Captain Elliot and the Founding of Hong Kong

by Captain Elliot

  Eight days following his promotion to lieutenant, Charles Elliot returned to Iphigenia, in which he served for a further five months. In March 1823 he was posted to HMS Hussar, a 46-gun fifth-rate which on 10 January 1824 sailed for Jamaica, arriving there on 21 February.11 The Admiralty record then notes the first of Elliot’s two assignments to HMS Serapis, from July 1825.12 The Serapis had been launched as a 44-gun fifth-rate in 1782. She saw thirteen years active service before being converted for use first as a storeship in 1795, then more than twenty years later as a convalescence ship. By January 1819 she was preparing to sail for Jamaica. She is recorded as ‘Flag ship, Port Royal, Jamaica’, and reported at approximately monthly intervals to have been at Port Royal from July 1821 to May 1824.13 Serapis’s role as a convalescence ship was a crucial one. The Caribbean was not as dangerous to health as the ‘White Man’s Grave’ of West Africa, but the region carried major risk of disease nonetheless. In the six years before Charles Elliot took up his post in Serapis, Jamaica had suffered three epidemics which had taken a heavy toll of the garrison. A Parliamentary paper of 1838 noted that:

  During the above period [1817–36] the average mortality has been about 113 per thousand of the strength annually … in 1825 about a third part of the force was cut off…. This station suffered very severely from the epidemic fevers which raged throughout the island in 1819, 1822 and 1825.14

  A little over four months later, in mid-November, Lieutenant Elliot was appointed to the command of the four-gun schooner HMS Renegade, also based at Port Royal. Developed in North American waters from the early eighteenth century, the schooner’s speed and manoeuvrability, and its consequent capacity frequently to evade capture, had made it one of the vessels of choice for pirates, slave-traders, and others engaged in illegal activities at sea. As the Preventive Squadron later found on the West African coast that using captured slave clippers was an effective way of pursuing slave traders, so in the Caribbean schooners were employed in policing the seas. The United States Navy and the Royal Navy cooperated in this work, but their main concerns were different, the Americans focusing on pirates and the British on slave trading. Cuba was a centre for both pirates and slavers; the United States maintained some fourteen ships in the Caribbean for action against Cuban, Spanish and other pirates, while a Royal Navy Squadron patrolled the approaches to Cuba for Spanish ships attempting to sell Africans into slavery there. Elliot’s time in command of the Renegade was brief, little more than a month, for on 2 January 1826 he was back in Serapis, not this time as a lieutenant, but as an acting commander.

  After her long career HMS Serapis was finally paid off in March 1826, to be superseded as Vice-Admiral Sir Lawrence Halsted’s flagship by HMS Magnificent, a former third-rate 74-gun ship-of-the-line which had seen action in the wars with France, and after convoy protection work was now in service as a hospital and store ship. Charles Elliot’s promotion to commander was confirmed when he transferred to Magnificent on 14 April 1826.

  In his new rank Elliot subsequently took command, on 15 August 1826, his twenty-fifth birthday, of the 16-gun brig-sloop HMS Harlequin, previously in the charge of Commander James Scott. During this posting, which involved, among other things, assisting the British Consul General in Haiti with his fact-finding survey of the island, Elliot became seriously ill, though apparently not with the yellow fever by which the Consul General himself was struck down.15 By January 1828 Harlequin was in Barbados, moving in July that year to Nassau in the Bahamas. Her career came to an end in 1829 when, having been deemed unserviceable, she was sold at Port Royal.

  1828 and 1829 were important years for Charles Elliot. On 28 August 1828 he was promoted captain, but early in January 1829 he was discharged from the Harlequin and placed on half-pay, his fourteen years active service with the Royal Navy ending at this point. His naval career had been formative and demanding, and had provided him with a range of experience of people, places, tasks and situations that would stand him in good stead for the trials and challenges with which he would have to deal in middle and later life. Fourteen years from entry to captain represented a very rapid rate of progression, one which was considerably faster than that of most of his contemporaries.16 Statistically impressive though this was, the nature of Elliot’s postings suggests that he was never marked out for a long or distinguished naval career. Half his time in the navy was as a volunteer or midshipman, and of the remainder barely two and a half years had been spent in command at sea.

  He was, however, still a young man. During his time in Harlequin helping to protect British interests in Haiti he had met and married, in 1828, the 22-year-old Clara Genevieve Windsor.17 She had been born and brought up in Haiti by her English father, Robert Harley Windsor, and her French mother, Marie Magdeleine Jouve, along with five younger siblings.18 There seems to be no definitive information in the available sources to suggest how Charles and Clara met, but it may be that Charles had first seen Clara in New York and subsequently recognised her in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.19 Clara was related through her brother to Louis Victor Noñez, Director of Customs at Port-au-Prince, and another possibility is that Charles had professional dealings with him at some stage and social contact with friends and relations followed.20 Whatever she thought her married future held for her, Clara had lived through unsettled times in the fledgling Haitian Republic, fitting her for the uncertainties of the several turbulent environments she would encounter over the years as Captain Elliot’s wife.21 In 1829 she gave birth to their first child, Harriet Agnes.

