Dawlish Chronicles

One well-known image above all symbolises the evil of the Atlantic Slave trade. Some two and a half centuries later it still has the power to outrage and to move. It is a diagram that was published by British abolitionists in 1788 and which illustrated the “Tight Packing” on a typical slave ship, the Brooks. It shows some 400 human beings confined directly on the lower deck, or on shelving 31 inches above.

The most dreadful aspect of the diagram is the reference to Britain’s Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788, which was considered to be a responsible measure for reducing deaths through overcrowding. The packing shown was legally approved, as it was in full conformance with this Act which allowed each man a rectangular space 6 feet long (72 inches) and 16 inches wide. A slightly smaller allowance was made for women and children.292 slaves were packed on the lower deck, of whom 130 were placed below the shelving above. The latters’ headroom was also restricted, being noted as 31 inches between the transverse beams overhead, but less directly beneath them. Men were placed in the forward part of the ship and women and children aft. The mind recoils from imaging the conditions these people endured for weeks in terror, without sanitation , adequate food, water or exercise as these ships crossed sweltering tropical seas and as the dead – and sometimes the sick – were tossed overboard.

The horror of such transport reached its peak in bad weather. This was driven home to me by an article in an American book, publication date unknown, author unspecified, and entitled “Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy” which I discovered on Project Gutenberg while searching for something else. The article quotes from “a letter from Philadelphia, dated November 11th, 1762.” Though no further detail was provided it appears to have been written by somebody – perhaps the captain – of a slave ship, the Phoenix, which was en-route to Chesapeake Bay from the African coast with 332 slaves on board.

Towards sundown on Wednesday 20th of October 1762, when still some 220 miles ESE of its destination, the Phoenixencountered a severe gale from the south, accompanied by high seas, thunder and lightning. She sprung a leak which the pumps proved incapable of keeping pace with and attempts to put the ship before the wind failed. By midnight ballast-sand had blocked the pumps and “there being seven feet water in the hold, all the casks afloat, and the ballast shifted to leeward, (we) cut away the rigging of the main and mizzen masts, both of which went instantly close by the deck, and immediately after the foremast was carried away about twenty feet above.” The guns were thrown overboard to lighten the ship and “we were then under a necessity of letting all our slaves out of irons, to assist in pumping and baling.”

The Phoenixsurvived the night and the weather moderated somewhat. The pumps appeared to have been cleared – temporarily at least – and the water level in the hold had been lowered by three feet. Nevertheless “we found every cask in the hold stove to pieces, so that we only saved a barrel of flour, 10 lbs. of bread, twenty-five gallons of wine, beer, and shrub, and twenty-five gallons of spirits. The seamen and slaves were employed all this day in pumping and baling; the pumps were frequently choked, and brought up great quantities of sand. We were obliged to hoist one of the pumps up, and put it down the quarter deck hatchway. A ship this day bore down upon us, and, though very near, and we making every signal of distress, she would not speak to us.”

By the next day, Friday 22^nd October, the male slaves were “very sullen and unruly, having had no sustenance of any kind for forty-eight hours, except a dram, we put one half of the strongest of them in irons.” On Saturday and Sunday, “all hands night and day could scarce keep the ship clear, and were constantly under arms.”

By Monday morning the slaves were in revolt– “many had got out of irons, and were attempting to break up the gratings; and the seamen not daring to go down in the hold to clear the pumps, we were obliged, for the preservation of our own lives, to kill fifty of the ringleaders and stoutest of them.”

There is no elaboration of this bald statement, no indication of whether these helpless people were shot or killed with edged weapons. The writer does however go on to say that “It is impossible to describe the misery the poor slaves underwent, having had no fresh water for five days. Their dismal cries and shrieks, and most frightful looks, added a great deal to our misfortunes; four of them were found dead, and one drowned herself in the hold.” By that evening the water level was still rising “and three seamen dropped down with fatigue and thirst, which could not be quenched, though wine, rum, and shrub were given them alternately.”

Eyewitness painting by Johann Moritz Rugendas shows conditions on a slave ship headed to Brazil in 1849

There is no elaboration of just what conditions were like in the next three days – they can only have been horrific as the dismasted and sinking ship drifted helplessly. Bby Thursday morning the battle against the rising water was clearly lost. “The seamen (were) quite worn out, and many of them in despair.”

Now comes the letter reaches is appalling conclusion, that needs to be quoted in full: “About ten in the forenoon we saw a sail; about two she discovered us, and bore down; at five spoke to us, being the King George, of Londonderry, James Mackay, master; he immediately promised to take us on board, and hoisted out his yawl, it then blowing very fresh. The gale increasing, prevented him from saving anything but the white people’s lives, not even any of our clothes, or one slave, the boat being scarcely able to live in the sea the last trip she made. Capt. Mackay and some gentlemen, passengers he had on board, treated us with kindness and humanity.”

No further details are given but the words “or one slave” stand as a unanswerable indictment of this unspeakable trade.

If there is a Hell, then there must be a hot corner reserved for those who financed such voyages and profited from them.

Tegetthoff
In the later 19^th and early 20^thCenturies the “K.u.K” – “Royal and Imperial” – Navy was probably the most efficient and well-equipped part of the Austro-Hungarian armed services. Operating out of bases on the Adriatic coast of what would later become Yugoslavia, and well provided with excellent ships, armed with the highly-regarded products of the Skoda arsenals in Bohemia, this navy was to represent a potent threat “in being” during World War 1 which tied up large Allied naval resources to contain it. The K.u.K Navy’s day of greatest glory was however a half-century earlier, when Austria-Hungary’s most famous admiral, Wilhelm von Tegetthoff (1827 –1871) led his fleet to and overwhelming victory over the Italians at Lissa in 1866. A daring and inspirational commander who was to die tragically young, Tegetthoff established a reputation in Austro-Hungarian popular consciousness which was comparable to that of Nelson in Britain. His success at Lissa was however preceded by a narrow tactical defeat two years earlier, not in the K.u.K Navy’s normal operational area of the Adriatic and Mediterranean, but in the distant waters of the North Sea.

The Danish War of 1864 was to be the first of three conflicts deliberately instigated by Prussia’s chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, in the 1864 -1870 period to establish primacy of Prussia over the other separate German Kingdoms and to unite them as a single empire under Prussian leadership. The ostensible reason for the war with Denmark was resolution of “The Schleswig-Holstein Question”, the control of two linguistically-German duchies lying directly south of modern Denmark and at that period under Danish control. The political, dynastic and diplomatic complexities of this “Question” were so impenetrable that the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, was to quip that “Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it."

The Danish screw-frigate Jylland - wooden hulled, steam and sail driven, 44 guns

Though it was to put up a valiant defence, the small Kingdom of Denmark was to find itself heavily outnumbered and outgunned by the combined land forces of Prussia and Austria-Hungary. The latter had allowed itself to be drawn into the conflict – stupidly as it was to find out two years later, when Prussia was to attacker it in turn. It was only at sea that the Danes were to have a degree of superiority since it had a well-equipped and competent navy, whereas Prussia still had negligible naval forces – little more than a gunboat flotilla – and the more formidable Austro-Hungarian Navy was operating far from its home bases. The Danes were to use their resources effectively in support of land operations as well as imposing a blockade on Prussian ports.

The most significant encounter of the short-duration (effectively February – May 1864) war was to occur close to its end, when significant naval forces clashed close to the then British-controlled island of Heligoland.

Heligoland - exchanged by Britain with Germany for Zanzibar in 1890

On May 9^tha squadron of three powerful Danish vessels under the command of Admiral Edouard Suenson – the 42/44-gun screw frigates, Niels Juel and Jylland, supported by the 16-gun screw corvette Hejmdal– approaching from the north, sighted the neutral British frigate HMS Aurora on station off the island. Beyond her however, to the south-west, five other vessels came into view. These were the powerful Austro-Hungarian screw frigates Schwarzenberg (51 guns) and Radetzky (37-guns), accompanied by three insignificant Prussian gunboats mounting three or for guns each. This squadron was under Tegetthoff’s overall command.

The Niels Juel in action - superb action-painting by Christian Mølsted

Both forces advanced to engage and at 13.15 hours the action commenced when Tegetthoff’s flagship, the Schwarzenbergopened fire. This was returned by the Danes only when the range had shortened to a mile. An attempt by Tegetthoff to execute the classic “crossing the T” manoeuvre failed. Had it been successful it would have allowed his two vessels to concentrate their combined broadsides on the Danish lead ship. Instead, a Danish turn allowed the squadrons to pass each other in line. By this stage the three Prussian gunboats had fallen behind and Tegetthoff turned to prevent them being cut off by the Danes. This brought the opposing squadrons running south-westwards in two parallel lines. The Niels Juel concentrated her fire on the Schwarzenberg, while Jylland and Hejmdal directed theirs on the Radetzky.

Schwartzenberg, burning, leading the Austro-Hungarian line, Danish ships on right of painting

The action lasted for some two hours and culminated in the Schwarzenbergsustaining such serious damage that she took fire. With her loss a definite possibility, Tegetthoff decided to make for the neutral zone around Heligoland. The pursuit by the Danes had to be abandoned as the British Aurora, which had observed the action, was standing by to enforce neutrality if so needed. There was no option but to remain outside the three-mile limit while Tegetthoff managed to get the fire on the flagship under control. In the course of the following night he managed to evade the Danish squadron and bring his ships to the nearby Prussian-controlled port of Cuxhaven.

Radetsky following Schwartzenberg - painting by noted German naval artist Willy Kirchner

The action was generally judged to be – narrowly – a Danish tactical victory. The butcher’s bill had been small – 17 Danes killed and 37 wounded as compared with 37 dead and 93 wounded on the Austro-Hungarian ships – though the losses would have been bitter indeed for the families of the men involved. Victory or defeat was irrelevant however. Three days later, on May 12^th, an armistice was implemented which brought the fighting by land and by sea to an end. By the subsequent settlement Denmark lost control of the two duchies in contention and they were in due course incorporated into what became the German Empire. They have remained German ever since.

The Jylland's officers after the battle (note the dog!)

Denmark may have lost the war, but her resistance had been heroic and considerable national pride is still taken in it, justifiably so. The 2400-ton Jylland, one of the largest wooden warships ever built, and which had sustained major damage in the battle, has been preserved as a national monument. She is today on display in a dry dock at Ebeltoft.

This engagement off Heligoland was to prove the last major action before iron and steel replaced wood as the main construction material for ships. When Tegetthoff was to go into action again two years later – this time during a war which would pit Austria-Hungary against its former ally Prussia – it was to be in a battle dominated by ironclads. On that occasion there would be no doubt as to who had gained victory, whether it tactical or strategic or both.

But that’s another story, and will be the subject of a future blog.

Just published: Britannia’s Spartan

AuthorAntoine Vanner talks about his latest novel, Britannia’s Spartan, in a shortvideo. Click here to watch it.

In April 1882 Captain Nicholas Dawlish RN has just taken command of the Royal Navy’s newest cruiser, HMS Leonidas. Her voyage to the Far East is to be a peaceful venture, a test of this innovative vessel’s engines and boilers. Dawlish has no forewarning of the nightmare of riot, treachery, massacre and battle he and his crew will encounter.

A new balance of power is emerging in the Far East. Imperial China, weak and corrupt, is challenged by a rapidly modernising Japan, while Russia threatens from the north. All need to control Korea, a kingdom frozen in time and reluctant to emerge from centuries of isolation.

Dawlish finds himself a critical player in a complex political powder keg. He must take account of a weak Korean king and his shrewd queen, of murderous palace intrigue, of a power-broker who seems more American than Chinese and a Japanese naval captain whom he will come to despise and admire in equal measure. And he will have no one to turn to for guidance…

Click below for more details:

For UK: Click here For US: Click here

The Good Samaritan has had a deservedly good image over the last two millennia. An equally well-deserved degree of obloquy has been heaped on two others who had previously seen the unfortunate traveller who had fallen among thieves but who “passed by on the other side” without helping. On countless occasions at sea captains and crews have played the Good Samaritan role, risking their ships and their lives to help others in distress and it has been a matter of pride among seafarers of all nations that they should do so.

It is however a chilling though that there have been occasions when ships have “passed on the other side” and have ignored requests for assistance. Reduction of visibility due to bad weather may play a role in such cases and one would always like to give the benefit of the doubt as regards innocence. The uneasy feeling does remain that at many times – especially in pre-radio days – distress appeals went unanswered and the subsequent disaster ensured that no survivors remained to appeal for justice.

The reality of shipwreck - the classic painting by the Russian artist Ivan Aivazofski (1817-1900)

This line of thought has been prompted by a short newspaper article from 1876 which sets out bare facts only and on which it is hard to come to a verdict one way or the other. It relates to an incident on the Kish Bank, a shallow sand-bank in the Irish Sea, some dozen miles due east of the port of Dublin. It was known for centuries as a hazard to shipping and a lightship was first moored on it in 1811. Lightships continued to provide warning until 1966 when a lighthouse of innovative design was installed. This telescopic structure was built of concrete close to Dublin and was towed to the bank. After sinking in position the telescopic sections were raised, giving a final height of 100-feet. It is clearly visible from shore in clear weather.

The horror of a grounded ship being pounded to destruction
(Shown here is the Rothesay Castle in 1831 - the Vespa's fate would have been similar)

In January 1876 a relatively new (built 1865) merchant steamer, the Vesper, ran aground on the Kish Bank. What followed was succinctly summed up in an article that appeared the following day in the Dublin daily newspaper “Freeman’s Journal”. It is quoted in its totality below:

Quote

Yesterday a screw steamer bound from Glasgow to Dunkirk ran on the Kish sandbank. The steamer was the Vesper, 60.horse power, laden with a cargo of 620 tons of coal and sugar, in command of Captain Tolson with a crew of 18 hands and belonged to Messrs. Huntley Berner and Co, of Glasgow.

The ship left Glasgow the previous night at 10 o'clock. The captain was on watch at the time the vessel struck. She began to fill and all efforts to get her off having failed, he ordered signals of distress to be made. A large fire was lit on the deck with paraffin oil and blue lights were burned from the masthead. The vessel was not observed by any of the life-boats crews or coastguard along the shore, although the weather was perfectly clear.

A heavy sea was running at the time and as the ship began to settle down the sea washed over her decks. In three hours the water rushing in forced up the hatchways upon which the crew had to take to the boats. One of them was stove in and the port boat was washed off the ship. The only remaining one to which the crew had to take was the starboard.

The crew say that before leaving a steamer passed in sight shortly before seven o'clock without paying any attention to their helpless condition and soon after another steamer and a fishing smack passed few miles off and left them in the same plight. The crew and captain numbering fourteen men left the ship about eight o'clock in the boat and steered for land which was about twelve miles off and they arrived in Killiney Bay about eleven o'clock when they were assisted by some men, and were provided with railway tickets for Dublin by the Station Master and afterwards put up at the Sailors Home.

Unquote

One is struck by the cold precision of the report – the impression that there was nothing particularly remarkable about the event. Considering the number of shipwrecks that occurred in British coastal waters in this period this is perhaps not surprising. A single instance suffices – in a major storm in February 1871 no less than 28 ships, many of them collier brigs, were wrecked off the North East Coast of England.

