by Tom Anderson
After a few months spent in dock in Falkland’s Islands, Perry was now planning a landing on the Platinean coast in which Hamilton would play a large part. Hamilton could scarcely hide his excitement. After all, his father had been in his exact position twenty years before and his wealth and popularity had found its roots in those events. He set out and took part in capturing several Meridian forts and facilitating the landing of General George Clinton’s men to besiege Buenos Aires. As Hamilton was preparing for his greatest victory yet, word of Lisieux’s invasion of England reached him and the rest of the army.
It was simply unbelievable. The Channel in Hoche’s grasp? The King dead by Modigliani’s hand? The mother country held by its most corrosive enemies? In his blind disbelief, Hamilton no longer saw the Meridian soldiers as the yellow clad men defending their homeland. All he saw was Jacobins, clad in red and black chequered trousers and Phrygian caps, hoisting the blood-soaked flag and advancing inexorably onward. In this blind rage, he drew new strength to protect all that he held dear and to preserve the Empire from falling to republican scum as he and General Clinton set out to capture Buenos Aires.
Hamilton decided to take part in the descent on Cape San Antonio, which, if it had been successful, would have taken much of the hinterland around Buenos Aires and might have destroyed the Meridian will to fight. But Hamilton and his commanding officer were not facing a ragtag militia band that could easily be swept aside but one of the most capable generals in the UPSA during that time period, Luis Ayala. The General possessed good battlefield intelligence and knew when and where the descent would take place. Imbued with this knowledge, Ayala proceeded to allow the Anglo-American Army to land as scheduled and encounter no opposition luring them inland; then he sprung his trap shut and surrounded the now helpless army. It seemed like General Ayala's greatest triumph in the conflict, one which could change the fate of the Third Platinean War. But the person who would take that victory from his grasp was the young and determined Philip Hamilton.
Hamilton was always the daring type, and in this charged battlefield climate he was no different, even at his young age. Knowing that the encirclement mirrored the Battle of Cannae his father had told him of and would only result in defeat, he knew he needed a breakthrough. Luckily, Wayne sighted a weakness in the Meridian lines enveloping them and informed Hamilton of this new information. Hamilton, knowing there was little time to waste, called on several of his fellow American regiments to push forward and attack that weak point, and if they broke through to try and reach the sea only a few miles away. Luckily for Hamilton, General Ayala was far on the other side of the encirclement and therefore unable to compensate quickly for this turn of events. Hamilton, fueled as much by the drive to survive as his hatred of republicanism at this point, led the charge himself, throwing his unit and several others directly into the Meridian lines. He killed line after line of yellow-clad soldiers before breaking free and opening up a direct line to the Atlantic. General Clinton was intensely relieved when he heard the encirclement had been broken and immediately ordered a full retreat. General Ayala, momentarily unaware of these developments, reacted with total shock upon seeing his prize begin to slip through his fingers. The Anglo-American army had escaped – and as General Clinton and soon everyone not only on Falkland’s Islands but across the Crown’s possessions knew, it was all because of the daring of Philip Hamilton.
He and Wayne returned as heroes to Dakar in 1809 and proceeded to use their newfound influence to begin their expeditions they had planned together nearly a decade before. Unfortunately, the man who had taught both of them, Daniel Houghton, had passed away and they were both deeply saddened as any young student would mourn the passing of their mentor. They also knew it was his wish that they continue his legacy and do everything they had planned and dreamed of together.
