Diverge and Conquer (Look to the West Book 1)

by Tom Anderson

  With that in mind, the New Company’s directors cooperated with a contemporary group, the African Association,[231] made up of natural philosophers and dedicated to the exploration of the West African interior. The Association included such luminaries as Joseph Banks, who had become famous publishing works on the fauna and flora of Canada, Newfoundland and the new western territories of the North American Empire[232]; John Ledyard, a New Englander who had joined the Association after failing to convince the British Government to finance a rival fur-trading company to oppose the Russians’ efforts in Alyeska; and Daniel Houghton, a veteran and the group’s leader, who was determined to find the exact location of the fabled Malinese city of Timbucktoo. It was obvious to Filling that such men could be of use to a Company searching for a new area in which to trade. Banks could identify economically important plants and animals using Linnaean techniques, Ledyard could figure out how to market them, and Houghton could help explore the interior. In return, having Company-subsidised access to a new land was an enheartening prospect to them.

  The Company also soon became caught up with the Colonisation Movement, a loose alliance of societies operating both in Britain and America, dedicated to re-settling black freemen in West Africa. The Movement’s diverse motives ranged from the belief that blacks could never live a normal life surrounded by white society, the idea that blacks who had been raised in such a society could go on to ‘civilise’ the natives, and the notion that moving former slaves back across the Atlantic was a restitution for the horrors of the slave trade in the past. The Company was approached by Equiano, one of the few Africans actually involved in the Movement’s activities, with the idea of providing transport. This solved a problem Filling had noticed. His great idea was to change the direction of the triangular trade. Instead of raw materials going from America to Britain, they could go from Africa to Britain (once the Company located such materials that would be economically valuable). British goods could still be shipped profitably to America, as Britain had begun to industrialise but America, hampered by the vast distances between its cities, had lagged behind. The problem was that he needed some commodity to go from America to Africa to complete the triangle. Freed slaves paying their way to found new colonies filled that gap, as well as providing a pleasing symmetry for more idealistic individuals such as Thomas Space.

  The Company had earned enough in its first five years’ worth of operations to sell off its outdated fleet – some of which were badly constructed former slaveships – and purchase new ships, often from the new dockyards in New England. The new fleet was more like the BEIC’s East Indiamen, larger, more sturdy and with at least a desultory load of defensive armament. Like the BEIC, the RAC did not so much have merely a trading fleet as a full navy, suited to Filling and Space’s ambitions.

  The RAC sent numerous expeditions into the African hinterland, many of which did not return or returned with casualties, but an improved picture of the still half-legendary land was gradually built up. Filling knew how valuable the BEIC found those men who had a clear and concise knowledge of Indian affairs, and was trying to build up a similar cadre for Guinea.

  The hinterland of what Europeans called the Gold Coast was ruled by the Ashanti Empire, a powerful and increasingly centralising confederation. Ashanti was ruled from the city-state of Kumasi by the Ashantehene, or King of all Ashanti. Thomas Space, upon visiting the area himself and recording his thoughts, compared the system of government to that of England under the Anglo-Saxons: the King enjoyed considerable power, but was elected by a council of the powerful rather than automatically inheriting his post. The Ashanti used a crude form of bicameral legislature (or advisory board), with most of the power held by a gerontocracy of the oldest and most powerful chiefs, but this was balanced by a second body, the Nmerante, made up of younger men. The King’s authority was symbolised by his throne, a golden stool said to have descended from the heavens to the founder of Ashanti, Osei Tutu I, and was partly religious in character.[233] The Ashanti religion, which focused heavily on various taboos, infused government to the point where it could be called a theocracy. The current King at the time of the Company’s penetration was Otumfuo Nana Osei Kwame Panyin, who was seen as a stabilising influence after years of jockeying between the Oyoko Abohyen (his own) and the Beretuo dynasties. The Ashanti were the hereditary enemies of the Fanti Confederacy, another powerful state which already traded with Britain and the Netherlands. This was of interest to Filling, who knew from his BEIC history that divisions and power struggles between native kindgoms were open doors to have the boot-tip of British influence wedged into them so that trade concessions could be prised from them.