A scene all too common on 19th Century Britain's beaches - shipwrecked mariners struggling ashore

The Vespa’s destruction was obviously a terrifying event and her crew were lucky to have got off her alive. One does however wonder whether the ship was ever in fact seen by the vessels in the vicinity or whether these latter did indeed “pass on the other side”. Had they done so the action might not have been prompted by callousness alone, but by a realisation that bringing in another vessel over the bank would have resulted in her destruction also. Today, in the early 21^st. Century, one would expect that such an incident would have been the subject of detailed investigation. This may have happened – if so details are hard to come by.

And as regards the vessels that passed by on the other side? At this remove it is perhaps best to avoid judgement and give the benefit of the doubt. There was however one undoubted Good Samaritan – that role was played the Station Master who provided the train tickets!

The most recent Dawlish Chronicles novel, Britannia’s Spartan, is set in Korea in 1882 when internal pressures and great-power interventions plunged the country into riot and chaos. A malign role is played by the “Daewongun”, the father of the weak King Gojong. Initially regent for his son, this callous man sought subsequently to dominate the spineless monarch even after he had come of age. The only Korean who later emerged at a later stage to counter the Daewongun’s power was the King’s clever, brave and ruthless wife, Queen Min. The merciless contest between her and her father-in-law was to play out over two decades and would end only with the brutal murder of one of them.

The Daewongun, circa 1870

By 1882 Yi Ha-ung (1821-1898), the Daewongun – a title meaning “Prince of the Great Court” – had been a near-dominant player in internal Korean politics for some eighteen years, ever since his infant son had succeeded to the throne. (Q. Why wasn’t the Daewongun king himself? A. Complex succession rules excluded him from the post). Cruel, vindictive and cold-bloodedly effective, a thoroughly nasty piece of work by any standards, Yi Ha-ung was to prove adept in playing off internal and external forces against each other.

During the 1860s the Daewongun’sprime concerns was maintenance of Korea as “The Hermit Kingdom”, cut off as far as possible from the outside world and maintaining traditional structures and culture unchanged. Though nominally a vassal state of the Chinese Empire, contacts with China did not challenge such structures or values. Powerful political and economic forces were at play in the area however. China had proved itself incapable of withstanding pressures brought to bear on it by Britain and other powers and was in a quandary – which would not be resolved for decades – as to whether to embrace Western models of industrialisation, government and economic development. Japan, by contrast, despite initial doubts, and even civil war to decide them, had already committed to a transformation that would make it a major military, naval and industrial power by the end of the century. From both Asian countries the lesson was obvious – continued isolation from global trends would be impossible.

A key factor in the Daewongun’sisolationist policy in the 1860s was concern for the challenge presented to traditional Confucian beliefs – and as a consequence, authority-structures also – by the arrival of Catholic missionaries. Some had arrived from China in the late 18^th Century but their impact only became significant from the 1840s when members of the French Société des Missions étrangères de Paris began to arrive in greater numbers and to make substantial numbers of Korean converts. Many such missionaries were to be executed – often savagely – in China, Indo-China and Korea, but this proved no deterrent to the insanely courageous men who took on this work. No less heroic were their converts, who remained faithful to their new beliefs and were murdered in much greater numbers in successive persecutions.

Korean converts in detention - note the boards fastened around their necks

By 1860 the number of Korean converts were estimated as some 20,000, despite persecution campaigns in 1839 – when a French bishop, Laurent Imbert ,was tortured and beheaded, as were many Koreans – and 1846, when the first native Korean priest was executed. Some estimates of the number of Korean Christians murdered during the century are as high as 10,000. It is against this background that the Daewongunlaunched a new wave of persecution soon after acceding to the regency in 1864. By this time another French bishop, Siméon-François Berneux (1814 –1866), had been appointed to Korea – and was working in a semi-clandestine way with the support of twelve other French missionaries.

Interrogation of Bishop Berneux, 1866

The Daewongun found his pretext for action in early 1866 when vessels of the Russian Navy arrived on Korea’s East Coast and demanded trading rights, including residency provisions for traders. There were obviously similarities to the United States’ “Opening Up” of Japan in the mid-1850s, and to Western nations securing unequal trading and extraterritoriality rights in China. Concerned about Russian intentions, a number of Korean Christians saw this as an opportunity for urging a Korean-French alliance to withstand further incursions. Bishop Berneux appears to have been mentioned as a possible intermediary. The Daewongun seems to have been open initially to such suggestions but this may have been a trick to bring the all-but-underground church into the open. Berneux was invited to the capital, Seoul, but on arrival, in February 1866, he was imprisoned, tortured and beheaded. A round-up now commenced of the other missionaries – nine of the twelve – and they suffered equally gruesome fates. The burden fell heaviest on the Korean Christians however, being slaughtered by the thousand along the Han River, close to Seoul. One of the three missionaries who had evaded execution, Felix-Claire Ridel, escaped to by a fishing vessel to Tianjin (then known as Tientsin) in Northern China in early July 1866.

La Guerriere, seen at Nagasaki in 1866

The timing of Ridel’s arrival was providential since the commander of the Far Eastern Squadron of the French Navy, Rear Admiral Pierre-Gustave Roze, was present in Tianjin with the powerful frigate La Guerriere., Informed of the murders – which could only be construed as an insult to French honour – Henri de Bellonet, the French representative at the Imperial Chinese court in Beijing (then Peking), some 80 miles from Tianjin, instructed Admiral Roze determined to mount a punitive expedition against Korea. The decision was most likely also influenced by the fact that there had been attacks on Westerners in China also, and effective action against Korea was likely to send a strong message there also.

Admiral Roze (centre) and members of La Guerriere's crew

Roze now set about organising his expedition, a major hazard to which was lack of charts of Korea’s highly indented western coast with its many navigational hazards. Attention was focussed instead on the offshore island of Ganghwa, at the mouth of the Han River, occupation of which would cut off export traffic to the sea from the Korean interior in the harvest season. A powerful French force – La Guerriere, the corvettes Laplace and Primauguet, the gunboats Lebrethonand Tardif and two despatch vessels, Kien–Chan and Déroulède, was concentrated at the port of Yantai (then known as Chefoo) on the Shantung Peninsula, almost directly across the Yellow Sea from Ganghwa and Seoul. Marines and other troops available allowed for a French landing force of 800.

Korean fortification under French attack

On 11th October Roze’s force bombarded the Korean fortifications on Ganghwa which dominated entrance to the Han. These were subdued despite resistance and marines were landed to secure them. The occupation was to last six weeks. Early the following month, with access to the Han clear, the lighter French vessels pushed upriver towards Seoul, some 40 miles distant. On the way several more fortifications were subdued and a significant amount of looting seems to have taken place. Arriving at Seoul, Admiral Roze demanded surrender of the two surviving French missionaries and reinforced his request with a bombardment of official buildings on 11^thNovember. Results were immediate – the Daewongunreleased the French priests. Honour satisfied, Roze dropped back downriver, but not without inflicting further damage to property as a reminder of the inadvisability of challenging French prestige again. Forces were withdrawn from Ganghwa and the expedition was at an end.

Queen Min - lovely, brave and ruthless

Small-scale, and limited in its objectives as it was, Roze’s foray served notice that further Korean attempts to maintain its isolation would be futile. In the coming years the nation would experience similarly-minor incursions by American forces and in the 1870s and 1880s it was to find itself the focus of Chinese, Russian and – most of all – Japanese intentions to dominate it. The history of these decades was to be an unhappy one, and the Daewongun was to remain a major player, though his power was to be increasingly challenged by Queen Min (1851-1895). Readers of Britannia’s Spartan will remember how their rivalry took a murderous turn in 1882 (and how the British Naval officer, Nicholas Dawlish, found himself drawn unwittingly into their machinations!).

And in 1882, no less than in 1866, a long career of infamy still lay before the Daewongun. We’ll return to him – and to the somewhat more attractive Queen Min – in a future blog.

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**A 5-Star Review of Britannia’s Spartan on Amazon.com**

“Rusty Edge” commented as follows on December 28, 2015:

The Dawlish Chronicles are a New Direction in Historical Nautical Fiction

Oak, wind, and black powder are being replaced by steel, steam, and high explosives. Dawlish embraced the change, and has finally been given his well earned and long promised promotion to captain and an independent command of the Royal Navy's newest cruiser. All of that time developing torpedoes and fighting in proxy wars has paid off.

The trouble is, he has little reputation among brother officers and crew because all of that is secret. They assume he is where he is on the basis of patronage rather than merit. He has to prove himself to them as an officer on sea and land. Not only that, but he has to prove himself yet again to his master Admiral Topcliff, this time as a diplomat. In wartime you engage your enemy and are rewarded for success. In peacetime, it's hard to know what to do and how far to go. Dawlish only knows that his life, career and reputation are in peril whatever he does.

Dawlish has always struggled with ambition and duty vs. personal honor. Here in the Far East he is faced with different ideas of what those things mean. Again he finds that the most dangerous villains aren't his open enemies. Sometimes it's his allies, be they ruthless, zealous, treacherous, or simply greedy.

Vanner has introduced and developed fascinating characters in this series, and I am looking forward to revisiting them in future historical conflicts. Beyond that, I am looking forward to other as yet unknown authors becoming inspired and eventually following his footsteps into Victorian historical nautical fiction.

To learn more, and to read the opening of Britannia's Spartan, click here.

Classic Pantaloon

In my blog of 27^th November 2015 (link provided at end of article) I outlined the duties – and the attendant hazards – of the Royal Navy’s Anti-Slavery Squadron off the West African coast in the era 1815 to 1860. Personnel allocated to this service faced the most serious peace-time dangers of any in the navy of the time, some of the encounters with armed slave-ships being of an intensity equal to that encountered in the Napoleonic Wars. Such battles were among the last ever fought between sailing ships and one such desperate action involved the bizarrely-named HMS Pantaloon in 1845. Ludicrous as this name appears to modern ears, it should be pointed out that it referred to a stock-character who appeared in the “Harlequinade” theatrical pantomimes popular in Britain at the time and derived originally from the Italian Commedia dell'arte. Pantaloon was the name of an aged buffoon, father of the beautiful Columbine, and of whose lover Harlequin he disapproves – and is bested by. A ten-gun sloop, which entered service in 1831, HMS Pantaloon was indeed matched from 1836 by a generally comparable HMS Harlequin.

In May 1845, while patrol on anti-slavery duty off what is now Nigeria, Pantaloon, under a Commander Wilson, detected a suspected slaver, although from contemporary accounts she does not appear to have been be loaded with human cargo. Pantaloonchased her for two days, in what seem to have been light airs and on 26^thMay. Both ships were becalmed off Lagos. The slaver proved to be the 400 tons polacca-rigged Borboleta. Contemporary accounts refer to her having “immense sails”. The term "polacca" seems to have referred primarily to the masting, and possibly hull type. Two-masted polaccas carried square sails on both masts and a contemporary illustration of the action that was to follow shows just such a vessel. The type was most common in the Mediterranean (and figure frequently as prizes in the Aburey-Maturin cycle) but the fact that the Borboleta appears to have been Spanish-manned probably accounts for the use of such a fast type as a slaver. This particular vessel was already “of great celebrity on the coast”, was armed with four 12-pounders and carried a crew of some 60.

"A Graeco-Ottoman Polacca" painted pre-1836 by Antoine Roux
What a beautiful vessel!

Unable, due to lack of wind, to bring Pantaloon directly into action, Wilson decided to attack with her pulling boats. A cutter and two whalers were sent under command of the first lieutenant, Lewis Prevost, supported by the master, a Mr J.T. Crout, and the boatswain, Mr Pasco. The force amounted in total to some 30 officers, seamen and marines. As they approached the slaver it opened fire with round-shot and grape. Intensely vulnerable to such opposition – a hit by a single 12-pound ball would have been sufficient to demolish any of the boats – the only defence was for the marines to maintain a steady hail of musketry on the slaver while the seaman pulled at their utmost. The approach must have been nightmarish – a half hour was afterwards mentioned as the time between fire being opened and Pantaloon’s boats reaching the slaver’s side.

Another lovely polacca painted by Antoine Roux

Prevost and Pasco brought the whalers alongside to starboard while Crout, in the cutter, came in to port. By this stage the Spanish crew seem to have been running out of munitions for their guns were by now loaded with “bullets, nails, lead, etcetera” Prevost and the men in the whalers stormed on board while Crout’s cutter party came on over the port bow. One of these latter attempted to enter via a gun-port at the moment the weapon within it was fired. He managed to get through unscathed by the man following him was thrown into the water by the discharge, luckily without fatal consequences.

Contemporary illustration - Borboleta under attack by the pulling boats
Note Pantaloon in the distance on the left

A vicious hand to hand struggle followed – the marines were by now on board also. In that era before multi-shot weapons there would have been little opportunity to load pistols or muskets, so that the issue was settled by bayonet and cutlass. Seven of the slavers were killed and another eight badly wounded before the remainder broke, ran below for cover, and thereafter surrendered.

Pantaloon’s losses were numerically lower – two men, the master Crout and the boatswain Pasco. Both men would have been in the van of leading their men in the boarding. Five others were seriously wounded, the overall loss rate being that comparable to that suffered by the slavers. Lieutenant Prevost received immediate promotion. He was to take command of the Pantaloonsoon afterwards but was not to be lucky in her. In September 1848, in the Cape Verde Islands, a grounded sloop, HMS Ranger called for assistance. She was floated off successfully but Prevost did not take adequate precautions for securing her so that she could be rolled over on her side for repair. The result was that she broke free in bad weather and sank. Representations were made that Ranger could be refloated but Prevost decided that she was beyond salvage. A few days later, with other support, Ranger was raised and repaired. The consequence of these successive failings was that Prevost was court-martialled and dismissed from command of Pantaloon. His career was eventually to recover – he was to achieve captain’s rank – but the humiliation must have been intense.

It was a sad postscript to a brilliant feat of arms.

To view earlier blog on Anti-Slavery Duty click here

To see Antoine Vanner talk about his latest novel, Britannia's Spartan, in a short video, click here

Soviet Stamp: 300th Anniversary of Bering

When thinking of the exploration of the Pacific the name that most immediately comes for mind is that of Captain James Cook (1728 – 1779) whose three voyages in the 1760s and 70s added immensely to knowledge of that ocean. These expeditions, meticulously planned, splendidly resourced and staffed by excellent officers, seamen, cartographers and scientists, were the equivalent in their own day of the Apollo Program. The focus in the first two voyages was on the South Pacific and Australasia but the third, which was to see Cook murdered in Hawaii, focussed on the Northern Pacific and its North American coast line. In the course of this voyage Cook penetrated the Bering Strait between Asia and Alaska and entered the fringes of the Arctic Ocean.

Cook’s achievement was impressive, but the initial exploration of the Northern Pacific had been almost a half-century earlier by a man who had to cope with far greater challenges as regards resourcing and back-up. Though he gave his name to the Strait that separates Asia and America Vitus Jonassen Bering (1681-1741) is largely unknown outside Russia. His achievement in the face of almost insuperable odds make him however one of the true giants of exploration.

Born in Denmark, and at sea from the age of 18, Bering was one of the many foreign officers recruited by Czar Peter the Great (1672 – 1725) who was rapidly modernising his country and establishing it as a great European power. A key element in his strategy was not only securing a Russian outlet on the Baltic – which became the new capital, St. Petersburg – but the creating from scratch of a navy to defend it. “The Great Northern War” that raged between Russia and Sweden from 1700-1721 saw Peter’s ambitions realised.