They travelled constantly on missions and became renowned for having some of the most successful trading and exploration excursions the Company has ever had up to that point. They visited the Kingdom of Benin in 1810 and made the trek to Ubindu, Benin’s capital, to speak with the Oba, or King of Benin, Ogbebo about trade deals and establishing an RAC presence in the Bight of Benin. But this would not be an easy victory for Hamilton. The Oba was angry with the RAC, because much of the wealth that had been built by Benin was based in the slave trade; and when the RAC changed its tone and developed a strong abolitionist streak, Benin’s coffers dried up. The Oba, however, knew he was in a position of strength. He had one of the best trained and well equipped armies in Western Africa and could defend against any forceful foreign incursion. But Hamilton was there to make a deal and he did. He decided to grant an exclusive Palm Oil monopoly on trade there and to reimburse the king for the RAC-driven drying up of the slave trade, he decided to bring several RAC blacksmiths and teach the native kingdom how to create their own tools – and, eventually, guns. This pleased Ogbebo greatly, as the only thing holding the Beninite army back was its reliance on imported weaponry. Wayne protested, but Hamilton knew that if he wanted a lock on the lucrative Palm Oil monopoly, it was a concession he was willing to make. Some commentators have blamed Hamilton for the events that followed, but other cooler-headed historians maintain that he could not have possibly have foreseen what would come about from this decision.
But Hamilton and Wayne’s most famous exploit was as the first Europeans to visit the fabled city of Timbuktoo. Part of the original reason to found the RAC was to find this fabled city of gold, but it had proven to be a difficult city to not only find but enter. Merchants were sworn to secrecy – and it being a sacred Muslim site, no Christian could ever enter the city gates. Still, after years of planning, Hamilton and Wayne decided to explore the interior and find it. They set off from Dakar in 1812 and took a small boat down the Gambia River, then their bribed Muslim guides took them across the desert to Ludamar, where they fought several Moorish bands who were trying to capture slaves for trading with North African corsairs. Nevertheless, they journeyed on, and by 1813 they became the first living Europeans to discover the Niger River. They soon built a small schooner – which Hamilton named Angelica, after his mother – and they set off down river. They passed through amazing country, with massive herds of antelope and elephants feeding by the water as they passed. They came upon several settlements as they went. Hamilton knew if they were found at this point, they would be most likely killed. So they both disguised themselves as pilgrims and scholars from Morocco and soon the city of Timbuktoo was upon them.
The city was amazing, as his account in Travels to the Interior of Africa told: “The city sits upon three hills and alights in gold when the sun shines upon the city. It is walled on all sides and guarded by thousands of spearmen on horses. Three massive temples sit on the tops of each hill. The libraries and places of learning in this fabled city lie there as well, where many pilgrims and learned men from all over the world seek knowledge and profit. Now England and America may count themselves among the nations here. The foliage here is also incredible. Within the walls of the city, there is a large forest where a specially bred herd of elephants live. They supply the best ivory in all of Africa and the trees produce some of the sweetest fruit in the entire world. This forest seemed to go on for an eternity in the middle of the savanna and from it seems to spring all of the wealth of Timbuktoo…”
His peaceful and incredible visit to the city soon came to an end, however. While they were examining a bazaar and betting on a camel race in the west side of the city, Wayne’s turban slipped off, exposing his very European face and provoking much outrage from the patrons present. Several men drew their swords and tried to arrest the two adventurers – to presumably be put to death. Hamilton had prepared for this sort of thing, however, and as these men moved in to capture them, Hamilton picked the largest one and promptly pulled out his father’s revolving pistol and shot him directly in the face three times. Seeing the largest among them drop dead so suddenly, and the remarkable spectacle of a repeating firea
rm, certainly shocked the patrons and provided enough time for Hamilton and Wayne to get a running start. Soon, they gave chase and Hamilton needed to get out of the city. They headed south with the men close behind, and for a time it seemed like they would be apprehended. The ever-resourceful Hamilton produced another pistol and neutralized one and then another as they were running, evoking the same skill he had in dispatching Meridian soldiers. They managed to escape the city, barely, and Hamilton had two horses waiting with all of their ‘borrowed’ goods; they took several ingots of gold, a few priceless pieces of ivory and several important manuscripts to prove their passage into the city.
They rode south, through desert, savanna and jungle, stopping to forage and collect plant life. They ran dangerously low on supplies, and it seemed as though they would join the ranks of fallen explorers. But, by a stroke of luck, they approached the city of Dumassi. There Hamilton saw a familiar face; one of the Ashanti ministers he had traded with nearly a decade beforehand. They embraced, and the tired travelers were not only given food and supplies but were escorted through the Ashanti Empire to Cape Coast Castle, where they greeted an incredibly surprised RAC contingent in early 1815.