  On leaving active service with the Royal Navy, Charles Elliot can have had little idea of what his next move would be. He had been on half pay before, for a few months between his time with the West Africa Squadron and joining the Hussar, and he may have entertained the possibility of resuming a naval career. That was not to be; it was a little over a year after his discharge from the Harlequin, having travelled to France and spent some time in Bordeaux, that he was appointed by the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Sir George Murray, to the post of Protector of Slaves in the newly established colony of British Guiana.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Four

  Slavery and British Guiana

  As the Portuguese explorers of the of the fifteenth century ventured southwards off the west coast of Africa, gaining strategic footholds in the islands of the Atlantic as they went, they joined existing trading systems among the indigenous African communities, developing thriving commercial intercourse with them.1 Since slave trading was already well established within Africa, Portuguese ships were able to trade slaves between coastal areas; from such commerce it was a short step to the transportation of slaves to the Portuguese islands and then to Portugal itself.

  The mid-sixteenth century saw the establishment of sugar plantations in Brazil by the Portuguese, who had planted sugar cane on their Atlantic islands and then developed the industry in Brazil as a response to growing demand for sugar in Europe. Experience of slave labour had shown the economic benefits of using it for sugar cultivation and refining; other crops, including coffee and cotton, were also harvested and processed by slaves, but it was in sugar production that the majority were engaged. Other European nations were quick to learn from the Portuguese example, the Spanish, Dutch, British and French using their maritime power to acquire and exploit Caribbean and South American territories for commercial gain.

  Slave labour was key to the success of their enterprises. Operating in what became known as a triangular system, specially constructed or converted ships sailed from major European ports to western Africa carrying manufactured goods.2 These were then exchanged for native Africans who, transported to the Caribbean and to North and South America to work the plantations, constituted the slave labour force which supplied Europe with sugar and other produce on which it came to rely. The number of slaves involved was huge; it has been estimated that in the more than 350 years of the Atlantic slave trade, around 12 million people were taken from Africa, of
whom some ninety-two per cent reached their destinations and about twenty-five per cent were carried in British ships.3

  A trading system so dependent on brutality and repression inevitably engendered rebellion. By the time Brazil formally abolished slavery in 1888 there had been thirteen major slave rebellions, revolts, uprisings and wars in eight territories, as well as countless smaller disturbances. The Atlantic slave trade also caused outrage among individuals and religious and political groups in Britain, America and continental Europe, but it was some 250 years before organised pressure for abolition began, and a further twenty years before the British abolition legislation of 1807.

  At the start of the nineteenth century, British possessions in the Caribbean comprised Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Trinidad, Tobago, and territories in the Leeward and Windward Islands chains. In 1831 the former Dutch colonies of Berbice, Essequibo, and Demerara, east of Venezuela, were consolidated to become British Guiana, Britain’s only colony on the South American mainland.

  The three Dutch territories had taken their names from the three rivers which dominated the region, each rising hundreds of miles to the south and flowing almost due north to reach the Atlantic some 300 to 400 miles south-east of the Orinoco delta. Though the area was first visited by Europeans – a Spanish expedition – at the end of the fifteenth century, the Dutch did not start to settle it until 1580. English interest was aroused by Sir Walter Raleigh’s report of his travels in the region in 1595, but decades passed during which the Dutch, French and English each sought to establish a permanent presence there. It was from the re-acquisition of an English settlement at Paramaribo, on the coast of what is now Suriname, that the Dutch developed their colonies; but the development was not continuous. Until the early nineteenth century, control of one or more of the three colonies was for short periods in the hands of the British or French, as the treaties which followed conflicts between European powers reallocated overseas possessions among them.

  The Dutch colonists were keen to attract immigrants to help build a prosperous economy, but they may not have expected the scale of the influx of plantation owners who emigrated to the three colonies from the Leeward and Windward islands. Dissatisfied with the relatively poor quality of their land these mainly British expatriates came to Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice in such numbers that by the 1780s their influence had begun to eclipse the authority of the Dutch colonial government. Having de facto control of Berbice, the British took possession of the now jointly administered colonies of Essequibo and Demerara in 1796, from which time British plantation ownership, the slave population and crop production expanded even more rapidly. Despite a short-lived period again under Dutch rule following the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, when the Treaty broke down and war in Europe resumed in 1803 the colonies were retaken by the British, this time until colonial rule ended with independence as Guyana in 1966.4 It was not until the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814, however, that the territories were formally ceded to Britain.5

  The government and administration of what became British Guiana were conducted during Dutch rule by the Dutch West India Company. The Company’s main man in charge in the territory for a major part of the eighteenth century was Laurens Storm van ‘s Gravesande, who was Secretary then Commandeur of Essequibo from 1738 to 1750, and Directeur Generaal of Essequibo and Demerara from 1750 to 1772. Van ‘s Gravesande is generally credited with responsibility for the rapid development and prosperity of Essequibo and Demerara, but it was his immigration policy which eventually resulted in the takeover of the colonies by the British, whose West Indies planters he had done so much to attract. By the time he left office he had successfully guided the territory through a turbulent period of slave revolt, immigrant crime, and tribal conflict but Demerara, particularly, had now reached the point at which government would become less autocratic and more responsive to the colonists’ needs. Following the report of a commission appointed by the Dutch government to look into the concerns of the planters, action was taken to implement, in 1792, what was known as the Concept Plan of Redress. The plan provided, among other things, for a single Court of Policy for the two colonies, with legislative and executive functions, while retaining separate Courts of Justice.