Bering had been with the Russian Navy since 1704 and though he resigned briefly in 1724 he re-enlisted almost immediately, around the time of Peter’s death. Rule of the vast empire now passed to Peter’s widow Catherine (1684 –1727), a woman of obscure and lowly origin who was to prove herself surprisingly capable in government affairs. She inherited Peter’s ambition to have Eastern Siberia’s Pacific coastline and the seas beyond mapped for the first time. At this time Russian settlers, very few in number, were established on only a few small settlement communities on the Sea of Okhotsk and on the vast peninsula of Kamchatka. None of these places possessed port or shipbuilding facilities and any exploration expedition would be expected to build the vessels it needed once it got to the coast there.

The choice of Bering as expedition leader seems to have reflected some prior experience of distant navigation, notably in the Indian Ocean and the North American East Coast. Supported by a cartographer and several experienced officers, Bering’s instructions were to move up Kamchatka’s east coast and to determine whether a strait did indeed exist – as was suspected – between Asia and America. Bering’s first challenge was to get to Russia’s Far East. Leaving St. Petersburg on February 5th, 1725, and crossing Siberia – much of it still all but unexplored – by horse, foot and boat, and enduring food-shortages and savage winters, Bering, his men and their equipment took two years to reach Okhotsk. By early 1728 they had crossed to Kamchatka, where, on the 4th of April building commenced of a boat called the Gabriel. This was based on the design of a Baltic packet-boat. The challenge of doing so was immense for timber had to be cut down and dressed into planks for construction. It is therefore all the more impressive that this craft was ready enough to set sail some three months later, in mid- July.

The Gabriel as drawn by Martin Spangsberg in 1827. Picture: Danish Geografisk Tidsskrift

In conformance with his orders Bering crept north-eastwards alone the coast, discovering St. Lawrence Island. He passed through what is now known as the Bering Strait, into the Chukchi Sea. It was still however impossible to say with certainty that the Asian and American landmasses were separate, although it was suspected, but rapidly advancing ice in mid-August forced Bering to the decision to return to Kamchatka. The voyage had lasted seven weeks. His return overland journey to report his findings in St. Petersburg now commenced, arriving in early 1730. He was ennobled for his work and his had findings aroused sufficient questions for a second expedition to be necessary to resolve them.

It seems amazing by modern standards that it should have taken a decade before the next expedition, once more under Bering’s command finally set sail from Kamchatka. (The contrast with the will to mount Cook’s three expedions in a decade is obvious). The intervening years had been occupied by political manoeuvring, command issues and logistics challenges. Supplies were once more carried across Siberia, a proposal to send them by sea around Cape Horn being rejected. Two new vessels were constructed at Okhotsk, the Michael and the Nadezhda, in addition to refurbishment of the Gabriel. Thereafter three other vessels, St. Peter, St. Paul and Okhotsk , followed - these were to form Bering’s exploration flotilla, he himself on board the St. Peter.

1966 Soviet postage-stamp showing course of Bering's last voyage

It was 1741 before the new expedition sailed from Kamchatka. The three-ship flotilla was dispersed in a storm soon afterwards and Bering decided to press on alone. He headed for the American coast and pressed eastwards along it, touching at Kayak Island and sighting Mount Saint Elias, on the northern end of what is now Alaska’s Panhandle. A second ship got separately as far as Prince of Wales Island before turning back. Scurvy, the cause of which was then not understood, was now however hitting Bering’s crew so badly that they were barely capable of working the ship. There was no option but to turn back towards Kamchatka, discovering several islands of the Aleutian chain in the process.

Shipwreck on Bering Island

Bering was by now too ill to leave his cabin. Nearing the peninsula in early November, at what was later to be called Bering Island, the St. Peter was hit by a storm that drove her towards rocks offshore. Attempts to moor failed but the sea was powerful enough to wash the damaged vessel bodily over the rocks into quieter where it was trapped. Salvation was illusory – the island was barren, devoid of trees, and with little driftwood. With the ship no longer a place of refuge small ravines were roofed over to provide shelter. Many of the scurvy-racked crew died during transfer ashore. Bering himself survived this landing but had to be moved about on a wheel-barrow and he directed survival efforts as long as possible. He died a month later in a shelter which was already collapsing – it proved necessary to dig him out before he could be formally buried.

Given the challenges they faced it is surprising that 45 of the St. Peter’s 75-man crew were to survive the freezing privations of the winter, doing so by eating the carcasses of dead whales that had been driven ashore. In the following spring they managed to construct a boat from the wreckage of their ship and in it they reached Kamchatka.

A Sea Otter drawn by Georg Wilhelm Steller. (Wikipedia Commons)

Despite its disastrous cost in human terms, Bering’s last expedition yielded valuable geographical and scientific information. This included mapping of much of the coast of present day Alaska. The expedition’s German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709 – 1746) identified six new species of birds and animals. One of his insights was that the Jay he identified on shore was similar to the already-known American Blue Jay, thereby supporting the conclusion that the continents were separate. He continued his studies while marooned on Bering Island and was subsequently to write a book describing its fauna. Steller’s fate was to be a sad one. He spent two years exploring Kamchatka after he returned there but because of his sympathy for the indigenous population he was accused of instigating a rebellion. Summoned back to St. Petersburg, he died of illness on the way.

Bering’s discoveries were the impetus for the halting, poorly-conceived, badly managed and under-resourced efforts to establish of a Russian presence in North America. Had more attention been paid to this, and should there have been any clear vision of what could have been achieved, it is unlikely that the Czarist government would have sold Alaska to the United States for a pittance in 1867. Doing so could have had incalculable strategic and epoch-changing consequences – one of the great “What Ifs” of history.

Author Antoine Vanner talks about his latest novel, Britannia’s Spartan, in a shortvideo. Click here to watch it.

Another 5-Star review of Britannia’s Spartan on amazon.com:

Iron men steaming into danger. Superb characterization and historical details. A truly wonderful book.

By Westsail on December 22, 2015

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

Antoine Vanner is a rare find - an author who knows his subject matter inside out and who possesses the ability to communicate that knowledge in a gripping and highly entertaining style. His creation, Nicholas Dawlish, is so completely rendered that the reader rejects the possibility that he is a fictional character rather than a piece out of the Victorian era. Vanner knows the details of the engineering innovations in whose creation and trials Dawlish often is involved. The ships in Vanner's novels are characters as well drawn as the people who sail them. The political sides of these books are well put together as well, from London to Seoul. All of the Dawlish novels are delights in themselves. I believe, however, that Vanner continues to improve. In my opinion, Britannia's Spartan is his best to date. One waits with bated breath for each additional gem!

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The US Navy’s role in the suppression of Barbary piracy in the Mediterranean is deservedly well known but few today are aware that in the 1830s two American expeditions were launched against pirates in what is now Indonesia. The scene was to be the then semi-independent Sultanate of Ache (Atjeh in Dutch) in Sumatra and the interventions were to be the precursor to an intense and bloody series of conflicts from 1873 to 1904 in which the Netherlands’ colonial army struggled to bring the area under Dutch rule. (These campaigns will be the subject of a later blog).

Salem in the 1830s - the base for Peabody's shipping empire

European spheres of influence in South East Asia were still fluid in the early 1830s. Britain had taken its first steps to control of Malaya by creating the “Straits Settlements” of Penang, Singapore and Malacca in the 1820s but lying directly to its west was the gigantic island of Sumatra. Though part of the “East Indies” which were for the Dutch as the most important part of their overseas empire, Dutch power in Sumatra was still limited and would be for decades to come. The Ache sultanate in the island’s north was to all practical purposes an independent entity and free to engage with trade with all comers. Among these comers were American traders, who were building up a great commercial and shipping empire in the Far East. One of the most prominent of these was Joseph Peabody (1757 –1844) of Salem, Massachusetts. Beginning his seagoing career on privateers during the American War of Independence he was to establish himself as a major ship-owner, building as many as 83 ships during his career and achieving great wealth in the process.

Pirate vessels of the East Indies

Ache’s most valuable trading commodity was pepper – a commodity high in value for a small volume – and it was pepper that brought Peabody’s trading vessel Friendship to the Sumatra’s North West coast, close to settlement of Kuala Batee, in February 1831. The area was under the control of several local chieftains who appear to have had loose but cordial contacts with the sultanate. The Friendship’s captain, Charles Endicott, landed with a small group of sailors 7^th February to bargain for pepper. While this party was on shore a group of local thugs in small prahus– outrigger sailing craft – boarded the Friendship, killed the first officer and two of the crew members and captured the ship. Four other men escaped from the Friendshipby swimming two miles down the coast and hiding in the forest.

With the support of a local leader called Pak Adam, Captain Endicott managed to make contact with three other American trading vessels in the area, the James Monroe, the Governor Endicott and the Palmer. All carried guns – a necessity in this pirate-infested area – and the Friendshipwas recovered only after the criminals leaped overboard and when fire had been opened on the nearby village.

The Friendship’sreturn to Salem with news of the outrage aroused widespread anger – the more so since this was during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, not a man to accept insult or injury meekly. The upshot was that orders were sent to Commodore John Downes, captain of the American Frigate Potomac, then cruising off Brazil. He was to proceed to Kuala Batee, assess the situation and take any measures he deemed necessary to ensure future safety of American traders in the area. This was the start of what became known as “The First Sumatran Expedition”.

The USS Potomac - she was to see service through the Civil War

Like other “frigates” of the US Navy in the early 19^th century the Potomac, completed in 1831, was more heavily armed than any of European vessel of the same designation. Her 32 carronades and 35 long guns (including two bow and three stern-chasers) gave her fearsome firepower for her size. Her crew of 480 – trained as were all crews of the era in the use of cutlass and small arms – added the potential of a powerful landing force.

The Potomacarrived off Kuala Batee in early February 1832, almost an exact year since the Friendship’s ordeal. Downes disguised his ship as a Dutch merchant vessel, with her guns pulled back behind the decks and all ports shut. Unsuspecting locals came on board and, when questioned about the village’s defences, provided useful information. The attack that followed commenced at dawn on 6^th February 1832 with a bombardment to cover landing of 282 American marines and seamen to the north of the settlement. Several “forts” – small stockades – were damaged by naval gunfire and stormed and by midday the Sumatran defenders had retreated inland, leaving the Americans to burn buildings and boats in reprisal. American losses amounted to two killed and some half-dozen wounded while somewhere between 80 and 100 (estimates differ) Sumatrans were killed and many more wounded. Honour had been satisfied. The American force withdrew to the Potomac, remained offshore for several days and thereafter set sail for the United States, circumnavigating the globe in the process.

A Sumatran woman helping to defend her husband - perhaps against Corporal John L. Dubois

News of the action reached the United States by other ships prior to the Potomac’s return and a portion of the population – who had not been there and knew of the incident only by hearsay – were immediately outraged by reports of collateral casualties. Women and children had indeed died, but it was not always obvious that they were non-combatants. The first report appeared on 7 July 1832, the New-York Observer, an abolitionist, anti-slavery newspaper. It mentioned that “There were several women killed who had the hardihood to take up arms when they saw their husbands fall at their feet; indeed it was impossible to distinguish the sex, they dress so much alike”. It stated further in the article that “John L. Dubois, ships corporal …. was wounded by a Malay woman in attacking the forts. This woman was with an Indian, probably her husband, who was attacked and killed by Dubois. As soon as she saw her husband fall, she had the courage to revenge him by attacking Dubois with a sabre; she cut him very badly between the upper joint of the thumb and where the wrist meets; the blow would have taken off the hand had it not been retarded by the barrel of the musket which was held at the time of a charge.”

By the time the Potomacreturned much righteous indignation has been directed at Commodore Downes and his officers. One of them, a Jeremiah Reynolds, who had been on board the Potomac as Downes’ secretary, published a book on the subject in 1835 from the perspective of those actually present and noted that“vague rumours and partial statements” in the media had created an“unfavourable prejudice in the public mind”.

The controversy simmered for a few years more but was overtaken by further events that were calculated to reduce sympathy for the Sumatrans. This was in August 1838 when another American ship, the Eclipse, was boarded at a village called Muckie by 24 Sumatrans who ostensibly wanted to trade. They were allowed on board on the condition of handing over their weapons but once trust had been established these were – unwisely – returned. The crew was then attacked and butchered, even those men who jumped into the water to escape being run down and murdered.

Columbia and John Adams bombarding Muckie

The American response was robust. News reached Commodore George C. Read in the Indian Ocean where, with two powerful frigates, Columbia and John Adams, he was involved with a circumnavigation associated with the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838 to 1842. He immediately diverted to Sumatra. At Muckie he landed some 360 men under cover of a bombardment. Most of the inhabitants fled and the few who resisted were silenced. The village was set ablaze and Reade withdrew his force.

This was the end of the Second Sumatran Expedition by the US Navy. A dose of bitter medicine had been administered and no further American trading ships were attacked off Sumatra thereafter. For the Dutch however a long war awaited them there in the future – but that’s a different story.

Recently published: Britannia’s Spartan

Author Antoine Vanner talks about his latest novel,Britannia’s Spartan, in a short video. Click here to watch it.

In April 1882 Captain Nicholas Dawlish RN has just taken command of the Royal Navy’s newest cruiser, HMS Leonidas. Her voyage to the Far East is to be a peaceful venture, a test of this innovative vessel’s engines and boilers. Dawlish has no forewarning of the nightmare of riot, treachery, massacre and battle he and his crew will encounter.

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We’ve met Edward Pellew (1757 – 1833) on this blog before (see link at end of article) and it’s probable that we’ll meet him again as he ranks just below Nelson, and certainly with Cochrane, as one of the Royal Navy’s most intrepid commanders during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. His earliest fighting experience came during the American War of Independence when he was present at fighting on Lake Champlain and his career was to culminate as Admiral Viscount Exmouth when he commanded a combined British-Dutch squadron in operations against Barbary pirates in Algiers in 1816. A humane and decent man, his personal courage was legendary and although his career was studded with desperate naval actions one of his most notable feats of heroism was not to be in a combat situation.

1795, the third year of the Revolutionary War, saw Commodore Pellew commanding a squadron of frigates from his own HMS Indefatigable. Operating in the Western Approaches and off North-Western Coast of France, Pellew’s force was to score significant success through the year. By January 1796 however Indefatigable had been brought into Plymouth for refitting. It was an opportunity for Pellew to relax ashore on and 26^th January he was on the way with his wife to dine at the house of a well-known clergyman, Dr. Robert Hawker. As the Pellew arrived Hawker ran out and called "Have you heard of the wreck of the ship under the Citadel? " This was enough to send Pellew racing to the scene of the disaster.

The wreck of the Dutton by Thomas Luny
Note group on beach, hauling on hawsers

The ship involved was the Eastindiaman Dutton– and as such manned by civilians. This vessel had been underway for the West Indies with no less than 400 troops for the strengthening of the garrisons there, together with a number of camp followers, not to mention the ship’s own crew – the total was estimated at somewhere between 500 and 600. It is an indication of the extreme dependence upon weather conditions during the Age of Sail that the Duttonhad already been seven weeks at sea but had been driven back to Britain by adverse winds. Given the number of people crammed into a vessel less than 200 feet long it is not surprising that there should be a large number of sick on board. It had now been driven against Plymouth Hoe, an open space that slopes down towards the sea and on which the Citadel referred to by Dr. Hawker stands. It ends at low limestone cliffs with a beach below.

