Squadron

by John Broich

  1. ‘On the brow o’ the sea’

  1 On evictions, palm-greasing and alleged bribery, see entry for County Waterford in D.R. Fisher, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820–1832, vol. 3: Constituencies, pt. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); also Royal Commission on the State of the Law and Practice in respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland, 1845, State of the law and practice in respect to the occupation of land in Ireland: evidence taken before Her Majesty’s Commissioners, part II (CMD 616), appendix B, 23; for contract-shredding, see Freeman’s Journal, 11 Sept. 1837, 2. On May Park, including its ‘pretty’ situation, see Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, vol. 1 (London: S. Lewis, 1837), 158; for fox-hunting, see Waterford News, 26 Jan. 1849, 3; on the matter of butter, see William Blacker, An Essay on the Improvement to be Made in the Cultivation of Small Farms (Dublin: William Curry, 1837), 87; on gardener Mr Hessian’s strawberries, see Martin Doyle and Edmund Murphy, Irish Farmer’s and Gardener’s Magazine and Register of Rural Affairs, vol. 1 (Dublin: William Curry, 1834), 50. Meara’s siblings were George E.J., William H.P. and Theodosia C.S. Meara. Arabella was born after Edward. Mother Sarah Catherine (Ward) Meara died the same year, though it remains unknown whether this was due to complications of childbirth. George Meara had more children with his second wife, Elizabeth. Data about May Park estate come from historic maps available on the excellent Ordnance Survey, Ireland website, www.osi.ie. For Meara’s appointment to the Heroine, see United Service Magazine, 1849, pt. 2 (London: H. Hurst, 1849), 310. For George E.J. Meara’s grooming in society, see Freeman’s Journal (Dublin), 7 Jan. 1845, 2; 6 Jan. 1851, 3.

  2 For some details of Heroine and her class see Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 29 Apr. 1847, vol. 92, col. 162, and David Lyon and Rif Winfield, The Sail and Steam Navy List (London: Chatham, 2004), 127. On the sorts of slavers the British encountered on the west coast during these years, see ‘Proceedings during the year 1845 in the British and Brazilian Court of Mixed Commission, Sierra Leone’, in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1847, vol. 67, Slave Trade, 77–81. Today, the Gallinas is called Moa. For the background to British efforts near the mouth of the Gallinas and the particular trouble with the Zaro, see Commander Dunlop to Commodore Fanshawe 13 Oct. 1849 in Foreign Office Librarian, British and Foreign State Papers, 1849–1850, vol. 38 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1862), 384–6. Details of the fight with the Zaro come from Commander Marsh to Commodore Fanshawe 10 Jan. 1850, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1851, vol. 26, pt. 1, Piracy; Slave Trade, 229–30. Further details come from HMS Heroine’s log, National Archives ADM 53/3580. Meara’s commendation is noted on his service record, National Archives ADM/196/70.

  3 Details about HMS Niger come from the invaluable Lyon and Winfield, The Sail and Steam Navy List, 212. Reporting Commander Heath’s appointment to her, the London Standard, 15 July 1850, 4, noted Heath’s luck in getting the command and notes that it was a powerful vessel to be classed a sloop – a commander’s command. For a general account of the Preventative squadron during this period, see Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter, especially ch. 16. The fear of British subjects in the hinterland of Lagos and violence at Badagry is reported in a series of letters between Heath, his superiors, the British missionaries and merchants at Badagry, and the second-in-command to Akitoye, the uncle of Kosoko, in June and July 1851: House of Commons Accounts and Papers, Consuls; Slave Trade (47, part 1), vol. 103 (Nov. 1852-Aug. 1853), 249–58, 281. Consul Beecroft is depicted in a portrait by an unknown artist held in the Whitby Museum, Yorkshire, item number WHITM:PEF277. His feeling that African chiefs were all the same and would bow before a show of force is a near-quote of his report that appears on pp. 306–7 of the Parliamentary Papers cited above. For the debacle of an attack on Lagos, see especially Heath’s report of 17 Dec. 1851 to the Sec. of the Admiralty reprinted on p. 188. For this see too the report of Commander Forbes, Philomel, to Commodore Bruce, 26 Nov. 1851, 295–6. This collection of letters and a story in Royal Cornwall Gazette, 19 Sept. 1851, 6, relates the capsizing of the Niger’s boat and loss of John Milne Duffus. He is described in Aberdeen Journal, 8 Oct. 1851, 4. Commodore Bruce comments on the particularly impassable surf here in the Parliamentary Papers cited above. On the military preparedness of Lagos, see The Destruction of Lagos (London: James Ridgway, 1852), 19; this book was written anonymously. Further details about the desperate raid on Lagos come from Nautical Magazine 21 (Feb. 1852), 109–10. For the men dying under Lagos by Heath’s side, see Leopold Heath, ‘A Sketch of the Life of Admiral Sir Leopold George Heath’ (1885), reproduced in George Heath, Records of the Heath Family (privately published); this item was transcribed by J.J. Heath-Caldwell at http://web.archive.org/web/20160824184244/http://www.jjhc.info/heathleopold1907.htm. For Commodore Bruce’s indignation at the event, see multiple letters and reports in the Parliamentary Papers cited above, 283–4, 292, 294–5, especially 302, 306.

