state of the Island's trade was laid before its proprietor, and Wood noted the wrecks of ships bound for the Isle by which the Duke's revenues suffered.

Writing from Castletown in December 1762, he reported that the box of tithe conveyances had arrived safe and that he had received the King's commands to proclaim the cessation of arms, which he hoped would put more spirit into a trade that had seemed for some months to be declining.

On the death of the second Duke he set the Island's mourning in order, arranging for minute guns to be fired for an hour on the return from chapel and directing enquiry into whether the parish churches had customarily been hung with mourning. He also recalled the interim commission he had given to young Taubman, acting on a paragraph in the late Duke's last letter which had wished the surviving Deemster to carry both offices, and their perquisites, until a successor could be settled by established rules.

Revestment changed whom he served rather than what he did. His predecessors had sworn to deal uprightly between the Lord and his people. Wood's own oath as Governor bound him to deal truly and uprightly between the King and his subjects within the Isle, and as indifferently between party and party as the staff of office then stood, and to call the Council together whenever he thought it necessary. His warrant of appointment as Governor under the Crown was issued by Sandwich on 21 June 1765. In March of that year, in the weeks when the sale was before Parliament, it was to Wood that George Moore applied for the Keys to be convened, and Wood who issued the precepts.

The new revenue establishment brought a jurisdictional quarrel. In 1771 he wrote to the Treasury complaining of deputations issued to revenue officers, arguing that the office and jurisdiction of the Water-Bailiff had not been properly explained to their Lordships, and warning of the confusion and clashing of jurisdictions likely to follow. Charles Lutwidge answered him in the same file. Wood was succeeded as Governor-in-Chief by Colonel Edward Smith.