Captain Elliot and the Founding of Hong Kong Page 4

  Doubtless without any expectation or hope of a positive response, but because he thought convention required it, Exmouth sent a message to the Dey early on 27 July via Lieutenant Samuel Burgess setting out the British demands. Chief of these was the release of Christian slaves. No response was received from the Dey within the two hours he had promised, and after a further half an hour Queen Charlotte advanced to take up position 50yds from the mole. The bombardment that followed was triggered by two or three shots from several Algerian guns, and lasted for more than seven hours. It was by all accounts ferocious; the firepower of the British and Dutch ships wrecked the main Algerian gun emplacements and set much of the town ablaze. The American Consul gives a vivid account of the action:

  The cannonade endures with a fury which can only be comprehended from practical experience; shells and rockets fly over and by my house like hail. The fire is returned with constancy from several batteries situated at the north-west of the town and from four heavy guns directly below my windows…. At half-past seven, the shipping in the port is on fire…. The upper part of my house appears to be destroyed, several shells having fallen onto it, whole rooms are knocked to atoms.23

  At about ten o’clock in the evening Exmouth called a halt to the attack and the fleet withdrew out of range of the Algerian guns. The demands were presented again early the following morning, and this time they were accepted.

  After some negotiation over 1,000 Christian slaves were released, reparations were made for previous slave-taking to Naples and Sardinia, the British consul was reinstated, and peace was made by the Dey with the Netherlands. In Britain the expedition was judged a great success. Exmouth’s reputation rose, earlier reservations about his abilities being set aside; as a midshipman in the Queen Charlotte loyally wrote in a letter home: ‘I hope Lord Exmouth has proved that he is a degree better than the Mediterranean waterman which some people were pleased to call him.’24

  Positive though all this seemed at the time, events over the succeeding years were for the European powers depressingly like the aftermaths of past attempts to solve the problem of Barbary Coast piracy. The corsairs regrouped and resumed their activities; the Dey of Algiers was killed in a coup a few months after the Battle, but it was not until the French occupation of Algeria from 1830 that the pirates there were finally overcome. Nor had the conduct of the Battle of Algiers itself gone quite as planned. From HMS Minden, before the action started, Midshipman Elliot will have seen the flagship come to anchor in close range of the main Algerian batteries. Behind Minden in line astern was the Albion, and on her starboard quarter HMS Impregnable. These positions were less than ideal; they did not follow the contour of the mole evenly, so that while the Queen Charlotte was close in, the ships behind her were progressively further out and less able to bring effective fire to bear. Impregnable, particularly, was not only unable to make a full contribution to the attack but was also in a highly vulnerable position. The casualty figures for the British ships reflected their deployment in the battle: overall, British losses were 128 killed and 690 wounded, of which the majority were accounted for by the out-of-position Impregnable and by the two vessels involved in the heaviest fighting, Queen Charlotte and Leander.25

  Charles Elliot’s participation in the Battle of Algiers at the age of 15 was a dramatic experience for him. The Minden played a valuable role in the action, even though she was not in the fiercest of the encounters (her casualties were seven killed and thirty-seven wounded), and she stayed in position after the main disengagement for some three hours to provide suppressive fire.26 On 3 September the fleet set sail from Algiers for Gibraltar, whence it would return to England – except, perhaps, for the Minden, which was reported on 1 November at Gibraltar to be preparing to sail for Madras (Chennai) two weeks later.27 From 1816 until 1820 Midshipman Elliot was to serve in the East Indies, where the commander-in-chief was Rear Admiral Sir Richard King, a highly experienced officer who had been one of Nelson’s captains at Trafalgar.