  4 Estimates of the number of Africans who were annually kidnapped and carried overseas to slave markets are very difficult to calculate, but the scholars who roughly draw this conclusion are Moses D. E. Nwulia, Britain and Slavery in East Africa (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1975), 24, 67, and Matthew S. Hopper, Slaves of One Master (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 36–9.

  5 Details about George Sulivan and others in the family come from Henry Norton Sulivan, Life and Letters of the Late Admiral Sir Bartholomew James Sulivan, K. C. B. (London: John Murrary, 1896), vii-viii, 394, 416, and elsewhere. Details about George’s religious upbringing come from his mother’s serial letter to George Sulivan, Sulivan papers held by the Hodson family, 28 Nov. 1849. And the Bartholomew James book cited above makes his strict Sabbath observance clear too: p. xxxi. Data on Thomas Ball Sulivan come from the Dictionary of National Biography 55 (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1898), 157. The detail about the Sulivan name being a ticket to respect and kindness in Cornwall comes from Henrietta Sulivan to George Sulivan, 10 August (no year given), in the Sulivan papers held by the Hodson family. George Sulivan’s descendants, the Hodson family, have carefully preserved an excellent collection of his letters, photos and other documents. I am extraordinarily grateful to the Hodsons for granting me the use of these items as well as for their warm hospitality. Details about George Sulivan’s great naval family come from Bartholomew James, Journal of Rear-Admiral Bartholomew James, 1752–1828, Publications of the Navy Records Society VI (London: Navy Records Society, 1896), ix. For an introduction to the naval Sulivan family, see Peter Collister, The Sulivans and the Slave Trade (London: Rex Collins, 1980), 1–19. For the details of the attack, G.L. Sulivan, Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters and on the Eastern Coast of Africa (London: Samson Low, 1973), 17, 25. See also M.D.D. Newitt, ‘Angoche, the Slave Trade and the Portuguese c. 1844–1910’, Journal of African History 13 (1972), 659–72. From the Sulivan papers preserved by the Hodson family comes the letter of Henrietta Sulivan to George Sulivan, Sulivan papers, 28 Nov. 1849.

  6 Details from this section come from Colomb’s service record, National Archives ADM 196/36; Phoenix Muster Book, National Archives ADM 38/8724, and Phoenix’s log for Feb.-Oct. 1854, National Archives ADM 53/4630. Details about Phoenix’s mission come from M.J. Ross, Polar Pioneers (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 348. Impressions of Inglefield come from E.A. Inglefield, Words of Advice to Young Naval Officers (Liverpool: Webb & Hunt, 1864). On Inglefield’s artistry, E.A. Inglefield, A Summer Search for Sir John Franklin (London: Thomas Harrison, 1853), 24; National Maritime Museum, photograph collection G4264, G4269, G4270, and others. Colomb’s verdict on arctic landscapes comes from P.H. Colomb, ‘The Evolution of the Blue Jacket’, North American Review 161 (1895), 268.

  7 On details of Colomb’s machine, his struggles with his superiors and his dangerous straying towards impertinence, see Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, HMS Mercury MER/102, Letter of Lieut. PH Colomb to Rear Admiral Smart, 24 Feb.1863; for his superiors suggesting Colomb w
as a ‘fool’, see ‘The Evolution of Modern Signalling: The Late Admiral Colomb and Night Signalling’, United Service Magazine 32 (1905), 181; for more details and Heath’s endorsement, see pamphlet, Colomb’s Patent Flashing Night Signals (Devonport: Colman and Son, 1862), 7; on the sense of Colomb’s signal computer as a ‘hurdygurdy’, see ‘Discussion: The Telephotos: A New Means of Electric Signalling’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution 38 (Feb. 1894), 111. A portrait of Colomb is in The Engineer (20 Oct. 1899), 403.