Edward Pellew

Pellew arrived on the beach to find – one can imagine that it was to his disgust – that most of theDutton’s senior officers had already abandoned ship. They had made it by clinging to a single rope stretched between ship and shore. Others had also gained the shore but the process was slow and dangerous – one eyewitness wrote that “you would at one moment see a poor wretch hanging ten or twenty feet above the water, and the next you would lose sight of him in the foam of a wave”.It was obvious that this method alone would be incapably of saving the hundreds on board before the hull broke up. Despite Pellew’s exhortations to the ship’s officers to return to the ship – and an offer of five guineas each – they refused to do so, as too did local pilots who believed that the case was hopeless. Pellew realised that without his direction almost all on Dutton ship would be lost and he resolved to go out himself. He did so by getting dragged to the ship by the single rope. This was hazardous, since the vessel’s masts had collapsed towards the shore and he was at one stage dragged under the mainmast, only extricating himself with leg and back-injuries that were afterwards to confine him to bed. He did however finally reach the wreck and took command – he made it plain that absolute compliance with his orders would be essential and that he himself would be the last to quit the wreck. His reputation as a national hero was already well established and his presence alone did much to reduce any tendency to panic. A complication was however that some of the soldiers had broken into the spirit store and were already drunk. Pellew, sword in hand, made it plain that that he would have no hesitation in killing anybody exhibiting disobedience.

Back at HMS Indefatigableit was not known that Pellew was on the Duttonbut efforts were made to get boats to her. Despite gallant attempts it proved impossible to bring them alongside. More successful however was a small boat from a merchant vessel. This was manned by a naval midshipman and the merchant vessel’s Irish mate, one Jeremiah Coghlan. With these men’s help Pellew managed to get two more hawsers stretched from the wreck to the shore. Pellew set men to work to fashion got cradles constructed that could be slung beneath the hawsers to be pulled to and fro. In order to avoid shock-loading of the hawsers as the wreck rolled, and to avoid the consequent risk of their snapping, they were not made fast at the shore end. Each line was instead held by a group of men who tightened and relaxed them so as to keep the tension steady. This must have been exhausting and was not the least impressive aspect of the entire rescue. Transfer by cradle now commenced but it was obviously unsuited to the weak and vulnerable – a category that included one three-week old baby on board. Coghlan in his small boat managed to get some 50 people to shore before any other craft reached the wreck.

While this was in progress a sloop and two large pulling-boats had managed to reach the Dutton from shore. In these the women children and the sick were landed, Pellew being adamant in ensuring that order was maintained despite the soldiers’ drunkenness – he was witnessed beating one looter with the flat of his sword. The handling of the rescue boats in such conditions was an epic in itself and they were in due course to get the soldiers to shore, followed by the ship’s company. Pellew was among the last to leave – passing ashore along a hawser – and the battered hull broke up soon afterwards. All on board had been saved.

Coghlan in silhouette
(Like Jane Austen's Captain Wentworth?)

It is typical of Pellew that the only mention made in the Indefatigable’s log was the statement “'Sent two boats to the assistance of a ship on shore in the Sound” with no reference to himself. A pleasing postscript – and a long one – was that Jeremiah Coghlan, the young civilian who had done such heroic work in his small boat was to join the Navy and have an illustrious career. Pellew took him on board the Indefatigableas a midshipman and had him follow him when he took command of HMS Impetueux in 1799. Coghlan was given command of the cutter HMS Viper the next year and he was promoted further following a cutting-out operation, in which he snatched the French gun-brig Cerbèrefrom a defended harbour. His subsequent career was to be the stuff of naval fiction – single-ship actions, storming shore-batteries, seizing Naples in 1815. When Pellew became Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, from 1811 Coghlan was to be his flag captain on HMS Caledonia. One of the heroes of the Age of Fighting Sail, he was to live long enough to see the birth of the steam navy.

And Pellew? We’ll return to him again in the future.

Click here to read about Pellew and Indefatigable’s ferocious encounter with the French Droits de l’Homme in January 1797

Britannia’s Spartan

Six-inch breech loading guns represented the cutting edge of naval technology in the early 1880s. In my novel Britannia’s Spartan they are shown in use in battle on both British and Japanese ships. The splendid Japanese woodcut below shows Japanese crews managing just such a weapon in the war of 1894-95 against China. Click on the image for further details.

We have met Captain Murray Maxwell (1775 –1831) on this blog in an article dealing with his adventures in the frigate HMS Alceste in the Far East and her subsequent shipwreck in the East Indies in 1817. On this latter occasion Murray’s superb leadership was to ensure survival of his entire crew on a despite shortage of provisions and attack by pirates. (Click here for a link to the earlier article). Alceste had been captured from the French in 1806 and Maxwell was to command her with notable success and distinction through much of her service in the Royal Navy. The Alcestewas not however the first frigate to be wrecked under Maxwell’s command and that event was also to occur in Eastern waters.

Murray Maxwell - honoured by a Korean stamp for his survey work on the Korean coast

Maxwell had command of the frigate HMS Dædalus, a Venetian-built ship captured in the Adriatic in 1811, for a mere eleven months. In her he left Britain in January 1813, escorting an East India Company convoy to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The voyage was uneventful and by sunset on 1st July the convoy had passed the island’s most southerly point. During the hours of darkness it sailed east by north to give any coastal shoals adequate clearance and on the following morning it headed north, parallel to the coast, towards its destination of Trincomalee. This was a period when charts were less than adequate and when heavy reliance was placed on pilots familiar with coastal waters. No chances were being taken on the Daedalus– her course was some seven or eight miles off the land and good look-outs were being kept both from the deck and mast-head for rocks and breakers. It was reported that “the atmosphere was so clear that a ripple might have been seen upon the water for miles around”. Nothing appeared to indicate danger and the master was pointing out to Captain Maxwell her position on the chart, when they felt the hull touch ground somewhere close to her stern. The shock was almost imperceptible and many on board were not aware of it. Signals were immediately made to warn the convoy of their danger, but before the signals could be answered, the Dædalus swung off into deep water. All sail was set, and hopes were entertained that she was not materially injured. Perhaps due to her Venetian construction, and originally designed for service in the relatively calm waters of the Mediterranean, Dædalus proved too slight to sustain any shock without damage. Gentle as the grounding had been the lower part of the stern-post had given way, causing a massive leak. The pumps were instantly manned but it was impossible to keep pace with the ingress of water.

The French frigate Clorinde - HMS Daedalus would have been very similar

A signal was made for the convoy to stand by and to send all their carpenters on board Dædalus, but their combined efforts were to be unavailing. The rudder was detached from the broken part of the stern-post and guns and anchors were thrown overboard. A patch was fashioned from canvas, oakum and tar. It was dropped over the stern and pulled into position along the keel to block the leak. This was only briefly successful however and hopes that had been briefly raised that the ship might yet reach Trincomalee were dashed. After eight hours continuous pumping the exhausted crew saw the water rising to the level of the lower deck.

Captain Maxwell now recognised that he had so chance of saving his ship and that she must be abandoned as soon as possible if lives were to be saved. The process was disciplined in the extreme. The boys, “idlers”, and two divisions of seamen and marines were ordered into the boats which were alongside, while the remaining men were employed at the pumps to keep the ship afloat. The good order and discipline which prevailed during this scene are beyond all praise. In Maxwell’s words “The men behaved as if they were moving from one ship to another in any of the king's ports.'

The sinking of HMS Pandora on August 30, 1791
(she was carrying captured mutineers from HMS Bounty)
The last moments of HMS Daedalus must have looked very similar

Dædalus was settling fast, when the boats returned to carry away the remainder of the officers and men, they left the pumps and embarked in the boats, taking with them the hammocks and clothes belonging to the ship's company. Maxwell was the last man to leave. Five minutes later the ship lurched, fell on her beam ends and lay on them for a minute, then righted again and slipped gently from sight.

In the court-martial that followed blame was laid on the master, Arthur Webster, for having failed to take constant depth soundings. He was severely reprimanded. To modern eyes it seems strange that it should be the master rather than the captain who would suffer but Maxwell’s reputation did not seem to be damaged and his career was not impeded. He was soon to be in command of Alceste again and three years later he was heading to China and the events for which he is best remembered.

And for these it’s best to refer to the earlier article.

Britannia's Wolf: Audiobook available as part of a 30-Day Free Trial

Britannia's Wolf, the first in the Dawlish Chronicles series of naval adventure novels set in the Victorian period, is now available as an audio-book. It's been read by the distinguished American actor David Doersch. If you haven't previously ordered an audio-book from audible.com you can download it without cost as part of a 30-Day Free Trial. You can listen on your Smart Phone, Tablet or MP3 Player.

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If you have already read it you may like to hear a world of battle by land and sea, palace intrigue and refugee flight during a savage winter brought to life. And if you haven't yet read, it this may be your introduction to a resolute but often self-doubting Royal Navy Captain and the woman he hesitates to recognise as the love of his life.

Britannia’s Spartan

Six-inch breech loading guns represented the cutting edge of naval technology in the early 1880s. In my novel Britannia’s Spartan they are seen in use on both British and Japanese ships. The splendid Japanese woodcut below shows Japanese crews managing just such a weapon in the war of 1895 against China. Click on the image below for further details.

There is something intensely sad when reading about forgotten conflicts, often fought over issues that were trivial even at the time, and which were memorable only to the families whose happiness was wrecked by loss of loved ones. War may be “Last Argument of Kings”– as was inscribed on his cannons by Louis XIV – but the true price is paid by much humbler people. One such forgotten conflict was that between the Balkan nations of Serbia and Bulgaria in 1885. Military operations lasted only two weeks but they resulted in a decisive victory for one of the parties.

The Price of Glory - A Bulgarian hospital at the war's end

Bulgaria as a nation had only been born seven years previously, following its liberation from Ottoman-Turkish (mis)rule in the brutal Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. This had been triggered by Turkish massacres of Christian Bulgarians in 1876 in what was still then a Turkish province. Russia, traditionally the protector of Eastern Christians, used this as a pretext for a declaration of war on Turkey, with the ultimate objective of capturing Istanbul (Constantinople) and thereby securing an outlet on the Mediterranean. The war was to be bloody in the extreme – other than the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 the largest in Europe between Waterloo and World War 1. It was characterised by excess on both sides and further massacres. The Russian Armies smashed their way to the very outskirts of Istanbul and had Britain not threatened to intervene on Turkey’s behalf would have done so. (This war provides the background to my novel Britannia’s Wolf, in which the action plays out in the last, brutal months of fighting - see link at end of article).

The final outcome was decided at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 when the major European powers agreed revised borders. This involved creation of Bulgaria as an independent principality, but with a large enclave within it, known as Eastern Rumelia, which remained under nominal Ottoman control. The challenge was now to find a ruler for the new principality and the solution usually adopted in such cases in the nineteenth century was resorted to. This was to find some under-employed member of a minor royal or semi-royal house, usually German.

Prince Alexander

In this case the lucky man was to be Prince Alexander of Battenberg (1857 – 1893), then serving as a lieutenant in the Prussian Life-Guards in Berlin. Why this was considered a suitable qualification for a head-of-state role, even for a constitutional monarchy, as Bulgaria was to be, is somewhat of a mystery. In the event however Alexander was not to do badly. His older brother, Prince Louis (1854-1921, was already serving in Britain’s Royal Navy and in due course would rise the office of First Sea Lord. Despite a distinguished career and unquestioned loyalty to Britain, this unfortunate man was hounded from office in 1914 because of this German name, which he thereafter changed from Battenberg to Montbatten. Lord Louis Montbatten (1900-1979), uncle of the present Duke of Edinburgh, and last Viceroy of India, was his son.

Alexander, now a constitutional monarch was Prince of Bulgaria, was to find himself caught between the machinations of the Russians, who wanted him as a puppet, on the one hand and of Bulgarian politicians on the other. Frustrated, he lost patience on 1881 and, with the connivance of Russia, suspended the constitution and assumed absolute power. For the next two years the real power was in the hands of two Russian generals, Sobolev and Kaulbars, sent by the Czar, much to the anger of many Bulgarians. In 1883 Alexander restored the constitution – with broad support from the Bulgarian political classes –an action that enraged the Czar and led to the withdrawal of senior Russians who had been training the Bulgarian army.

Throughout this period Eastern Rumelia had remained under nominal Turkish control but a revolution there in 1885 gave Alexander the opportunity to annex it and create a single Bulgarian state. This step was popular throughout Bulgaria but the possibility existed that Turkey would strike back. Bulgarian forces were accordingly sent south-east to defend the border against any Turkish offensive.

Milan I

Serbia, Bulgaria’s western neighbour, saw this situation as an opportunity for an easy seizure of a small area of disputed territory on the border between the two countries (see map). In November 1885 Serbian forces, 60,000 strong, crossed the frontier under the command of King Milan I (1854-1901). Eager for personal glory, and confident of an easy victory, he did not appoint experienced generals to key positions. Though well-armed with modern Mauser rifles the Serbian troops were poorly trained in their use. Recently-ordered modern artillery had not yet arrived. Morale seems to have been poor, not least because the troops seem to have been told initially that they going to the aid of the Bulgarians in a war against Turkey. That they were now to fight the Bulgarians instead caused considerable confusion and lack of trust.

Given that Bulgarian forces were massed to the south-east, to face a Turkish threat, the Serbian advance in the north-west should have proved a walkover. In the event however Alexander and the Bulgarian high-command took the risk of assuming that the Turks would not attack – an assumption that proved correct – and worked somewhat of a miracle in shifting the bulk of their forces to meet the Serbians. Doing so was dependent on a limited-capacity railroad as well as very impressive feats of marching. One infantry regiment marched some 60 miles in 32 hours, and indication of the high level of Bulgarian morale. The Bulgarian weakness was in senior officers since the Russians occupying these positions had been withdrawn and the burden of command fell on middle-ranking Bulgarians (causing the conflict to be known afterwards in Bulgaria as "The War of the Captains"). Armed with poorer rifles than the Serbians, the Bulgarians did however have the advantage of modern breech-loading artillery.

Alexander on his way to the Front

The weak screen of Bulgarian forces in the mountainous terrain on the border succeeded in delaying the Serbian advance while reinforcements arrived from the south-east. These occupied previously prepared defensive position at Slivnitsa, where the decisive battle was to take place. Some two and a half miles of trenches and artillery redoubts ran along a ridge in front of Slivnitsa village and the flanks were protected by steep mountainous terrain on the right and hilly country to the left. Experience in the later stages of the American Civil War and in the Russo-Turkish Was had shown that frontal assaults on entrenched positions were unlikely to succeed, and in the years since both these conflicts significant improvement had been made as regards range, effect and accuracy of both small-arms and artillery.

Alexander in command at the Battle of Slivnitsa

By November 16^th Prince Alexander – personally commanding the Bulgarian forces – had some 25,000 troops in place, with 15,000 more arriving over the next two days. The Serbian attack commenced on November 17^thand continued through the 18^th and 19^th. An attack on the Bulgarian centre was – not surprisingly – thrown back, artillery fire proving especially effective, while an attempted Serbian flanking attack on the Bulgarian left on the 19^th proved equally abortive. The Serbians were now forced to retreat, followed over the frontier by the victorious Bulgarians. An attempt by the Serbians to dig in to resist the Bulgarian onslaught failed under a determined flank attack. By November 27^ththe Serbs were back at Nish and at this point the Austro-Hungarian Empire demanded that the Bulgarians accept a cease-fire or face reinforcement of the Serbs by Austro-Hungarian troops. This was accepted, although peace negotiations were to last until March of the following year.