  Despite the dramatic reduction in men and in ships on active service being undertaken in the Royal Navy following the ending of the Napoleonic threat, much work was still to be done, not least against piracy, not only in the Mediterranean but also throughout the Indian Ocean region. The Honourable East India Company had done much to assist the Royal Navy but little impact had been made. European shipping continued to be vulnerable from pirates based along the Coromandel and Malabar coasts of southern India and, especially, from those operating out of the Persian Gulf. The origins and extent of Indian Ocean piracy have been much discussed, but there seems little doubt that it became much more widespread once European countries began expanding their trading expeditions to East Asia. Indian merchants, and after a time the rulers of coastal territories on the Indian sub-continent, resented the imposition first by the Portuguese and then by others of systems of maritime control. Inevitably such resentment led to conflict, the European powers attempting to quell what they saw as piratical interference with legitimate trade, and indigenous Indians seeking to resist encroachment on their maritime sphere of influence by foreigners whom they regarded, in turn, as pirates.28 Recent military successes in India against the Kingdom of Mysore and the Maratha Confederacy enabled the British in 1818 to focus their attention on the Persian Gulf, in particular on the Qawasim pirates based at Ras-al-Khyma, west of the Strait of Hormuz and north-east of present day Dubai.

  With news of the defeat of Napoleon orders had been given for the reduction of the number of ships in the East Indies Squadron of the Royal Navy. Nevertheless, the main naval base and dockyard at Trincomalee on the east coast of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) continued to be fully maintained. An example of the importance of Trincomalee to the British at this time is the estimated expenditure on personnel at her ten overseas dockyards for the four years from 1817; Trincomalee was responsible for around a fifth of the total, only Quebec taking more.29,30 The strength of the East Indies Squadron during this period was usually twelve to fourteen vessels. Headed by HMS Minden, which became Sir Richard King’s flagship, and the 50-gun frigate HMS Liverpool, the ships on the station typically consisted of four or five fifth-rates (36 to 46 guns), four sixth-rates (20 to 24) and two or three brig-sloops (18).31 One of their functions, making use of port facilities at Bombay (Mumbai), Colombo and Madras (Chennai), as well as Trincomalee, was to support the military, which they had done to good effect. From the British viewpoint their most significant operation at this time, however, was the successful attack in December 1819 on Ras-al-Khyma, in which Royal Naval support comprised the Liverpool, the sixth-rate HMS Eden (24) and the brig-sloop HMS Curlew.

  HMS Minden was elsewhere. On 18 August 1819 she had arrived from Bombay at Trincomalee, her main base, where she is recorded as having been berthed during the late summer and autumn of 1817 and into 1818.32,33 In contrast to his experience in the Mediterranean, it seems that Charles Elliot saw little, if any, action during his time on the East Indies station. It is highly probable, though, that he met up with his family in Madras, where his father Hugh was Governor.34 Such a meeting or meetings could have taken place either shortly after the Minden’s arrival on the station from Gibraltar in 1816, or following a visit by Minden in 1818, when she is recorded on 30 March as ‘Returned to Trincomalee having conveyed the 15 Regiment of native Infantry from Madras to Colombo’.35 It will have been the last time Charles saw his mother, who died in India on 1 March 1819. An obituary notice paid her due respect and mentioned her funeral:

  Mar. 1

  At Madras, the wife of the Rt.Hon. Hugh Elliot, Governor of Madras. She was universally esteemed; and while her death was a severe affliction to her own family, it excited general regret in the settlement…. The Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Calcutta arrived at Madras on the 2 of March, and was thus accidentally enabled to celebrate the funeral obsequies of Mrs. Elliot.36

  Later in 1819 Hugh Elliot wrote to his nephew, Lord Minto, ‘Charles who must always vociferate his joke, good or bad, says it is a g
reat pity that Edward always cuts in last, alluding, I suppose, to the age and other circumstances of the fair ladies who attract his brother’s notice.’37,38 As well as possibly helping to locate Charles at this time, his father’s comment is an explicit observation of sibling rivalry between Charles and his elder (by five years) brother Ned; he insisted on being heard, and disliked being deprived by Ned of having the last word.