His glorious return and an account of his daring and heroic journey were published all over the world and instantly he became a household name everywhere in the Empire. The public loved the charismatic Hamilton, the spitting image of his father, who was elevated to near-deity like reverence as an elder statesman. His son did not live in his father’s shadow, and Philip in some ways eclipsed his father in the fame they both were seeking ever since Alexander had spoken to young Philip back in Fredericksburg all those years ago.
His golden boy status did not hold true for his co-workers back in the Royal Africa Company. Many despised his status and the perks that went along with it. Filling and Space had been giving Hamilton and Wayne all of the best assignments even before their victories against the Meridians, and now they were literally worldwide celebrities. Many of the hostile British directors referred to them as the “Yankee Twins”. But their exploits were trumpeted beck in Britain and especially America where their popularity was astounding. Their exploits inspired many of the earliest ‘florin bloodies’. Even though their contemporaries in Dakar despised those two, they could not brush them aside without drawing public outrage and subsequent shareholder losses from their respective home countries. But one unscrupulous director named Philip Lawrence gathered power off the hatred for Hamilton. He was quite power-hungry and would stop at nothing until he was the leader of the RAC. His exploits and failures have filled many history texts focusing on Guinea. His cutthroat business practices gained him a cadre of followers in Dakar, and by 1814 he set out to control the RAC and get rid of Hamilton once and for all.
When Thomas Space passed away in 1816, Lawrence had already bought up incredible amounts of stock in the company itself through somewhat shady and indirect means, using proxy buyers and diversifying his holdings amongst his supporters whilst gaining far more influence than anyone had before in the Company. So when the time came for Filling, who was at least 78 years old by this time, to name Space’s successor, Lawrence jumped at the chance. At the stockholder meeting, he had enough gall to stop Filling from appointing Hamilton as his successor by a majority of the voting members disagreeing with Filling’s decision. Many of the stockholder defections were unexpected by Filling, and this turn of events shocked the man who had built the RAC from the ground up. Filling was powerless and deeply saddened with the loss of his best friend and control of his company, all in the span of merely two weeks.
Lawrence knew the Hamilton question could not be ignored because of his popularity and many back in London were expecting Hamilton to be running the RAC now, not himself. So the ever cunning Lawrence decided to give him a seemingly impressive title; the supreme director of Southern African operations. But many in the company knew that it was farcical because there were then two offices in all of Southern Africa, one in Port St. Lucia and one in Port Natal, each with a permanent employment of ten Company men each.
Hamilton was devastated by this sinister turn of events, but he was ultimately powerless in this situation as well. He knew Lawrence had too firm control of the stockholders in the RAC and that his biggest backers were either dead (Space) or soon to be retired (Filling), and while they taught him much during his young years, they could not help him in this situation. He felt insulted and betrayed for all of the hard work that he had done for the Company and now saw the dark side of the fame his father had spoken of. The masses who had read and praised his exploits avidly now shrugged at his downfall and would not lift a finger to help.
Hamilton was so disgusted that he did not even visit Natal, since the job was so rudimentary and useless his deputy could easily perform the functions, dismissing the job as merely a title without any power attached to it. At that point, he was correct. The British East India Company had controlled the new colony at Natal for the last ten years and it was doing very well under their jurisdiction, while the RAC offices were manned by twenty other men and dealt with trade from Natal to West Africa, which was little at that point.