Serbian troops surrendering

The 1886 Treaty of Bucharest that ended the war was to result in no adjustments to the Serbo-Bulgarian border. The butcher’s bill for achieving this return to the status quo ante involved each side suffering 700-800 dead and some 4500 wounded. Bulgaria was justifiably proud of its military victory but a residue of bitterness was to remain between both countries which was to have dreadful consequences three decades later in World War 1. Outside both countries the only popular memory of the conflict – and a fading one today at that – was George Bernard Shaw’s cynical comedy “Arms and the Man.” Set in the war’s immediate aftermath, this was, quite bizarrely, made into an operetta entitled “The Chocolate Soldier” (Der Praliné-Soldat) by Oskar Strauss in 1908.

Alexander's forced abdication - one wonders if the revolvers were artistic licence

In the circumstances Prince Alexander had acquitted himself admirably. He was not however to enjoy his enhanced reputation for long. Many Bulgarian officers considered themselves inadequately rewarded for their part in the victory and in August 1896, a mere nine months after his victory, he was forced to abdicate, possibly at gun-point. An attempt at a come-back failed and he finally left Bulgaria the following month. He was to live only seven years more, mainly in Austria, where he held a military command. The reduction in status and dignity must have been hard to endure and one cannot but feel that he deserved better. He died in 1893.

And the Bulgarian monarchy? Yet another member of a minor German princely house was found to fill the vacancy. But that’s a separate story!

Britannia’s Wolf

The first book in the Dawlish Chronicles Series

1877: Russian forces drive deep into the corrupt Ottoman-Turkish Empire. In the depths of a savage winter, as the Turks face defeat on all fronts, a British officer is enmeshed and finds himself confronting enemy ironclads, Cossack lances and merciless Kurdish irregulars. And in the midst of this chaos, while he himself is a pawn in the rivalry of the Sultan’s half-brothers for control of the collapsing empire, he is unwillingly and unexpectedly drawn to a woman whom he believes he should not love.

Britannia’s Wolfis available in hard-copy and Kindle format – click here for details.

Britannia's Wolf It is also available as an audio book read by the distinguished American actor David Doersch. If you haven't previously ordered an audio-book from audible.com you can download it without cost as part of a 30-Day Free Trial. You can listen on your Smart Phone, Tablet or MP3 Player.

Click here for audio details (UK)

Click here for audio details (US and elsewhere)

Today’s blog is from a guest, Helen Hollick, whose novels range from Arthurian Britain, via Saxon England, to sea adventures which she says are “not meant to be taken seriously”. Invariably witty and entertaining, exuding energy and joie-de-vivre, Helen’s website and blog are a source of delight (see links at end of article). Her “Sea Witch Voyages” series, set in the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, are unique in the nautical fiction genre. I’m very grateful therefore that she should contribute some entertaining musings on society’s continuing fascination with pirates. Over to Helen…

SO WHY PIRATES? Helen Hollick

So why write about pirates? Why read about pirates? Even more bizarre, why dress up as pirates? What exactly is the exotic lure of pirates in the realm of entertainment?

Let’s be honest here, real pirates were not (are not!) nice people. The most active period of piracy is called the ‘Golden Age’, a few short years in the early 1700s. What is

‘Golden’ about outright ruffians who steal things, frighten and torture their victims? Who murder, destroy, blow things (and people) up? Pirates were the terrorist hooligans of the eighteenth century – yet we love novels and movies about them. We have pirate festivals and pirate fun days; pirate costumes are among the highest choice for fancy-dress parties, there is even an annual ‘Talk Like A Pirate Day’ every September 19^th.

Why?

Very possibly three answers. Romanticism. Escapism. The thrill of safe danger. Johnny Depp’s creation of Jack Sparrow (at least for the first movie, the others were not so good) re-kindled that spark of interest in nautical adventure where belief is suspended in favour of a darn good sailor’s yarn. Safe escapism to that other world where bad things look like they happen, but actually they don’t. It’s all enjoyable make-believe.

In reality there is nothing romantic about a ship being boarded by dozens of drunken cut-throat louts bellowing at the top of their voices, ‘Death! Death! Death!’, all eager to torture, rape, murder, plunder and loot, and then destroy the evidence by setting the ship on fire.

But fictional pirates are very different. They are rogues, yes; they would as soon cut your throat as cut your money-pouch from your belt, but there is a rugged charm associated with these scallywags. Pirate tales are a grand adventure romp, usually with barely any historical accuracy whatsoever. You know that the hero will survive the storm and subsequent shipwreck, recover from a near-fatal wound, dodge the gallows, find the treasure and get the girl in the end. We all enjoy the adventures of a loveable rogue because – well, he isn’treal. The danger he gets into or creates makes our hearts race – the thrill of the chase or the fight, the within-an-inch-of-his-life death-defying scenes. The ability to keep on fighting/running/bedroom antics even though shot/wounded/kicked in an ‘ouch’ vulnerable place where real men would be curled up on the floor clutching their nether regions, howling in agony. You know these heroes are in trouble. You also know they are going to get out of it – the thrill, the excitement, is not knowing how they do so.

The secret of a good pirate novel (or any novel come to that!) is the pace, action, larger than life characters and how believable it all is. Even fantasy has to be believable – which is one of the reasons Game Of Thrones is so successful. I was halfway through Series One of GoT before I figured it was fantasy-based, not historical-adventure. (The dragons gave it away, I guess.)

It is not just our thrill-seeking generation to be enamoured by these bad-boy characters. Back in the eighteenth century the Big Entertainment (the equivalent of going to a Celeb-packed Premier Opening Night) was the spectacle of the Gallows. A good hanging drew the crowds, the more famous the criminal, the bigger the audience. To some, the prospect of seeing a man hanged was the highlight of the year. A hanging was a party atmosphere with pie-sellers and souvenirs. Dancing, revelry, and then, Top of the Bill you get to see a man taking twenty minutes or so to be strangled to death along with all the other unpleasantries that happen to the slowly expiring body. That long drop with a short stop was not in use in the early 1700s; to hang meant standing on a barrel, or cart, which was rapidly removed leaving the poor soul to kick and squirm as the noose around his (or her) neck choked him to death. No quick broken-neck death. Captain Kidd, poor chap, was pushed off once at the Gallows at Wapping, London – and the rope broke. They picked him up, tied a new noose, stood him on the barrel, kicked it away… and the rope broke again. Had it happened a third time he would have been set free. Alas for him, someone obviously had the bright idea to get a different rope…

Another chap did survive, but I’m not sure it was a good thing. If the corpse was not paid for and collected by relatives (who often grabbed hold of the strangling body in the hope that the extra weight would kill quicker – literally, ‘hangers on’) then it was sent to the local medical school for dissection. This poor bloke was hanged, sent for dissection but was not actually dead. He regained consciousness as he lay there, naked, on the table about to be cut open!

Nope. Hanging? Not my type of entertainment. I’ll stick to drama on TV thank you.

But that’s where the ‘safe danger’ comes into play isn’t it? A hanging, or a horror movie, a murder-mystery or a thrills and spills adventure where the ‘baddies’ get killed with no remorse from the one doing the killing – usually the hero who ends up with the cute busty blonde - sets our heart racing, our eyes popping, and in no danger whatsoever apart from a nightmare or two.

My pirate novels, the Sea Witch Voyages are adult adventures not meant to be taken seriously. I write them for fun, they are meant to be read as tongue-in-cheek Errol Flynn / Jack Sparrow romps. They are entertainment… even if the real pirates were far from entertaining to the poor souls who met a boat-load of them somewhere on the open ocean!

Book Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTXe3zNMug8

Links:

Website: www.helenhollick.net

Blog: www.ofhistoryandkings.blogspot.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/HelenHollickAuthor

Sea Witch Page: https://www.facebook.com/HelenHollick.SeaWitchVoyages/

Twitter: @HelenHollick

My Author Page on an Amazon near you : viewAuthor.at/HelenHollick

And Thanks to Helen for a most entertaining guest blog! I look forward to welcomng her back again in the future - Antoine Vanner

Inman in his later years

In a recent blog (click here) we met Captain Henry Inman (1762 –1809), a noted frigate commander who was in overall command of operations off Dunkirk in 1800 in which the French frigate Désiréewas captured in dramatic circumstances. This ship was commissioned into the Royal Navy and Inman was to command her at the Battle of Copenhagen in the following year. A man of great ability, Inman’s career was to be dogged by ill health and he died before achieving his full potential. His most impressive achievement was however in his youth – he was only twenty years old at the time – and it was characterised by leadership and seamanlike skills of the highest order. Without him well over 200 lives might well have been lost.

The Battle of the Saintes, April 1782

Promoted to lieutenant in 1780, after surviving two separate shipwrecks, Inman, on shore duty in the West Indies, missed participation in the large fleet action, The Battle of the Saintes, off Dominica in April 1782. This had culminated in a crushing British victory over the French. In the course of this engagement the French “74” line-of-battle ship Hector was captured. Though badly damaged in the action she was commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS Hector. Under the command of Captain John Bourchier (approx. 1755 – 1819) she was ordered to return to Britain. Henry Inman joined her as First Lieutenant. Getting the battered Hector seaworthy for the Atlantic crossing involved removal of 22 of her guns and replacement of her masts with shorter ones, presumably so as not to over-strain her hull. Her crew was significantly short-handed, some 300 men, many of whom were invalids. In normal circumstances a ship of this size would carry a crew of 500 to 700 men and it is therefore obvious that her fighting ability was very seriously impaired. She sailed in late August, none on board suspecting that she would have to survive a violent hurricane that was to spell doom for other survivors of the Saintes Battle and killing over 3500 men.

Before the unanticipated hurricane another enemy had to be confronted. On the evening of September 5^th the Hector was found by two 40-gun French frigates, L’Aigle and Gloire. These fresh, undamaged vessels quickly perceived Hector’s decrepitudeand one placed herself on her beam, and the other on her quarter and began to pour fire into her. Poorly manoeuvrable, Hector was badly placed to avoid several rakings but she returned fire sufficiently to damage both attackers. It was a very creditable performance for a ship so weakly manned and armed. Even so, had the French vessels continued the bombardment from a distance they might have sunk Hector. Instead they made the mistake of attempting to board and their efforts were bloodily repulsed. The action was broken off after six hours and both French ships bore off. (They were to be captured by a British force off the Delaware coast a week later – the damage sustained in the conflict with the Hector quite possibly a contributory factor).

Hector’s survival had been dearly bought. 46 of her crew had been killed or wounded, an especially serious concern when so many of her complement were already invalids. Captain Bourchier had been so badly wounded as to be incapacitated and effective command now passed to the twenty-year old Henry Inman. The ship herself had been weakened yet further – the hull had sustained more injury, as had the masts, rigging and sails.

The "74" HMS Theseus surviving a hurricane in 1804
The Hector's plight would have been even worse as she had lost both masts and rudder

"All Hands to the Pumps" 1889
by Henry Scott Tuke

It was in this state that the Hector was to encounter the massive hurricane that swept through the Central Atlantic on September 17^th. Battered by high seas, she lost her rudder and all the masts. Leaks were sprung and incoming water reached a level at which a major portion of the provisions and fresh water was spoiled. Survival now became a matter of continuous pumping, a labour that demanded physical exertion on an open wind and spray-lashed deck which would have been severe for a fit and healthy crew, but almost impossible for one so debilitated.

The pumping ordeal was to last two weeks, with Inman – himself driven to the limits of exhaustion – needing at times to resort to the threat of his pistols to keep men at the task. Many appear to have died from fatigue while those who had finished their turns had no energy to do other than lie, washed over by surging water, in the scuppers. Despite these efforts the water level was still rising inside the stricken hulk. Men already sick were dying daily and in the last four days of these two weeks the ship was without drinking water even as the hull structure began to disintegrate.

It was at this extremity, when hope was all but abandoned, that a sail was spotted. This was the tiny snow Hawke, of Dartmouth, Devon, under the command of a Captain John Hill. Though the seas were still high Hill brought her alongside Hector, remained with her through the night, and in the morning commenced transfer of the survivors, now only some 200 in total, including the wounded Captain Bourchier. Henry Inman remained on Hectoruntil the last man had left. She sank ten minutes after he reached the Hawke.

A naval snow, 1759, by Charles Brooking
The figures on deck give an idea of just how small a craft such a vessel was

The situation was now only slightly less desperate. The Hawke was small – it is unlikely that she would have been longer than 100 feet – and to make room for Hector’s survivors necessitated dumping much of her cargo overboard. Even at that she was so grossly overcrowded, and the extra weight taken on gave concern for stability, that Hill and Inman had to enforce orders regarding how many men could be on deck at any one time. Food was quickly depleted, despite rationing, and the water allowance was only a half pint per man per day. Despite this caution only a single cask of fresh water remained when land was sighted close to St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Inman and Hill were – deservedly – the heroes of the hour and were carried in triumph through the streets of St. John’s. Without the skill and bloody-minded determination of both men, the death toll would have undoubtedly been higher. With his health badly impaired by his ordeal Inman was put on half-pay on his return to Britain and it was to until 1790 that he was again assigned a command. Further adventures lay ahead – and we’ll return to them in a future blog.

Britannia’s Reach by Antoine Vanner

Historic naval fiction moves on into the age of Fighting Steam. Click here for more details of this story of desperate riverine combat.

A blog last month dealt with an 1876 case of a ship “passing by on the other side” and not rendering assistance to a wrecked vessel (click here to read this article). An even more extreme case occurred the same year, one involving “Hit and Run”, with a ship causing a collision that sank another vessel ignoring the plight of her survivors without any significant effort to render assistance.

SS Strathclyde, seen in 1873

On the afternoon of February 17^th 1876 a large British trading steamer, the Strathclyde– 1950 tons, 290-feet – was in the English Channel, just off Dover, on the first leg of a voyage to Bombay. She carried a crew of 47 as well as 23 passengers. The weather was fine, “with a fair wind”, visibility good and the sea relatively smooth. Strathclyde was making some nine knots. A generally similar ship was spotted about two miles astern and still further out to sea and it was estimated that courses, if maintained, would cross. The stranger turned out to be the German Franconia, en route for the West Indies, and steaming at higher speed than the Strathclyde. As the faster vessel. the Franconia was expected to take evasive action and on this assumption the Strathclydeheld a steady course. A half-hour passed, during which time the Franconia had all but overhauled the Strathclyde and was giving no indication of altering her course – indeed, according to one contemporary account “the Franconia came down upon the Strathclyde as if she had been an enemy’s vessel in time of war.” What seems to have been a panicked order was given at the last moment to avoid collision and the Franconiawas swung around, possibly in the hope of crossing the Strathclyde’s wake. The manoeuvre failed and the Franconia smashed into the Strathclyde amidships, tearing a huge rent into which water rushed. She rebounded from the impact, then surged forward again, striking the Strathclydeand gouging a second hole in her side further aft. The Strathclyde began to settle by the stern and was clearly doomed.

A contemporary illustration shows the Franconia reversing from the Strathclyde
The clouds of steam enveloping the latter may have been artistic licence!

The Franconia’sbows had been damaged, but not fatally so, but the over-riding desire of her captain, one Ferdinand Keyn, was to get his ship safely into the nearby harbour of Dover. He was encouraged in this by James Porter, a British pilot taken on board for the transit of the Dover Straits. The Strathclyde’sfirst mate and four seamen seem to have managed to jump across to the Franconia before the ships separated, reporting later that discipline seemed to have broken down there. They urged Captain Keyn to drop boats for the Strathclyde’ssurvivors but he was deaf to their appeals. After no more than a few minutes, with feeble attempts at rescue, the Franconiabacked off and headed for Dover.