  Having completed her deployment with the East Indies squadron, HMS Minden returned home in 1820. For Mr Midshipman Elliot there now followed two short postings on the Home Station. The first of these was under Lieutenant Commander John Reeve in the cutter HMS Starling (10 guns) with a complement of fewer than ninety men. As if to ensure his exposure to yet more contrast in a short space of time, he was then assigned from one of the smallest categories of armed vessel in the Royal Navy to the largest, HMS Queen Charlotte, a 100-gun first-rate ship-of-the-line. The Queen Charlotte, Exmouth’s flagship at Algiers, was now the flagship at Portsmouth of Admiral Sir James Hawkins-Whitshed.

  Charles Elliot’s time on the Home Station gave him an opportunity to visit Minto House, the family seat in Scotland. His family was important to him, and after several years’ absence he was determined to make the most of this period in Britain – which he doubtless knew might be brief – to renew contact with his relatives. Lord Minto received a letter from his uncle Hugh, now returned from Madras, at the end of 1820. Not for the first time, Hugh Elliot was short of money:

  This will be delivered to you by Charles. When he expressed his anxious wish to pay you a visit at Minto, I consented to it, upon the presumption that 3 or 4 guineas would have sufficed to go and the same to come back. But soon I found this trip will cost more than twenty guineas. As however I had consented in the first instance I do not like to disappoint him in a project upon which he had set his heart. I have given him ten guineas, and I shall be much obliged if you will advance to him whatever may be necessary for his return before the end of January at which time he is to join his ship at Portsmouth.39

  In June 1821 Sir Robert Mends was appointed commodore and commander-in-chief of the West African Squadron, sailing on 20 November that year for Sierra Leone in the 42-gun fifth-rate frigate HMS Iphigenia.40 Midshipman Elliot also joined the Iphigenia, one of a total complement of 264 men. The Preventive Squadron, as it was known, was not one of the more favoured postings for navy personnel. Its role was to enforce the prohibition on the transportation of slaves in the Atlantic, as required by the 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The work was relentless, dangerous, unglamorous, and a constant risk to health. Having served for a short time in Iphigenia, Charles Elliot was transferred to a smaller ship in the squadron, the sixth-rate 20-gun Myrmidon. After another few months, in June 1822, he was promoted lieutenant.

  Chapter Three

  Commission to Captain

  Since 1677 formal progression to the commissioned officer rank of lieutenant in the Royal Navy had been dependent on passing an examination. Samuel Pepys, then Secretary for the navy, had sponsored the measure, which required candidates to show competence in seamanship and navigation; they also had to be aged at least 20, and to have completed at least three years at sea. The examination did much to help raise levels of competence, as had been hoped, but the prospect of sitting it had the effect of limiting the number of men seeking promotion. It was not, in any case, an unavoidable hurdle on the route to lieutenancy; with the necessary patronage and influence exercised on their behalf aspiring midshipmen could still progress without taking it. The examination and the presence on some ships of schoolmasters, as they were known, were the more formal elements in what were essentially informal arrangements.1 This was in large part because of those who, contrary to the advocates of the examination system, saw practical experience, the acquisition and development of leadership skills and the building of character as more important than instruction in technicalities. Many of the adherents to this traditional view were highly placed: ‘There is no place superior to the quarterdeck of a British man of war’, King William IV is said to have remarked, ‘for the education of a gentleman.’2

  There is nothing in the sources to suggest that Charles Elliot sat the examination. It seems unlikely that he would have done so, given his background and the standing of his family. His promotion to lieutenant after seven years’ service was almost as fast as it could have been, given the normal pre-requisite of a minimum of six years at sea; among those progressing at least to commander the average period of service from entry to lieutenant at that time was nine to ten years, and for some men it was considerably more.3