  Further eastward, the area known as the Slave Coast was better known to the RAC, due to the fact that its local states had extensive slave-trade contacts with the Europeans there. Settlements by Britain and the Netherlands were joined by the small outpost of Whydah, which had been a Prussian venture ceded to the Saxons after the Third War of Supremacy. The Saxons, with no interest in African trade, had let it lapse, and the Company unilaterally seized the settlement, despite protests from the Dutch (who had had the same idea). Whydah had formerly been part of the Kingdom of Savi, which had been conquered by the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1727. Dahomey in turn, despite being one of the most powerful and warlike states in the region, had been conquered and vassalised in 1730 by the cavalry-using Yoruba empire of Oyo. The Dahomeans had lost the war despite their Ahosu (King) Agadja having invested heavily in European firearms. Now, though, the country was chafing under being forced to pay tribute to Oyo, and it was obvious that breaking free was on the mind of the current King, Kpengla. Kpengla was interested in buying more modern flintlock muskets for his troops, recognising that Agadja’s failure had been partly due to having bought obsolete, unreliable matchlocks from the Danes. Filling could see another opportunity there – or two.

  The Dahomean army included an elite corps of female warriors known as the ‘Amazons’ to Europeans, who made a connection with the Greek myth of that name. The victory over Savi was considered to have been partly due to the shock deployment of the Amazons. The idea was exotic enough that, when the Company’s agents published articles about it in the Register, British intellectual interest in Guinea was sparked and soon Africophiles even threatened to equal the orientalists fascinated by India and China.

  Like Ashanti, Dahomey also had an elective monarchy, though the King had to prove his descent from their legendary founder. But the Dahomean voodoo religion required annual human sacrifices, and this pushed Space into describing the people as savages. It also explained why the Dahomeans were so enthusiastic about selling even their own people into the slave trade, given that their culture meant they placed a low value on human life (or more accurately saw this world as only the surface of a much more fundamental one, and that life or death was not a particularly important distinction). Of course, this did not stop the enterprising Filling investing heavily in trade missions to the Dahomean capital, Abomey. Beyond, on the other side of Oyo city itself was Benin,[234] barely yet breached by European traders but an important market in palm oil. The Company’s interest was sparked.

  Further west, Britain’s acquisition of the French posts in Senegal after the Third War of Supremacy now paid dividends. Senegal had an existing colonial apparatus compared to the British one in Calcutta, with half-bloods (Métis, in French), filling many administrative positions and contributing largely to the area’s culture. The former French colony was centred around Fort St. Louis and the island of Gorée, both of which were considered part of the government of the capital Dakar. Gorée had previously been English, as well as Dutch, so while the French had held the area for about eighty years prior to losing it, in many way the change in ownership had been accepted with a shrug by the locals. However, it is unlikely that Britain would have been so successful in the transfer of power if she had not appointed John Graves Simcoe (later knighted) as Governor of the conquered territory after a period o
f mismanagement and corruption throughout the 1760s. Simcoe was a veteran of the Second Platinean War, who had observed the Platineans raising a regiment of freed black slaves and had even had his life saved by one such soldier. He thus had more enlightened views about what black Africans could achieve than many Britons or Americans.

  Upon taking command in Dakar, Simcoe was quick to take action against corruption and root out several organisations still trading illegally with the French. Until the late 1780s, though, his grand designs could not be matched by reality, as he had few resources to work with. While Simcoe despised slavery, he recognised that Senegal’s economy was dependent on it and that taking direct action against it, with no thought for the consequences, might do more harm than good.

  This changed when the new Royal Africa Company moved in to Dakar, which had been included in its revised charter. Simcoe was innately suspicious of all merchants and speculators, but the fact that the RAC did not deal in slaves made a favourable impression. Arthur Filling discussed with him his plans for running British possessions in Guinea in a more BEIC-like manner. Simcoe, who had only served in America prior to this, was unaware of the details of this, and Filling spoke at length on the subject. It was the idea of sepoy regiments that stuck in Simcoe’s head, more even than Space’s plan to try to broaden Senegalese trade to the point where the slave trade might be wound down. This was the germ of what would become the Company’s African equivalent of sepoys, native troopers trained and equipped in the British fashion—intended to exert the Company’s will on, and in alliance with, native states. Although they were first raised by Simcoe in Senegal, the term for them that eventually stuck was ‘Jagun’, from the Yoruba word for a soldier, ologunomo ogunjagunjagun. This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that it sounds similar to jäger or ‘hunter’, the name used by various German armies for an elite skirmisher, and that the Company employed some German veterans from Hanover, Hesse and Brunswick to help train its native soldiers.