Two of Strathclyde’slifeboats got away, the first with fifteen of the women passengers but it was quickly swamped, most of the occupants drowning. The second boat got off safely and recovered two living survivors from the water. The ship disappeared in less than ten minutes and took many with her. A fishing lugger from Deal, the Early Morn, arrived on the scene and pulled survivors from the water. The Dover lifeboat had been launched – the whole tragedy had played out so close inshore as to be plainly visible – and was towed towards the stricken vessel by a harbour tug. The final death toll was 38, out of a total 70 crew and passengers. Strathclyde’scaptain, J.D. Eaton, stayed with her until the final plunge but he did survive.

The Strathclyde's last moments. Note Franconia on right and heading for Dover

The Franconiareached Dover safely but her Captain Keyn was charged with manslaughter for his unwillingness to render sufficient assistance. Considerable opprobrium was also heaped on the British pilot on board, of whom it was written at the time “Let us hand James Porter’s name down in infamy; let us blush to think that he could call himself an Englishman!”

Keyn’s trail, at London’s Central Criminal Court, was to have implications beyond the immediate case. He was convicted as charged, but the verdict was quashed on appeal. The grounds for this rested on the argument that English Law was not applicable to foreign vessels in English waters. Sufficient feeling was however aroused by the case that soon thereafter Britain adopted International Territorial Waters provisions which were already in use by several other countries. These defined such waters as extending three miles from the shoreline, this distance reflecting the contemporary range of coastal artillery. As for the owners of the Strathclyde, they brought and action against the Franconia’sowners in the Admiralty Court and were awarded £45,000. It seems a very paltry sum in view of the loss of life.

Britannia’s Spartan

Six-inch breech loading guns represented the cutting edge of naval technology in the early 1880s. In my novel Britannia’s Spartan they are seen in use on both British and Japanese ships. The splendid Japanese woodcut below shows Japanese crews managing just such a weapon in the war of 1895 against China. Click here for further details.

In the late 19^th and early 20^thCentury the French and German navies became fixated on the idea of “Cruiser Warfare” – the individual ships operating far from home on the world’s oceans and striking at enemy seaborne trade. Britain, with enormous merchant fleet and the dependence of its economy on overseas trade, was seen as particularly vulnerable. Belief in the concept rested on the success of such operations in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars by both privateers and national navies. As late as the American Civil War, in the 1860s, the Confederate riders Alabama and Florida were to hurt disrupt Union trade far from home waters and necessitate diversion of significant resources to hunt them down. In the 1890s so called “protected cruisers”, which would later evolve into the light-cruiser classification, were seen as especially suited to such tasks.

The French navy went so far as to build one such cruiser, the Châteaurenault, which was designed to look from a distance like an ocean liner, and so increase its chances of closing with an unsuspecting victim. Several classes of German cruisers of the immediate pre-WW1 period were especially suited to such operations. It was also intended that in time of war civilian vessels would also be commandeered and armed. Unarmoured they might be, but they were intended to capture defenceless merchant shipping and not battle it out with a naval opponent. The Royal Navy, no less than those of other nations, had made provisions for such conversions and subsidies were often provided to shipping companies to build strengthened positions into decks on to which guns could be mounted in wartime. (The RMS Lusitaniawas one such vessel, though she was not armed at the time of her loss).

Priinz Eitel Friedrich in peacetime - and a candidate for transformation to ocean raider in times of war

The weakness of the cruiser warfare concept was that the conditions that had favoured success in the Napoleonic era no longer applied. Sailing ships could operate far from base for many months – food and fresh water being the only consumables – but steam vessels were heavily dependent on shore support, not only for fuel supply but for maintenance of boiler and machinery. Britain was well supplied with widely-spread fortified naval bases when war broke out in 1914 but Germany had only a single such base, Tsingtao, on the Chinese coast. German colonial harbours elsewhere were unfortified and were thus easily occupied in the early months of the war. Tsingtao, despite heavy investments in strong fortifications, was to fall to a combined Japanese –British force before the end of 1914. The upshot was that German vessels on overseas deployments could not rely on fuelling and maintenance facilities other than those in Germany itself. Some reliance had been placed on chartered colliers supplying coal from neutral ports and rendezvousing with warships at sea but in the event this source proved of little utility. (Click here to read blog on “Germany’s Naval Nomads”) In practice German raiders were dependent on coal captured from prizes. In practice, transfer of coal from one ship to another on the open sea was a brutally difficult task in all but the calmest weather.

Gunboat SMS Iltis - sister of the Luchs, which gave up her guns to arm the Eitel Friedrich

It is against this background that the relative success of the German raider SMS Prinz Eitel Friedrich should be seen. A 16,000-ton, 503-foot liner, launched in 1904 was in service for the Norddeutscher Lloyd Company between Germany and China. Designed for long ocean passages, she was capable of a maximum 15 knots. Her peacetime crew was of the order of 400, reflecting the heavy labour demands of a large coal-fired steamship. She was at Shanghai when war broke out in August 1914 and she proceeded immediately to Tsingtao to be fitted out as a raider and to support Admiral von Spee’s East Asia Squadron (Click here for an earlier blog on this squadron’s victory in the Battle of Coronel). The Eitel Friedrichwas fitted with four 4-inch (10.5 cm) guns and several smaller weapons from the obsolescent gunboats Luchs and Tiger. She now commissioned as a warship of the Imperial German Navy as SMS Prinz Eitel Friedrich, under the command of Korvettenkapitän Max Therichens, previously of the Luchs. She slipped out of Tsingtao before the Japanese-British blockade of the base became effective and she sailed to join von Spee’s squadron at Pagan, in the Northern Marianas island group, a German colony since 1899, arriving there on 12^thAugust 1914, some two weeks after outbreak of war. Too slow to join von Spee’s cruiser squadron, the Eitel Friedrich was detached for independent action against the merchant shipping of Britain and her allies, initially off Australia.

Stern view of Prinz Eitel Friedrich - gun just visible on the poop

The Eitel Friedrichwas to operate in the Pacific for the next three months, hunted, as von Spee’s squadron was separately by Japanese as well as British forces. Britain’s formal alliance with Japan – which was to last until 1923 – was paying off and fulfilling its intended role of releasing British ships from the Pacific area for employment closer to home. No success was scored by theEitel Friedrich until early December but her second capture was invaluable, a French sailing collier carrying 3500 tons of coal. As this vessel carried no radio it was possible to tow her to the tiny Chilean possession of Easter Island which was not connected to the mainland by either telegraph or radio. The Eitel Friedrich’s presence thus unknown and here the coal could be transferred in sheltered waters and sheep were also taken on board for meat. The collier – the first of eight sailing vessels the Eitel Friedrich would capture – was scuttled after the transfer. The collier’s crew were put ashore though those of subsequent captures were taken on board, accommodation being ample.

By this time the Eitel Friedrich was with one exception – the light cruiser SMS Dresden– the only survivor of van Spee’s squadron, the others having been hunted down and sunk. Her engines and boilers were already showing signs of wear and top speed had fallen, and was likely to fall still further. With no friendly base available there was no option but to head for Germany, inflicting maximum damage on enemy shipping on the way. Accordingly, in January 1915, with enough coal and mutton to last until early April, Captain Therichens brought his ship over into the South Atlantic. Conscious of the risk of British ships patrolling the Cape Horn area, he steered a course far to the south, along the northern fringes of Antarctica.

The William P Frye

Over the next month the Eitel Friedrich was to sink a further eight ships off the South American coast. Aware that he was incapable of outrunning any enemy, Therichens stayed away from the main trade routes and detection of his presence was made all the more difficult by most smaller merchant ships of the period not carrying radio. His tonnage score was steadily increasing – reaching before operations ended a total of eleven ships of 33,000 Gross Registered Tons. One of these victims was to prove especially significant, the large (3,374-ton) American sailing vessel William P Frye, detained on 27^thJanuary. It should be noted that the United States was still neutral at this stage of the war. The Frye was carrying wheat to Britain and, despite her American registration, Therichens ordered the entire cargo to be thrown overboard before she would be allowed to proceed. This process went slowly – and dangerously, for too-long a stay in any one area increased the risk of interception – so on the following day Therichens ordered the American crew to be taken on board the Eitel Friedrich and the ship herself to be destroyed by gunfire. This was the first case of a neutral American ship being sunk by the German Navy – actions that were ultimately draw the United States into war with Germany.

The Prinz Eitel Friedrich arriving at Newport News on 12th March 1915

Four further ships – two steamers and two sailing vessels – were captured and destroyed in February but during the following month it was obvious that with supplies running low, engines suffering breakdowns, hull badly fouled and awareness that British patrolling has intensified, the chance of reaching Germany was all but zero. There was nothing for it but to head for a neutral port – in this case Newport News in Virginia, arriving there on 12^thJanuary. Therichens seemed to have entertained hopes of being allowed to carry out major repairs, and the American authorities – bizarrely, one must think – allowed the captured crews, now amounting to some 300 men, to be kept on board. Therichens argued, with some success, to be allowed to stay in Newport News for several weeks to effect repairs, but the sinking of the William P Frye had eroded sympathy and the case was in the process of growing into a major diplomatic issue. It was obvious at last however that escape would be impossible, since a British armoured cruiser, HMS Cumberland and a Canadian cruiser HMSCS Niobe, were waiting just outside territorial waters. (The similarity with the plight of the Graf Spee at Montevideo in 1939, when a later HMS Cumberland was also waiting outside, is very marked). Accepting defeat, Therichens surrendered his ship and his crew for internment in America.

The Eitel Friedrichwas to remain idle for the next two years but when the United States entered the war she was taken over for use as a troopship and renamed USS DeKalb. She was to see intense service carrying troops across the Atlantic to Europe and equally intense service carrying them back in 1919. Thereafter she was to be sold to the United American Lines Company and operated on transatlantic service under the name SS Mount Clay. She was laid up in 1926 and scrapped nine years later.

It was a mundane end for a raider that had evaded capture with skill and determination for seven months and had inflicted significant loss on enemy shipping at little cost.

Recently published: Britannia’s Spartan

Author Antoine Vanner talks about his latest novel, Britannia’s Spartan, in a short video. Click hereto watch it.

Click below for more details for both paperback and Kindle versions:

For UK: Click here For US & Rest of World: Click here

When thinking about war at sea in the Age of Fighting Sail one’s attention is immediately drawn to the ferocity of battle when ships engaged at close quarters. In actuality however combat was relatively rare but wreckage in stormy weather remained a constant – and exhausting – hazard at all times. One is indeed struck by the number of ships – and lives – that were lost without any intervention by the enemy. The Royal Navy was more vulnerable than those of other maritime powers since British strategy rested on keeping at sea – and dominating it – whether on close blockade of hostile coasts or bases, or cruising to destroy enemy commerce, or projecting force anywhere in the world, from the Caribbean to Java, from Egypt to Argentina.

The nightmare of shipwreck on a lee shore - painting by Francis Danby (1793-1861)

Keeping at sea did however mean inevitable exposure to extreme weather, in many cases with fatal consequences. For all the professional seamanship of ship’s officers and crews, sailing ships were, by their very nature vulnerable, and never more so than when forced towards a lee-shore. One example – a terrible one – of such a loss was that of HMS Sceptre in 1799.

A third-rate, in this case HMS Bellerophon - Sceptre would have looked generally similar

The Sceptre was a 62-gun third-rate ship of the line which had entered service in 1782, in time to participate in the Battles of Trincomalee and of Culladore, off the Indian coast, the last significant engagements of the Anglo-French was that had grown out of the American War of Independence. She was laid up until 1794 and on recommissioning participated in actions off Haiti and St. Helena. She spent a long time thereafter at Cape Town – captured from the Dutch in 1795 – and was described to have become “weak and leaky” there. Notwithstanding this she was to return to Indian waters in early 1799, escorting a convoy and carrying an entire army regiment – the 84^th– herself. She leaked so badly in during one spell of bad weather that she survived only by pumping. On reaching Bombay she was docked and was strengthened by large timbers, known as riders, which were bolted diagonally to her sides fore and aft. That this should have been necessary for a relatively new ship indicated that the structure was in very poor condition. Now repaired, she set out on her return voyage, reaching Cape Town in late October.

Table Bay in the early 19th Century - contemporary illustration

On November 5^th, while moored in Table Bay, Cape Town, a strong wind began to blow from the North West – a direction against which the bay offered no shelter. No danger was anticipated however and flags were flown, and a salute fired at noon, to celebrate “Guy Fawkes Day”, commemorating the frustration of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. By early afternoon however the wind was at gale force and the captain ordered top-masts to be struck (i.e. taken down) and the fore and main yards lowered to reduce drag. Soon afterwards a mooring cable parted but another anchor was dropped, with two guns attached to increase its holding power. By early evening even this was proving insufficient to hold the ship and a boat was launched to cross to HMS Jupiter, a fourth-rate moored close by, to secure a cable to her. The waves were so violent however that the boat capsized and its crew drowned. The Sceptre was now helpless in a raging sea. No help could reach her from the land and officers who had gone ashore the previous evening could only watch helplessly.

Loss of HMS 'Victory, 4 October 1744' by Peter Monamy (1681 - 1749)
(Not Nelson's Victory, but an earlier ship. The Sceptre, in distress, might have looked like this)

At eight in the evening a new horror manifested itself, a fire below decks, its origin unclear. Dense smoke was rolling from the hatches in such volumes that it was impossible to go below to fight it. Two hours later the helpless ship drove on to a reef, broadside towards the shore and heeling to port towards the sea. The captain ordered the main and mizzen masts to be cut away and this was done – discipline seems to have been well maintained even at this desperate juncture. Lightened by the masts’ fall, the ship lightened and rose free from the reef, moving closer to the shore and giving hope that she might be thrown high enough upon the beach for all to be saved.

HMS Sceptre's destruction as imagined in a 19th Century illustration

Hope turned to despair as the Sceptre began to break up, the port side collapsing and throwing large numbers of men into the water. The survivors clustered on the starboard side. Several jumped overboard and tried to swim ashore but were borne away on the seething eddies. The entire poop structure wrenched itself free and carried towards the shore, observers there estimating that seventy men or more were clinging to it. It never reached the beach, capsizing as a wave hit it and taking every man on it with it. Worse was to come. The shattered hull was now heeled towards the shore, men clustered on it, but as a large wave hit it was lifted again, then smashed down, breaking into two sections just before the mainmast. The after section appears to have disintegrated immediately but the forward part lasted a little longer, with some forty men clinging to it as waves surged over them. Then it too collapsed into separate chunks of wreckage.

Guns and wreckage from HMS Sceptre thrown up on the beach
as drawn by a witness, Lady Anne Barnard

The tragedy was played out close the shore, so that the crowds that gathered there – townspeople, soldiers from the garrison – saw the horror unfold but found themselves powerless to help. Fires were lit to guide swimmers but many of them were killed by the churning wreckage as well as by drowning. Only a handful reached the shore alive and the next morning three waggon-loads of dead bodies were gathered for burial. The death toll, which included the captain, was horrific – 349 seamen and marines were killed or drowned. Of the 51 who reached the shore nine were so badly injured as to die there.