  2. ‘The valiant of this warlike isle’

  1 For Livingstone, see David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi, 1858–1864 (New York: Harper, 1866), 620–5. Richard Huzzey’s work on slave trade suppression politics and political culture is the state of the art. I draw here from his ‘The Politics of Slave-trade Suppression’, in Huzzey and Robert M. Burroughs, The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave trade: British Policies, Practices and Representations of Naval Coercion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 34–7 and elsewhere. For the dominant theory of the laziness of the poor and the need to inculcate them – white and black – into ‘habits of work’ see Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992), 35 and elsewhere. On Sulivan writing in terms similar to Wilberforce’s or Stowe’s, see Dhow Chasing, 141, 231, and elsewhere. For Dickens and Africans, in this case Zulus, see ‘The Noble Savage’, Household Words VII (1853), 141–8; the line ‘free of course he must be’ comes from a Dickens letter quoted in Susan Zlotnick, ‘Contextualizing David Levy’s How the Dismal Science Got its Name’, in David Colander, Robert E. Prasch, Falguni A. Sheth, eds., Race, Liberalism, and Economics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 87. For Trollope see The West Indies and the Spanish Main (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1860), 50, 179; I would not have found Trollope’s comments without Richard Huzzey’s reference in Freedom Burning, ch. 1. ‘Human-equality fanatics’ and ‘abolition mania’ come from ‘A Poor Peacemaker’, The Slavery Quarrel, with Plans and Prospects of Reconciliation (London: Hardwicke, 1863), 50. And for those who argued against the expense of suppressing the slave trade in 1850 at the behest of the romantic abolitionists, see one response in ‘A Barrister’, Analysis of the Evidence Given Before the Select Committee upon the Slave Trade (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1850), 5–6 and elsewhere. Robert M. Burroughs’ is a useful summary of arguments for or against slave trade suppression in the middle of the nineteenth century in the public discourse: ‘Slave-trade Suppression and the Culture of Anti-Slavery in Nineteenth-century Britain’, in Burroughs and Huzzey, eds., The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 125–45. For the proposal the Britain not invest so much in suppressing the east coast slave trade because slavery there was ‘merely’ domestic, see MP Colonel W.H. Sykes in Hansard Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 4 June 1868, 3rd series, vol. 192, col. 1131. For abandoning the role of ‘knight-errant’, see MP Matthew Marsh, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1 Mar. 1864, 3rd series, vol. 173, col. 1347.

  2 Napier is pictured in Frederic A. Sharf, Abyssinia, 1867–1868: Artists on Campaign (Chestnut Hill, Mass.: Boston College Museum of Art, 2003), 32. A portrait of Heath is in the possession of descendant Michael D. Heath-Caldwell and published at http://www.heathcaldwell.com. The details of what was visible from the deck of Octavia come from Trevenen J. Holland and Henry M. Hozier, Record of the Expedition to Abyssinia, vol. 2 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1870), 344. Details about Heath’s massive responsibility at Abyssinia come from Holland and Hozier, Record of the Expedition, 175, 207–9, 360. Further details come from Commodore Heath’s East Indies Station Journal, National Archives ADM 50/293. Northwestern University has a photo album of the flotilla at Annesley Bay and other aspects of the landing; http://web.archive.org/web/20160706190426/http://winterton.library.northwestern.edu/browse.html?id=inu-wint-3. On the Sevastopol landing, details come from Heath’s own Letters from the Black Sea (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1897), 26–8, 53–6, and elsewhere. On Heath’s reputation as clever and capable, see Scott, Fifty Years in the Royal Navy, 27. On Heath’s belief that organisation had precluded Russian resistance, see Heath, Letters, 54–5.

  3 Details in this section regarding the Abyssinian campaign come from Commodore Heath’s East Indies Station Journal, National Archives ADM 50/293; Also Tozier, Record of the Expedition, 344. ‘Undoubted duty of England’ comes from Heath to Sir S. Fitzgerald, Bombay, 19 Jan. 1869. Other evidence of Heath’s thinking on the slave trade in this section come from Heath to Henry Churchill, 25 Aug. 1868, British Library, India Office Records, India Political Despatches, L/PS/6/560 1/11 Coll 1/11. More on Heath’s turning his attention to the next mission, fighting the slave trade even before leaving Abyssinia and collecting such documents, see Heath to the Secretary of the Admiralty, 7 Apr. 1868, http://web.archive.org/web/20160707202227/http://www.jjhc.info/HeathLeopold1907admiraltyletterbook1868.htm. For his time spent with William Maxwell as well as the detail about jackals in the hinterland around Annesley Bay see National Maritime Museum, William Henry Maxwell Journals, MAX/1, Section 1868.