He decided to travel back home to New York, to the place he grew up and knew as a child and where he was known and loved. His father was ailing and his mother was calling him back to the Hamilton lands in New York City. Hamilton had, after all, been keeping contacts in New York and putting much of his money into investments into an ambitious project to carve a canal through western New York, connecting the Great Lakes with the Hudson River. It was an ambitious project, and since it passed directly through Hauden lands, someone who had experience making agreements with native powers was needed. Hamilton decided; he would leave Africa and return to New York after more than a decade and a half away. He did not know if he would ever return, but at the time he underestimated the allure of the majestic and mysterious Dark Continent that he had grown to love…
Chapter #84: Antipodean Antics
“The ancients believed that a wall of fire stood on the equator, and the mysterious lands of the southern hemisphere could never be reached by humans. Now of course we know that to be untrue, yet sometimes it seems that a wall of a different kind indeed stands there, insulating us from the affairs of those nations above and beyond what might be expected even from the great distances. And it is perhaps this we have to thank for the circumstances of our founding…”
- M. Maurice de Chardeaux, Consul of the Adamantine Republic of Dufresnie, 1897
*
From: "Exploration and Discovery in the late 18th Century" (English translation) by Francois Laforce, Nouvelle Université de Nantes (1961)—
La Pérouse’s Land had been largely forgotten by Europe during the Jacobin Wars, and particularly after 1805. It was in that year that Admiral Surcouf finally gave up his attempts to provoke the Dutch Republic into a war by raiding the shipping of the Dutch East India Company, and returned to France with much of his fleet. The previous year, the Dutch under Heemskerk had burned Surcouf’s new port of Saint-Malo [OTL Albany] but the French had already begun to repair the growing settlement. Saint-Malo had been constructed in a hurry, on the end of a long supply line, to be in a better position to raid the Dutch shipping, and was certainly unable to support itself. Surcouf and his lieutenant, Alain Bonnaire, who managed most of the affairs of the base itself, coped both by resupplying Saint-Malo from the main French settlement at Nouvelle Albi [OTL Sydney] and by trading with the ‘Indien’ natives. The race in the region called themselves the Noungare[125] and, although possessing some suspicions of the white newcomers, soon settled down to fairly amicable trade relations.
One chronicle of the earliest days comes from Piet Poortman, a sailor of the Dutch East India Company who had been captured by one of Surcouf’s earliest raids. Surcouf was generally unwilling to kill enemy captives out of hand, yet they could not be released, either, as the fact that these “privateers” raiding Dutch shipping were Republican French had t
o remain officially secret. The Stadtholder and the Heeren XVII might be privately certain that they were backed by Lisieux, but they must not be allowed to gain any hard evidence of this. The solution was to put captives to work in Saint-Malo, developing the growing settlement. Poortman, a former non-commissioned officer, quickly proved himself capable as a junior administrator and was trusted sufficiently to fill that role. As Bonnaire privately remarked, men like Poortman were fortunate that Saint-Malo was being run by men like Surcouf, pragmatists, rather than the hardline Linnaeans who ruled in Albi under Lamarck and his imitators. Poortman kept a diary in Dutch in which he records the often halting transactions between the French and the Noungare natives. He recorded that one characteristic of the Noungare that their neighbouring races (such as the Angatoumé) found repellent was their proud certainty in their own cultural superiority over other Indiens – so, he memorably added, it was small wonder that they and the French got along so well.
By 1806 Saint-Malo’s trade links with the natives were such that the town was growing more self-sufficient; the departure of Surcouf back to France with much of the fleet and its personnel doubtless helped force this situation. This was just as well, for Albi was falling into conflict with the Ouarandjeré people near Béron [OTL Melbourne], and that secondary settlement had been burned to the ground. Lamarck continued to overestimate the advantages of his “scientific” approaches to farming in New Gascony around Albi, and the colony was beginning to starve. Furthermore, overzealous Linnaeanism was alienating those few native races in the region, such as the Ourandjeré themselves, who had been friendly enough with the French to trade. An abortive mission to Autiaraux to try and re-establish links with the Mauré – trade which had saved the young colony once before, in 1795 – failed when both main Mauré factions, the Tainui and the Touaritaux-Touaux alliance, refused to treat with the Republicans. The Tainui were being assisted by the exiled La Pérouse, the Touaritaux-Touaux by La Pérouse’s former lieutenant Valéry Élouard, who along with some other officers had been tempted away from the original group of exiles. Both La Pérouse and Élouard counselled their native associates to shut out the Jacobins. With Surcouf having withdrawn the vast majority of the colony’s armed forces, Albi could not organise an expedition to take the Mauré’s harvests by force.