One of the survivors of the disaster was “The Indestructible Admiral Nesbit Willoughby”, whose story has been told in an earlier blog (clickhere for details). Then a lieutenant, he was lucky enough to be one of the Sceptre’s officers who were ashore and who were forced to watch from the beach. Thirteen years later this extraordinary man was to survive the horrors of the retreat from Moscow as a prisoner of the French. One cannot wonder whether he was lucky, by surviving these and other adventures, or unlucky in being an apparent magnet for danger!

Britannia’s Shark by Antoine Vanner

Historic naval fiction moves on into the age of Fighting Steam. Click here for more details ofthis story of the birth of a new weapon, of savage repression and revolt by land, of survival at sea, and below it.

(This is a much-expanded revision of a blog published two years ago).

Throughout the nineteenth century the Royal Navy had a strong tradition of landing “Naval Brigades” in trouble spots – invariably succeeding brilliantly. Crises often flared up in remote locations, to which sending Army units would be slow and difficult. The Navy was in a position to land ad-hoc forces made up of marines and “bluejackets” – as seamen ashore were known – and to support this ad-hoc infantry this most ships carried light field-guns, typically 7, 9 or 12-pounders. These were designed to be broken down into their components – barrel, wheels etc. – for easy transport and easily reassembled for action. Such Field-Gun Competitions are still held in the Royal Navy, with teams competing for the Brickwood Trophy, and can be witnessed at public displays.

Field-gun drill, circa 1895

In addition to such light weapons considerably larger ordnance was sometimes also landed. Seamen’s familiarity with blocks and tackles made them especially valuable when transporting heavy equipment across obstacles and ships’ carpenters were capable of taking on any challenge from constructing gun carriages to building bridges. Naval muzzle-loaders which had been brought ashore played a major role in the Siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War (1854-56).

Naval guns in use at the Siege of Sevastopol

An even more impressive achievement was that of the naval brigade of HMS Shannon, which dragged several of her 8-inch weapons some 600 miles across Northern India, from Calcutta to Lucknow, during the suppression of the Indian Mutiny in 1857-58. More powerful than any army artillery, these weapons were invaluable for breaching walls. Given the heat, the appalling road conditions and the fact that only bullocks and human muscle-power was available to pull the weapons, the achievement was an epic one. Another notable example came several decades later when 4.7” guns from HMS Powerfuland HMS Terrible were mounted on improvised carriages and were to play a key role in the relief of Ladysmith in 1899 during the Second Boer war.

Naval forces also made use of rockets in an artillery role. Congreve rockets, some as heavy as 32-pounds, had been in use since the Napoleonic period and they were to be superseded from around 1850 by the Hales rocket. The latter did not rely on a long, trailing stick for guidance but were spin-stabilised to improved accuracy. Since no recoil forces were involved, only a light framework was needed for launching and they could be used equally easily ashore or in small boats. During the Abyssinian campaign of 1868 the only body of men in the whole army which arrived at Magdala, after a brutal march of 400 miles across the mountains, without a single man falling out for any cause, was the Naval Brigade, including its team of rocketeers.

The Navy was in advance of the Army in the use of semi-automatic, and later automatic, weapons. Gatling, Nordenveldt and Gardner guns were attractive for deterrence – and destruction of light enemy craft. This a role became especially important when the torpedo-boat, armed with automotive “fish torpedoes” emerged as a serious threat to large surface warships. Mounted on upper-decks, or even in fighting tops on masts, such weapons could deliver a devastating rate and volume of fire and could be compared with the “Goalkeeper” close-in weapons systems mounted today for protection against missile, aircraft and fast- boat attack.

Naval Gatlings in action in the Sudan 1884

The Gatling, Nordenveldt and Gardner designs were all mechanical rather than automatic weapons, and were fired by manually turning a crank, or in the case of the Nordenvedlt, by rocking a lever back and forward. The usual round for such weapons was a heavy .45-inch bullet but Nordenveldts were also manufactured in 1-inch calibre, providing a fearsome hail that could rip apart a lightly constructed torpedo-boat.

5-barrel, .45-in calibre Nordenveldt

The Archetypal Bluejacket

They were equally devastating when used against mass attacks by tribesmen and other enemies in colonial warfare. These designs were to be replaced in due course by fully-automatic machine guns such as the Maxim. Though the attractions of such weapons on board ship were obvious there was less certainty as to how such weapons should be used on land and the British and other armies were tentative in committing to them, seeing them mainly as a branch of the artillery arm and being uncertain as to how they could be deployed tactically. The result was that the majority of the early deployments were by naval brigades, the main challenge for which was often action against lightly-armed, though often numerous, untrained enemies on the fringes of the empire. In such cases a combination of mechanical machine guns, on often-improvised wheeled carriages, and standard 7 or 9-pounder naval field guns could prove hard-hitting, mobile and flexible support to landed bluejackets and marines.

The most important single element in a naval brigade, whether consisting of the crew of a single small ship, or drawn from many larger ones, was the men themselves. Seamen, no less than marines, were trained in musketry and their skill with the cutlass – a fearsome close-quarters weapon – was legendary. The cutlass, the weapon most closely associated with the British bluejacket was still considered a useful weapon. The “stamp, thrust and hack” associated with its use must have been terrifying at close quarters and regular exercising was a normal part of every ship’s routine. Tomahawks – effective weapons in close action - were carried by some ships into mid-century and beyond.

Cutlass drill on the quarterdeck of HMS Royal Sovereign (1991)

Cutlass drill ashore

In the later decades of the century proficiency in rifle shooting was enhanced by practice at sea, made possible by use of the “Morris Tube” calibre-adapter which allowed miniature rounds to be used in the standard rifle of the time, the .303 Lee-Metford.

Rifle practice with Morris Tubes on the quarterdeck of HMS Royal Sovereign (1891)

In the 1890s a large Royal Navy vessel – such as an “R-Class” battleship such as HMS Royal Sovereign– was capable of landing a “Battalion” of four “Companies”, with sixty men in each. Two 9-pounders and two Maxim machine guns, all on field carriages, were available to land with them. When fully accoutred the men carried rifles, ammunition pouches, water bottle, haversack, blanket and entrenching spade. They were trained to carry out regimental attack and defence manoeuvres – as the dramatic photograph below of “forming square” against cavalry attack so well illustrates.

"Forming Square" to repel cavalry or human-wave attack

HMS Active's naval brigade in line with marines in centre, Zululand 1879

A typical example of a brigade landed from a smaller vessel was that of HMS Active which came ashore in Natal in November 1878 to prevent any from Zululand. The force consisted of 174 bluejackets, 42 marines and 14 West African “kroomen”. They were equipped with two 12-pounder field guns, one Gatling and two 24-pounder Hales rocket launchers. They were to play a valuable role in the Zulu War the following year.

Once ashore a naval brigade could be considered capable of taking on just about any role, from fighting battles and besieging fortifications to restoration and maintenance of law and order. In many cases they were present before the army arrived and they often continued to play an active role thereafter. Their versatility is perhaps best illustrated by the hurried construction and manning of an armoured train at Alexandria, Egypt, in 1882, in the aftermath of British landings there.

Armoured train at Alexandria 1882

Gatling in action against rioters in Alexandria, 1882

Though there were too many such Naval Brigade operations to be listed here the most spectacular were those in The Crimea (1854-56), the Indian Mutiny (1857-58), the Ashanti War (1873-74), Alexandria (1882 - see illustrations above), the Gordon Relief Expedition (1885) and the Boxer Rising (1900). There were literally dozens of smaller actions. Particularly notable was the Benin Expedition of 1897 which was almost an entirely naval “show” without Regular Army participation. Perhaps we’ll return to this later incident in a later blog.

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The original – and much shorter – version of this article was prompted by a question from a reader of Britannia’s Wolf which is equally relevant to Britannia’s Reach, Britannia’s Shark and Britannia’s Spartan. The reader asked “Dawlish seems to be pretty comfortable fighting on shore, but he was an officer in the Royal Navy. How come he seems to be able to fight so well on land?” I have now expanded the article to include much more information.

The answer is that from his entry into the Navy in 1859 Dawlish, like other officers and ratings of the time, was trained to fight on land as well as sea and had naval-brigade experience. His skill as a horseman, learned in boyhood, proved an extra advantage. Click on the links below to learn more about his adventures ashore and afloat.

Britannia’s Wolf Britannia’s Reach

Britannia’s Shark Britannia’s Spartan

A Guest Blog by Richard Abbott

We're honoured today to welcome the novelist Richard Abbott as a guest blogger and he brings us back some millennia earlier than the eras normally covered in this blog. His focus of interest is on the earliest civilisations and you can out more about him at the end of the article. Over to Richard!

Prehistoric Seafaring along the Atlantic Coasts

When we think of ships and sailing in the ancient world, the first thing which comes to mind for most people is the Mediterranean scene. Here, within the confines of an almost-enclosed sea, vessels of varying sizes plied a coastal trade. Now, Mediterranean weather can get extremely fierce at times, so there is certainly no guarantee of safety. Nevertheless, the situation faced in northern Europe, along the Atlantic seaboard, was considerably more challenging.

Dover Bronze Age boat remains (Wikipedia)

Two separate strategies emerged – one for exploiting the many rivers of north-west Europe, and the other for proper sea traffic. The river option is fascinating in its own right, spawning a number of technological solutions for carrying people and cargo a long way inland, and shaping settlement patterns which are still visible today. But for today I want to focus on the seagoing option.

Today’s United Kingdom is often characterised by a north-south divide. Simplistically, we have a prosperous and densely populated south, and a rural north with thinly scattered population, supplying a lower fraction of our GDP. The industrial midlands towns have not successfully broken up this picture.

But go back to the Bronze Age, and earlier into the Neolithic, and there is no real sign of this north-south divide. Instead, the divisions of material culture are mainly between east and west. The eastern portion faces towards, and maintains, close cultural links with what we now call Belgium, Holland, Germany and Denmark. Indeed, until only around 7,000 years ago, this connection was in the physical form of a land bridge. The last remnants of "Doggerland", a fertile area occupying much of today’s North Sea, were submerged by rising sea levels rather later than 5000BC.

The western half of the country maintained a rather different material culture, sharing common features with Ireland, Brittany and Galicia. For example, closely related passage and entrance tombs are found in Portugal, Brittany, Scilly, Cornwall, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, but not most of the rest of England, nor in much of France. Clearly the modern concept of an Atlantic coast Celtic identity has some historical truth behind it. Indeed, part of my own DNA preserves the ancestral memory of Galicia and the Iberian peninsula, where some of my remote progenitors waited for the retreat of the ice so they could head north.

Replica of Ferriby boat being sailed (http://www.ferribyboats.co.uk/)

These communities, seemingly separated by the sea but linked by culture – and quite probably language – kept contact with each other by ship. The ocean became a means of connecting settlements, not dividing them. Now, parts of these journeys can be conducted by small coastal hops. Elsewhere, however, you need to set off into deep water, in faith, and using skills and talents cultivated through the generations. Some of these boats were of sewn-plank design, the timbers held together by flexible wooden roots or withies rather than metal fastenings. Others were of animal skin and hide, stretched over a frame of wood or antler, like a curragh. Boats of this basic pattern are still used by the Inuit, albeit with more modern materials. Navigating the approaches to the English Channel, and avoiding the fearsome rocks and reefs of the Scilly Isles, has proved difficult for many ships in the last few hundred years. How challenging was it, I wonder, in an open boat with low freeboard, flexing with every wave?

One of the eight Must Farm Bronze Age boats
(archaeology.co.uk)

We have hardly any examples of seagoing ships of this era, largely because little of the construction would survive intact. We can only infer the journeys they made, and the courage they must have shown, by the shared material record they left along the coastline from Spain to Scotland.

A few later hints help us. When Julius Caesar was conducting his characteristically brutal war against the Gauls, he was forced to confront their very capable navy in Morbihan Bay, in southern Brittany. We get the clear impression that purely as sailing vessels, the Gallic ships were superior – built of thick oak timbers, with iron nails and leather sails, these were ships fully capable of facing Atlantic weather. The Romans won by converting the naval conflict into what they knew best. Instead of ship to ship combat, they turned it into an equivalent land battle by using grapples and the crow – a sort of combined hook and gangplank – to immobilise the enemy and allow boarding parties to prevail.

A recent discovery claims to have identified a Roman sword on the east coast of Canada – a claim that most archaeologists are currently treating with scepticism. It seems unlikely that a Mediterranean ship would knowingly make the transatlantic crossing – though there are persistent hints that the Phoenicians might have done this the better part of a thousand years earlier. But single vessels might easily have been caught up in fierce weather and driven far from their intended course. Or the weapon might have been captured in battle by some enterprising Celt, and then carried on what was potentially a regular voyage.

Small clues indeed, but the big picture is that the prehistoric Atlantic coastline was a lively arena. Here the ocean did not divide people: rather it connected them together. Europe’s multicultural roots, and challenges, go back a great many years.

Replica Bronze Age boat on Loch Tay (archaeology.co.uk)

About Richard Abbott

Richard lives in London, England. He writes historical fiction set in the ancient Middle East - Egypt, Canaan and Israel - and also science fiction about our solar system in the fairly near future.

So far his books have not tackled the Atlantic vessels described in the article. This represents research in progress for the next historical novel, which will explore the Late Bronze Age tin trade between the British Isles and the eastern Mediterranean. It is provisionally called A Storm of Wind, and is at an early stage.

His novel The Flame Before Us covers, in part, another bronze age group for whom the Meditteranean was important – The Sea Peoples, who settled in the coastline along from Gaza after a tumultuous approach disrupting cities from the Hittite realm down to the borders of Egypt.

When not writing words or computer code, he enjoys spending time with family, walking, and wildlife, ideally combining all three pursuits in the English Lake District. He is the author of In a Milk and Honeyed Land, Scenes From a Life, The Flame Before Us - and most recently Far from the Spaceports. He can be found at his website (http://www.kephrath.com/) or blog (http://richardabbott.datascenesdev.com/blog/), or various social media sites.

Click here for more information on The Flame Before Us

This item was originally posted in 2013 when I was first starting blogging and few readers saw it at the time. On looking at it again I thought it might be of interest for the wider audience that I now reach. Comments will be welcome.

In 1851 the English historian and jurist Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy published his “Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World”. A different outcome of each of these battles would have resulted in a significantly different course of world history, and as such they still influence the world we live in today. As such they represent major “points of departure” for alternative histories.

Tours (Poitiers) 732: Charles Martel repels the Muslim invaders from Northern Europe

Each chapter of Creasy’s book describes a different battle. The fifteen battles chosen are:

The Battle of Marathon, 490 BC: Persian expansion into Europe halted
Defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse, 413 BC: The end of Athenian power
The Battle of Gaugamela, 331 BC: Opened Asia to Alexander’s armies
The Battle of the Metaurus, 207 BC: Guaranteed Rome’s survival and triumph over Carthage
Victory of Arminius over the Roman Legions under Varus, AD 9: Ended Roman hopes of expansion into Germany
The Battle of Châlons, AD 451: Roman victory over the Huns saved Western Europe’s Future
The Battle of Tours, AD 732: Stopped Moslem expansion into Northern Europe
The Battle of Hastings, AD 1066: Essential First step towards Britain as a World Power
Joan of Arc's Victory over the English at Orléans, AD 1429; The end of English power in France
Defeat of the Spanish Armada, AD 1588: The beginning of the end for Spain as a World Power
The Battle of Blenheim, AD 1704: Britain’s emergence as a Superpower
The Battle of Pultowa, AD 1709: Russia’s first step to Superpower status
The Battle of Saratoga, AD 1777: Secured the survival of the United States
The Battle of Valmy, AD 1792: Ensures survival of French Revolutionary power and thinking
The Battle of Waterloo, AD 1815: France never again achieved Superpower status

Poltawa 1709: Russia's first step to superpower status

It is notable that due to Creasy’s focus on European (and North American) power, and because little was then known in the West about Far Eastern history, no battles were listed which refer to China’s consolidation and survival as an imperial power, the failed Mongol invasions of Japan or to Japan’s failed bid for conquest of Korea in the 15th and 16th centuries and the implications that had for subsequent Japanese history. The Mameluk victory in 1260, over the Mongols at Ain Jalut, in Galilee, which was critical in stemming Mongol power, was also omitted. Taking these and other Asian battles into account Creasy’s list might rightly have been extended to 20 or even 25 at the time he wrote. There is also good reason that he should have included the 1836 Battleof San Jacinto, which led in due course to United States acquisition of a vast areal percentage, and an economically vital one, of the modern nation.