  4 For the Foreign Office and Admiralty’s discussions on the quality of ships on the station and awareness of the poor state of the station’s ships as well as the relative lack of attention to the slave trade on the east coast compared to west, see Admiralty Memo of 20 July 1866, National Archives FO 84/1268 and accompanying notes regarding discussion with Foreign Minister Lord Stanley. Sulivan’s contemporary Devonport, Plymouth, with plumes of coal smoke is pictured in an 1870 watercolour by Henry Thomas Dawson, Jr.; http://www.devonportonline.co.uk. Other details about Devonport come from a W.H. Maddock lithographic map, 1877; http://web.archive.org/web/20160708184440/http://www.cyber-heritage.co.uk/maps/olflft.jpg. Thanks to the generosity and patience of the staff of the National Maritime Museum ship model archive at the Chatham Dockyard Museum I was also able to examine an enormously detailed contemporary model of the Devonport dockyard. Details of Daphne’s master (a position becoming known as ‘navigating lieutenant’) and first lieutenant come from their service records, National Archives ADM 196/22 and 196/15 respectively. Details about the Amazon class come from Lyon and Winfield, The Sail and Steam Navy List, and G.A. Ballard, ‘British Sloops of 1875, the Wooden Ram-Bowed Type’, Mariner’s Mirror 24 (1938), 302–17. For the Amazons being an answer to the Alabama, see Admiralty Surveyor, ‘Amazon Class, Particulars of New Design’, 3 Dec. 1867, National Archives ADM 1/6020. There was some question about whether the ram was really a ram or just an added pocket of buoyancy. At least some Royal Navy captains thought the ram-bow was for ramming and attributed the idea for the ram to George Sulivan’s brother Bartholomew James Sulivan; see Journal of the Royal United Services Institution 16 (1873), 16. Richard Hill writes about the craze for rams in these years in War at Sea in the Ironclad Age (New York: Collins, 2006), 35. Sulivan’s June 1867 commission is in the Sulivan papers preserved by the Hodson family. Details on the crew, work done on the Daphne in this period, and more come from the log, National Archives ADM 53/9582. Note that Daphne’s log for this period is in two volumes with the same catalogue number. See also Collister, The Sulivans, 90–1. Canopus was one of the receiving ships that supplied Daphne with men. Details about the royal marines who first joined Daphne come in part from research done on Royal Marine Light Infantryman Aaron Tall located at http://www.worldnavalships.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-11719.html. Additional information about Dick Osborne comes from Daphne’s Establishment Book, National Archives ADM 115/245. Before she left England, Daphne, still manned by many green men, participated in a Naval review before Queen Victoria and the Ottoman sultan. Nymphe also participated and the two were sometimes paired in a kind of contra-dance at sea during the review. For the naval review see ‘Rehearsal of the Fleet Preparatory to the Grand Naval Review’, Isle of Wight Observer, 13 July 1867.

  5 Weather and sailing details around Daphne’s time in West Afri
can waters come from Daphne’s log, National Archives ADM 53/9582, including 19–20 Oct. 1867. Further details come from Sulivan, Dhow Chasing, 132–4. For John Bull, formerly of Pantaloon, see Pantaloon’s Establishment Book, National Archives ADM 115/724. More than one Krooman was given the name ‘John Bull’ in those days, but Daphne’s Establishment Book confirms that these were one and the same, National Archives ADM 115/245. For the old Krooman saying, see Laird and Oldfield, Narrative of an Expedition into the Interior of Africa by the River Niger, vol. 1, 33. On the Head Krooman taking responsibility for the discipline of Kroomen, see Colomb, Slave-catching, 249. More details come from Allen and Thomson, Narrative of the Expedition Sent by Her Majesty’s Government to the River Niger, 122–3. See Daphne’s Establishment Book, ADM 115/245; Nymphe’s Establishment Book, ADM 115/691 for the Kroomen entered on the ship’s books. Regarding Sulivan’s experiences saving crewmates near drowning, see a letter from Captain J.A. Paynter, 6 Oct. 1860, in the Sulivan papers preserved by the Hodson family. This letter describes two rescues. Sulivan was recognised by the Royal Humane Society for one of his rescues. Richard Francis Orton’s service record is at the National Archives ADM 196/15. He enrolled as a naval cadet in 1860. The Registrar General’s index shows him to have been born in 1846 in Cambridgeshire.