In the meantime, sad to say, the Gallinas barracoon was rebuilt and resumed its slave-trading operations; it was destroyed again in another attack by the Royal Navy in 1849. Other barracoons, at the mouths of the Sherber and Pongas Rivers, likewise received the attention of the Royal Navy.
Three of the characters featured in this book were real characters. Neither Isambard Kingdom Brunel nor William Ewart Gladstone need any introduction from me, although it is only fair to say that while Gladstone did speak out against the maintenance of the West Africa Squadron, he was a lifelong opponent of the slave trade. The third, Rear-Admiral Sir Charles Napier, is less well known, which is a pity. Napier was a popular hero, something of a legend in his own lifetime.
He had been promoted to post-rank after taking on three French ships of the line in nothing more than a brig during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1828 Dom Miguel usurped the throne of Portugal from the rightful heir, his niece Maria da Gloria. Captain Napier was employed as a sailor of fortune to command Queen Maria’s fleet. To the despair of the British Foreign Office and the concomitant delight of the British public, Napier not only thrashed Dom Miguel’s fleet but, fancying himself a general as well as an admiral, helped to trounce the Miguelites by land as well.
Napier’s greatest moment came in 1840, after Ibrahim Pasha, the Viceroy of Egypt – a vassal of the Ottoman Empire – rebelled against the sultan in Constantinople and invaded Syria. The people of Syria, Christian and Muslim alike, preferring the less exacting regime of the Ottomans, in turn rebelled against the Egyptian invaders. Fearing the break-up of the Ottoman Empire – if only because its fall would give the Russians free access to the Mediterranean – the British government sent a fleet to the Levant to support the Ottoman sultan and his oppressed subjects in Syria. Napier was promoted to commodore and was appointed second-in-command of the fleet. But if the Admiralty hoped that the years might have mellowed him to the point where he would be prepared to take orders from someone as cautious as the commander-in-chief of the fleet, Admiral Stopford, they were disappointed. Before long Napier was playing at being a general again – and just as successfully as before – leading a naval brigade in action in the Lebanon fighting alongside the Turks.
The British government was not entirely happy with the high-handed way in which Napier imposed a peace settlement on the viceroy, which was far more exacting than the one they had intended. When the viceroy asked him what his authority was, he is said to have replied: ‘My credentials are the double-shotted guns of the Powerful and the honour of an Englishman.’ But the British public welcomed Napier back as a hero once more, and if there was one thing the government was not prepared to do, that was fly in the face of public opinion. Becoming the independent member of parliament for Marylebone in the general election of 1841, Napier was effectively kicked upstairs by his appointment as naval aide- de-camp to Queen Victoria until his promotion to the rank of rear-admiral in 1846 and his appointment as commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet in 1847.
If Napier is less well known today than even Admirals Rodney, Hood or Cochrane, despite having been a national hero in his day, it is because his career effectively came to a dead end in the Baltic during the so-called Crimean War, where Napier was in command of the British Fleet. The British public expected great things of a man with Napier’s reputation for succeeding in what most other people would not even have bothered to attempt, and he disappointed them. But it was not his fault if the Russian Fleet refused to come out of harbour to fight. He certainly did the best he could… but that’s another story.
Men like Napier, larger-than-life characters who were prepared to risk everything out of motives that were one hundred per cent pure and noble, simply don’t seem to exist any more; they are relics of a bygone age, which is a great pity. I for one have always had an admiration for the early Victorians – the more liberal sort of them, at least – and can only lament that their reputation has been dragged into the mire by certain scurrilous politicians who have sought to identify themselves with Victorian values.
Nowadays when we think of the Victorian era we tend to think of the child labour, the appalling working conditions, the poverty and squalor; we forget that it was an era of social reform, and that the Britain they left behind them in 1901 was a far better place than the one they found in 1837. In enforcing the Pax Britannica, the Royal Navy made the seas safer for trade. Their main aim, of course, was to make the seas safer for British trade; but making it safer for all trade was a side effect of which they could be justly proud. And if that most hated of bugbears, the British Empire, reached its zenith under the Victorians, then it must be remembered that the great age of colonialism and the scramble for Africa belonged to the later Victorians. Men like Napier and Killigrew, students of Adam Smith, believed in fair and equal trade, and in respecting all nations and races; they would not have approved of what was to come. It is true that sailors in the Royal Navy received head money for each slave they helped to free, but the more active members of the West Africa Squadron were undoubtedly motivated by idealism rather than greed.
And what of Killigrew himself? He is a fictional character, of course, but inspired by extraordinary characters who nonetheless lived and served in the Royal Navy during this era: men like Denman, Henry Keppel and Astley Cooper Key – gentlemanly swashbucklers who fought with revolvers in one hand and cutlasses in the other and carried the day against pirates and slavers because they never worried about the consequences of failure. Such men and their deeds are largely forgotten today, perhaps because in the public’s consciousness they – along with everything else to do with the Victorian Age – are inextricably and unjustifiably bound up with the atrocities of imperialism. They were the last of a dying breed and could not exist in a world where old-fashioned virtues like courage, idealism, fair play and good manners have been replaced by arrogance, selfish ambition and unthinking political correctness. We shall not see their like again, which is a great pity.
Acknowledgements
Eternal gratitude to my father, for smuggling me into the cinema to see The Three Musketeers (1973 version) and my first Bond Film, The Man with the Golden Gun, at an appallingly young and impressionable age; to George ‘He’s torn our carpet!’ MacDonald Fraser for giving the Victorians back their humanity; to John ‘The Guvnor’ Barry and David ‘The Heir-Apparent’ Arnold for the music; to Christopher Lloyd for giving me the original idea in The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade (London, 1949) and to Hugh Thomas for his exhaustive yet constantly fascinating history of the Atlantic slave trade, The Slave Trade (New York, 1997), which introduced me to Pedro Blanco and the Gallinas Barracoon; to Anne Williams and Sarah Keen at Headline for all their work and patience: to Richenda Todd for her excellent editing and fact-checking; to the staff of the S. S. Great Britain Project for their kind permission for me to be photographed on board Brunel’s masterpiece; and to James Hale for keeping faith while everyone else was jumping ship. Also, thanks to Alistair Wilson for advice on technical and other matters, and for putting me straight when my seamanship was at fault; it it’s right, it’s thanks to him; if it’s wrong, blame me!
First published in the United Kingdom in 2000 by Headline Book Publishing
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
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Copyright © Jonathan Lunn, 2000
The moral right of Jonathan Lunn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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IS
BN 9781911591863
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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