Mongol horsemen - virtually unstoppable until defeated by the Mameluks
at Ain Jalut, near Nazareth, 1260

Since that time various writers have added to the list of post-1851 battles. Given the increasing pace and scale of conflicts since then it is not inappropriate to add at least 10. As a starting point for discussion and speculation, and with all due lack of modesty I’m suggesting the 10 post-1851 decisive battles as below:

1) Gettysburg (and Vicksburg) 1863: though fought in separate theatres, but at almost exactly the same time, these battles made the defeat of the Southern Confederacy inevitable, not least by ending hopes of international recognition. A long attritional grind lay ahead but Union victory was now inevitable.

2) Sedan1870: Not only did Bismarck’s Germany crush France decisively, and usher in the new German Empire, but it was absolute enough to ensure that the French would ultimately settle for a peace that ceded Alsace and Lorraine, thereby planting the seeds for WW1.

3) Manila (and Santiago) 1898: Two naval victories half the globe apart that announced the arrival of the United States as a world power and established a position in Asia that would be critical in WW2.

4) Tsu Shima 1905: Japan’s victory over the huge Russian fleet was perhaps the most absolute in naval history. It marked the arrival of Japan as a major power and encouraged ambitions that would ultimately lead to WW2 in the Far East and the Pacific.

5) The Marne 1914: Decisive in the sense that Germany could not achieve the quick victory in the west that it had built its strategy on. From this moment on Germany was on the back foot in the West. The Western Allies bought time that would ultimately lead to their defeat of Germany.

6) Warsaw 1920: Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War was almost absolute when the Red Army was launched westwards to carry revolution into Central Europe. The new Polish state worked a miracle in defeating it. It saved Europe but at the cost of stoking Russian resentment that would exact a terrible revenge in later decades.

7) The Atlantic 1939-45: Though the struggle to secure Britain’s supply lines climaxed in 1943, the fight went on from the first to the last day of WW2. Churchill described the U-Boat menace as the thing that frightened him most – and with good reason. Without victory in the Atlantic, no Allied victory in Western Europe.

8) Stalingrad 1942-43. The name says it all. No need to say more.

9) Saipan 1944: I’ve identified the conquest of Saipan rather than the Battle of Midway as being the decisive battle in the Pacific in WW2. My reasoning is that though Midway was critical in weakening the Japanese Navy, the United States would still have prevailed, though over a much longer time scale, if it had lost the battle. Saipan was critical in identifying the type of war that had to be fought to beat Japan, leading in due course to the decision to drop nuclear weapons, At Saipan not only did the Japanese military fight to the death, but huge numbers of civilians, including women who killed their own children, were prepared not only to resist but to commit suicide rather than surrender. This was the first US encounter with a Japanese civilian population and it highlighted just how costly an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would be. From this point on I believe that use of nuclear weapons was unavoidable.

10) The Battle That Never Was 1983-90: The US commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI – “Star Wars”), whether it was ever technically feasible or not at the time, was believed to be feasible by the Soviets. Their military budgets were already an unsustainable percentage of their total economy and the pressure to compete with Star Wars was possibly the greatest single factor in bringing about the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union. Not a shot was fired and the tyranny hundreds of millions had lived under for seven decades died not with a bang but a whimper.

The list above is obviously subjective and I’d be welcome to hear comments

Warsaw 1920: The Miracle of the Vistula
Poles advance past Marshal Pilsudski to achieve the impossible

The reality of the six-year Battle of the Atlantic

Burning tanker painted by Commander Anton Otto Fischer, USCGR, February 1943

Britannia’s Shark by Antoine Vanner

Historic naval fiction moves on into the age of Fighting Steam. Click here for more details of this story of the birth of a new weapon, of savage repression and revolt by land, of survival at sea, and below it.

This article deals with the most notable naval “last stands” of the Napoleonic era.

In an earlier blog article we encountered the innovative sloop, HMS Dart, when she went into attack on the heavily defended French base at Dunkirk in 1800 (Click here for this article). The Dart and her sister HMS Arrow, were experimental vessels, never indeed to be repeated. They were the brain-child of Sir Samuel Bentham (1757 – 1831) – brother of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. At this stage in a remarkable career as an engineer and naval architect, in Britain, Russia and China, Sir Samuel held the position of Inspector General of Naval Works. These two vessels were virtually double-ended and featured a large breadth-to-length ratio, structural bulkheads, and sliding keels. Of 150 tons and a mere 80 feet long overall, they packed an enormous punch for their size, all guns being carronades, twenty-four 32-pounders on the upper deck, two 32 pounders on the forecastle and another two on the quarterdeck.

Close up of HMS Arrow - detail from larger painting shown below

The second of the sister-vessels, HMS Arrow, left Malta in January 1805, under the command of Commander Richard Vincent (1770–1831), to escort a British convoy of 34 merchant vessels headed westwards out of the Mediterranean. Accompanying her, as the only other escort, was HMS Acheron, commanded by Commander Arthur Farquhar (1772 – 1843). The latter was somewhat of an unusual choice, as she was a bomb vessel, a 388-ton, 108-foot merchant ship that had been converted to carry a 10-inch mortar and a massive 13-inch weapon for shore bombardment. Though these mortars was unsuited to ship-to-ship action, Acheron did however carry a heavy close-range armament of eight 24-pounder carronades. Once again, as we see in so many accounts of actions in this era, the carronade was to provide notably strong gun-power to a small vessel.

The convoy had passed out into the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar when on the morning of 3^rd February two large vessels were seen coming up fast from astern. These were initially thought to be laggards from the convoy but as they closed they were perceived to be most likely warships. Commander Vincent on the Arrow accordingly signalled to Acheron to investigate. The strangers proved to be powerful 40-gun French frigates, later to be identified as the Hortense and the Incorruptible. Neither Arrownor Acheron could be considered a fair match for either. A stern chase developed and continued through the day but by nightfall it was obvious that there would be no way of escaping. The options were to fight or to surrender. Commander Vincent chose to fight.

French frigate Incorruptible

It appears that Vincent had previously made an agreement with the captains of the larger merchant ships in the convoy that carried guns to form a line of battle in such circumstance. He now called on them to do so but according to one account “these gentlemen were of the opinion that discretion was the better part of valour… they did not even answer the signal.”

Darkness had now fallen, so too the wind, and no contact were made with the enemy during the night. A breeze sprung up with first light the following morning however and one of the French frigates was revealed to be close enough to hail the Arrow. Vincent was invited to submit and come on board the French vessel but he replied with a similar request. The French now opened fire on both Arrow and Acheron and it was returned, falling off however until full daylight would allow more accurate shooting. At seven o’clock the real action began – one can imagine the preparations on all the ships during the three or so hours immediately prior to this, and the sense of supressed fear that must have reigned among the crews.

Opening oaf action: on left Acheron takes on Incorruptible and on right Arrow engages Hortenseby Francis Sartorius Jr. (c) National Maritime Museum; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Both British and French vessels opened fire almost simultaneously. The Hortense concentrated on the Arrowwhile her sister Incorruptiblefocussed on the Acheron. The wind was so light that the vessel had difficulty in manoeuvring but the unequal contest continued regardless for an hour and twenty minutes. The Arrow sustained massive injury – her masts and rigging badly damaged, four guns dismounted on her engaged side, her rudder rendered inoperative. Most serous of all was however that she had taken many hits “between wind and water” – that is, on her hull below the water line as it was exposed by rolling. Out of some 132 on board (including several passengers, among them a lady, her baby and her maid) thirteen men had been killed and twenty-seven wounded, a casualty rate of 30%. Commander Vincent realised that further resistance was futile and he struck his colours in surrender. The Arrow was so badly damaged that French boats were sent across to take off the survivors, her own boats having been badly damaged. The transfer was just completed when the Arrow rolled over in her beam ends and disappeared.

The Acheron had been in action against the Incorruptible all this time and had suffered severe damage, but low casualties. She resisted for a quarter hour longer than Arrow but in the end the Acheron’s Commander Farquhar reluctantly ordered his colours to be struck as well. She was so badly disabled that the French set her on fire after her crew had been taken off.

HMS Arrow sinking after surrender, Acheron and Incorruptible still engaging on the right

by Francis Sartorius Jr. (c) National Maritime Museum; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

The behaviour of the French officers and men to their captives offers significant insights to the state of discipline and morale in Napoleon’s navy at this time. On board the Hortense the conduct of the officers was “polite and humane” but they had so little control over their crew that they were unable to restrain them from pillaging the British prisoners. The treatment of the prisoners was even worse on the Incorruptible, the officers themselves“taunting them with their misfortunes, using very opprobrious terms.”

The sacrifices of the Arrow and the Acheron brings to mind similarly doomed resistance by the armed merchant cruisers Rawalpindiand Jervis Bay in 1939 and 1940 when they too were faced by overwhelming enemy force while escorting convoys. In all these cases the “last stands” by the escorts allowed a substantial part of the convoy to escape. After the Arrow and Acheron action the French frigates captured only three out of the 34 ships in the convoy. Some of these vessels, now sailing independently, did however later fall prey to Spanish privateers.

The Acheron’s crew were taken to Malaga and, as was common at this period, a prisoner-exchange deal was agreed soon after. Commander Farquhar, his officers, and his crew were court-martialled on board HMS Royal Sovereignoff Sardinia for the loss of their ship. The court-martial was a formality – Farquhar was not only acquitted with honour but he was promoted to the coveted rank of Post Captain. The court-martial president returned Farquhar’s sword with the words “I hope you will soon be called upon to meet the Hortense on more equal terms. The result of the contest may prove more lucrative to you, but it cannot be more honourable” (What a way with words!)

The Arrow’s crew were taken to Cartagena and were exchanged some three months later. Their court-martial took place on board HMS Gladiator in Portsmouth and Commander Vincent and his men were acquitted with similarly eulogies to those accorded the Acheron’s crew. Vincent too was promoted to “post”.

A pleasing postscript was the two ships’ defence of the convoy was rewarded by commercial organisations. Swords of Honour were presented to both Vincent and Farquhar by the Lloyds (Insurance) Patriotic Fund and cash payments were made to wounded, bereaved families and survivors who had lost all they had when the vessels were destroyed.

Looking back over two centuries however, the most significant aspect of the action was the post-victory behaviour of the French crews and the inability of their officers to control them. It was hard to imagine such men ever prevailing against the discipline and professionalism of Royal Navy crews. And Trafalgar, only eight months later, proved that they could not.

I'm busy at present preparing for the Weymouth Leviathan festival in the coming weekend.I'm particularly looking forward to the writer's workshop "From Idea to Plot" that I'll be running from 0900 to 1045 on Saturday 12th. Participants will receive and use a workbook for developing a plot from one of eight "ideas" for a historical naval adventure which I'll ask them to choose from. There are a few places left for this session so if you've ever thought "I've got an idea for a novel", but have never got further, and are in the South of England in the coming weekend, you may find it useful to come along. Click here for booking detailsfor this or any one of a myriad number of fascinating events at which well-known names in the factual and fictional nautical writing worlds are appearing.

Though mention warfare in the Age of Fighting Sail so often conjures up images of major fleet actions such as Camperdown, The Nile, and Trafalgar, single-ship actions between small vessels represented the vast majority of combats at sea. One of the most remarkable of these – stranger than fiction indeed - occurred in the Indian Ocean, off Madagascar in 1806. It did not involve ships of the official British and French navies but rather two privateers – privately owned vessels which had been issued “letters of marque”by their governments and thereby authorised to wage war on their behalf. The profit motive was powerful in such cases and where possible the objective was to capture enemy commerce rather than to risk combat.

A classic image of small-ship action in the Napoleonic era -

A brig chasing a privateer by Thomas Buttersworth (1768-1842)

A John Myers (I have no information on his previous or subsequent career) was serving as first lieutenant on the privateer Tamar in September 1806. Close to Madagascar this vessel captured a small French privateer, the Bon Fortune, which was operating out of the French island stronghold, the Isle de France, now known as Mauritius. The crew was removed to the Tamar and Myers took over the Bon Fortune with a prize crew of fourteen men. The two vessels separated in the night but the following morning Myers saw a strange sail approaching at speed and her general appearance indicated that she was La Brave, a large privateer carrying 16 guns and 130 men, which had been operating in the area with considerable success.

Myers recognised that he had no hope of escaping this enemy vessel or of defeating her in straight combat but he settled on a stratagem that was as audacious as it was dangerous. La Brave had a reputation for capturing her prizes by boarding with almost her entire crew, a manoeuvre that avoided damage and potential loss of valuable cargos. Myers accordingly brought the Bon Fortune’s two portside guns across to supplement the two on the starboard side, on which La Brave was approaching. He had them all loaded and the remaining gunpowder was then dumped overboard. His vessel carried one boat only and this he had lowered from the stern, filled with small-arms and secured close to the cabin’s portside port. He then briefed his crew on what he wanted of them and waited. As La Brave closed to “within pistol shot” Bon Fortune opened fire and received a broadside in return. The French ship then crashed into her, her bowsprit lodging in the Bon Fortune’s rigging. Briefly locked together, La Brave repeated the manoeuvre for which she was known – the greater part of her crew, all but four men, swarming across to take the prize. They met no opposition. Myers and his crew had retreated to the stern cabin and had locked themselves in. The French placed guards on the door to prevent a sally.

No illustrations seem to exist of the Bon Fortune vs. La Brave action but it might have looked like this:
In 1797 HMS Nimble captured the French privateer cutters Bonheur, and L'Impromptu

The ships had by now drifted apart and Myers and his crew piled out of the cabin and into the boat secured alongside. They cut the rope that secured it and rowed frantically away towards La Brave. As they boarded her the four Frenchmen left on board ran to opposed them. Two were killed and the other two secured. Myers’ men now had control of La Brave and he brought her around under the stern of the vessel he had just vacated, bringing all guns to bear on it. Under threat of raking by the ship he had just lost, La Brave’s captain surrendered on promise of his crew’s treatment as prisoners of war.

Now with both La Braveand the Bon Fortune under his command, Myers set out to search for his parent ship, the Tamar. He found her three days later but the appearance of La Brave in the Bon Fortune’s company raised fears that both ships were under French control. The Tamar made every preparation to open fire and Myers lowered his topsails in sign of capitulation and sent his men below decks to minimise the risk of casualties. Disaster was thus avoided.

Myers continued in command of La Brave for several months until she in turn was captured by the French frigate Tamise. He was received honourable treatment as a prisoner at Port Louis, on the Isle de France. It would be interesting to know what became of him subsequently. Would any of this blog’s readers know?

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