  The Preventive Squadron of which Lieutenant Elliot was a member had been formed only recently, in 1819. The Napoleonic Wars had demanded a level of ships and manpower which left very few resources for other purposes, however desirable, but the need for significant naval intervention on the west coast of Africa had in any case not become apparent until it was clear that the 1807 Act would not suffice to stop the capture of Africans and their transportation across the Atlantic. For the first few years after formal abolition the law was more honoured in the breach than the observance; the legislation was silent on many of the consequences of abolition, such as what to do with liberated slaves. British slave traders found ways of circumventing the new requirements with relative ease; investing their ships with the flags and crews of other nations was a common tactic.4 Further complications arose from British attempts to police the activities of other nations which had abolished slave trading, notably the United States. A modest step forward was taken with a bilateral agreement in 1811 between Britain and Portugal, the earliest and one of the most active of the slave trading nations, which committed Portugal to gradual suppression of the trade and authorised reciprocal (in practice, British) interception and search, though only of ships suspected of taking slaves from non-Portuguese parts of the African coast. There followed anti-slave trading agreements and formal treaties between Britain and other countries, as well as with Portugal, but in the face of organised cooperation between slave traders of all nationalities, and the continuing legality of the trade in most of the countries concerned, trying to take effective international diplomatic and naval action against it was fraught with difficulty.5 The cost of the Preventive Squadron was controversial. It was nevertheless a relatively small force, especially to start with, for the job it had to do, comprising seven ships in 1819 (nine by 1824, and more then twenty-seven at its height in the late 1840s) with which to cover the African coast from what is now Senegal in the north, to Angola in the south. Slave trafficking in the early decades of the nineteenth century was flourishing; the captain of the Myrmidon, Commander Henry Leeke, estimated that in the fifteen months to October 1821 at least 190 slave ships entered the River Bonny in the Bight of Biafra.6

  Whatever Charles Elliot had heard from his father about the injustice and horrors of slavery, his service patrolling and intervening on the slaving coasts of West Africa ensured that he confronted the inhumanity and brutality of the trade at first hand. HMS Myrmidon had already seen much action, as had the rest of the Squadron, by the time Elliot joined her early in March 1822. There is no reason to suppose that he was not aboard Myrmidon when, the following month, she attacked the Portuguese slaver Esperanza Felix in the waters off Lagos. Among the Africans rescued in that operation was a 13-year-old boy, Adjai, who went on to study at Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone, was ordained, and in 1864 as Samuel Adjai Crowther, in Canterbury Cathedral, was consecrated the first Anglican bishop in Africa. It seems highly probable, too, that Charles Elliot took some part in the joint action by Iphigenia and Myrmidon, also in April 1822, when a cutting out expedition by boats of the two ships was sent to attack five slave vessels at anchor in the River Bonny.7 The boats were under the command of George Mildmay, a senior lieutenant who later that year was promoted commander. A later account seeks to provide operational detail:

  When about four miles off, the British boats showed their colours
. As soon as they came within long range they were fired at by two schooners showing no flag … Mildmay’s boat was ahead of the others, and he had to allow them to catch up, exposed meanwhile to the additional fire of two brigs and a brigantine under French colours that had joined in the fight.8

  The two schooners turned out to be Spanish; some of the crew of the first continued to offer resistance after it had formally surrendered but the second was abandoned before boarding took place. When it did, ‘…a lighted match was found hanging over the hatch to the magazine, intended to blow up the ship and 325 slaves ironed in the hold’.9 With the capture of the three French vessels it emerged that nearly 1,500 Africans had been herded onto the five slave ships. Their release was to prove one of the highest numbers of slaves to be freed in a single operation in the Preventive Squadron’s endeavours over fifty years.10

  Slave trading across the Atlantic – the notorious ‘Middle Passage’ – eventually ended in 1869. The West African and Cape Squadrons of the Royal Navy were then amalgamated, the Preventive Squadron having lost some 17,000 men during its existence. Some of these fatalities were in battle and some were accidental, but many were from disease, mainly malaria and yellow fever. While illness was a risk everywhere in naval service, the West African coast was well known to be especially hazardous. ‘Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin! There’s one comes out for forty goes in!’ ran a contemporary warning. Both Commodore Mends and his son, a lieutenant, succumbed to disease and died in 1823.