  The last decades of the eighteenth century in the colonies were characterised by the increasing power of the planters as it speeded the weakening of Dutch authority. The appointment of the commission was a recognition that action was needed, but pressure from the planters was maintained. The size and composition of the Court of Policy – initially comprising four officials (one of whom had a casting vote) and four colonists nominated by two electoral colleges – were a continuing source of disagreement, notably so far as the ‘elected’ members were concerned. So also were the court’s powers to approve estimates and fix budgets; ‘Financial Representatives’ were added but their role too was contentious. Perhaps aware of where all this might be leading, the Dutch central government was clear that the official members of the court should be more accommodating: ‘the contributions for the Colonial Chest are to be regulated by the inhabitants themselves’ decreed the Staten Generaal in 1788.6 Some years later instructions were issued that the Directeur Generaal ‘will take care not to leave the administration of the Colony Chest wholly to the Colony [i.e. official] Members of the Court of Policy, but will thereto admit a greater number of the Colonists...’7

  The planters will have received with some relief the news that the first Governor of British Guiana was to be Sir Benjamin D’Urban, the current Governor of Demerara/Essequibo. Like Hugh Elliot, he had, when Governor of the Leeward Islands, been based in Antigua; as Governor there he had acquired a reputation for being sympathetic to the plantation owners. He had been appointed Governor of Demerara in 1824 and rapidly found out at first hand that its most recent history had been more turbulent than that of Antigua and would present sterner challenges. There had been a major slave revolt in Berbice in 1763-4, but in 1823, just eight years before the inauguration of British Guiana, one of the largest and most significant rebellions ever in the Caribbean and the Americas took place in Demerara.

  Slave labour was used for the cultivation of coffee and cotton in Demerara, but it was in sugar production that the most money was to be made and in which the great majority of slaves were engaged. The 1823 uprising was initially planned at Plantation Success, some four miles east of the capital, Georgetown. Owned by Sir John Gladstone, who had switched his operation in Demerara from coffee to sugar, Success was one of the larger plantations in the colony. Those working there included several prominent members of the slave population who had mistakenly believed that recent instructions from the Colonial Secretary, Lord Bathurst, intended to improve conditions for slaves, meant they were to be freed. As several weeks had passed since the instructions were known to have been received in the colony, the slave leaders concluded that implementation was being deliberately stalled. Whether or not that was the case, they were justified in being suspicious of the authorities’ motives. The ‘Amelioration’ measures had been drawn up by the Privy Council following a House of Commons resolution in March 1823 proposed by the Foreign Secretary, Canning. Pressure for such legislation had come not only from the abolition lobby but, through Members of Parliament sympathetic to their views, from the planters, whose self-interested aim was to take the heat out of both slave agitation in the colony and demands at home for abolition. The measures were essentially an attempt to steer a middle course, and as sometimes the case with compromise, in the end satisfied neither side. In March 1824 Canning gave a report back to the House on the contents of the Order in Council, in which he summarised

  the improvements government propose to effect in the island of Trinidad – First, abolition of the use of the whip with regard to females entirely – discontinuance of the use of the whip as applied to males as a stimulus to labour – restrictions on the infliction on males of punishment by the whip. Secondly, a religious establishment and religious instruction; – and in order
to give time for the acquirement of that instruction, the abolition of the markets and of slave labour on the Sunday. Thirdly, encouragement of marriage among the slaves – the keeping together of families of slaves, in sales or transfers of estates; the securing to slaves the enjoyment of property, and the right to distribute it at their death. Fourthly, The admissibility of the evidence of slaves, under certain regulations; and lastly, a power to the slave to purchase his own freedom or that of his wife or children.8

  To enquiry about other colonies he responded:

  It is the intention of the government … after having established the system which I have explained, in Trinidad … also to extend the experiment to Demerara and its dependants; where indeed it would have been first tried, but for the intervention of the unfortunate occurrences which have lately taken place in that colony.9

  The ‘unfortunate occurrences’ involved the rebellion of several thousand slaves and the deaths of hundreds. The possibility of uprising had never been far beneath the surface and had been simmering in particular since May, 1823 when Governor John Murray resurrected instructions facilitating freedom of religious worship first sent to the Governor (Bentinck) in 1811; except that they did not, in practice, make religious observance easier for slaves because all the apparent extension of opportunity for that purpose was constrained by the need in each instance to obtain the permission of the plantation owners or managers. The reissued instructions began:

  It must in the first place be understood, that no limitation or restraint can be enforced upon the right of instruction and of preaching on particular estates; providing the meetings for this purpose take place upon the estate, and with the consent and approbation of the proprietor or overseer of such estate.10