  Simcoe soon needed many such troops, because Equiano and Space approached him with the idea of founding a black freedman colony in the region, to the south of Senegal proper. Simcoe agreed with the idea, partly because he thought such an example might eventually lead to a decline in slavery elsewhere in the region. Coastal land around St George’s Bay was purchased by the Company from the Kingdom of Koya, a local power that had had extensive diplomatic contacts with Britain and the French and recognised, from the changing of hands of Senegal, that Britain was now gaining supremacy in the region. Koya signed over the little-settled land in exchange for British help in a war against their neighbours, the Susu. Company troops, consisting largely of hired Hessian and Scottish mercenaries paired with Simcoe’s first cohort of native soldiers, assisted the Koya and forced a Susu defeat in a war which ended in 1793. Koya then vassalised Susu and thus gained overall from the deal, at least in the short term.

  The new colony was supported by the Colonisation Movement, and was named Freedonia, with the inhabitants being known as Freedes and the adjective being Freedish.[235] The capital, overlooking St George’s Bay, was called Liberty.[236] The colonists who arrived in that first decade were a very diverse crew, from many places and many classes. Some were educated, such as Equiano, who became the first Lieutenant-Governor of the colony and set a precedent that they would not be ruled by a white man appointed by London. There were many ‘Black Poor’, as the blacks of London who had become stranded there after being press-ganged into the Royal Navy were called, and a few of them brought white English wives with them. Many freed blacks from the northern Confederations of North America, and the West Indies, came also. This vast range of colonists meant that mutual communication was often difficult, and a simplified creole version of English known as ‘Freedic’ or the ‘Tongue of Liberty’ became the common language.

  Freedonia was at first under serious risk of attack from native powers – Koya and Susu were only two among many – and bandits, including slavers. Because of this, Equiano raised militia regiments from the colonists, sharing resources with Simcoe’s jaguns, and began a tradition of close cooperation between the Freedes and the Company. Filling had envisaged a BEIC-like bureaucracy consisting of blacks who spoke English and understood British methods of government; the Freedes were a pool of just such people, and ones who passed on their ideas to genuine natives as the colony grew.

  Yet all of what the Company achieved would have been impossible, or at least very difficult, without the work performed by James Edward Smith. Smith was a natural philosopher and Linnaean, who ignored Linnaeus’ racial theories and worked on what Linnaeus himself had seen as the far more important work, his classification of animals and plants. Originally Linnaeus’ intention had been to find economically important plants that could be grown back in Europe. In this he had never succeeded much himself, but his successors such as Smith eventually did so. In this he was assisted by Alexander von Humboldt, a Dutch natural scientist of Prussian birth.[237] Humboldt originally approached the British in 1800 after failing to sell his new idea to the Dutch. While based in Africa, he had travelled to Dutch Suriname three years before and then made an expedition down into Meridian Peru. Humboldt’s writings are now keenly studied by those who can see, in his incidental descriptions of the country and its people, the seeds of resentment and rebellion against the regime in Córdoba, which had taken power away from conservative Lima and ended its casta system.

  But Humboldt himself was mainly interested in the fauna and flora of the region, and in particular the cinchona tree – the source of quinine or ‘Jesuit’s bark’, a remedy for malaria that had been known of since the seventeenth century, yet had not been widely adopted. “It almost goes without saying,” he wrote, “that among Protestant physicians, hatred of the Jesuits and religious intolerance lie at the bottom of the long conflict over the good or harm effected by Peruvian Bark.” Perhaps this, or simply the fact that it was such an ambitious plan, led to the Dutch VOC rejecting his thoughts on how to change this. The RAC, however, had the equally visionary Smith, who listened to Humboldt’s idea and then recommended it to Filling and Space.

  It was certainly a bold idea. Humboldt advocated the planting of new plantations of cinchona trees in West Africa, thus providing a ready supply of quinine to combat the endemic local malaria, which had so far killed many whites who settled and traded there – along with some of the re-settled blacks.[238] The prevalent theory that black resistance to malaria was intrinsic and not due simply to growing up in the region turned out to be wrong, which was serious, as part of the Company’s economic policy (rely on educated British black colonists as administrators) rested on it.

  After some hesitation, Filling invested in the idea. A fleet of Company ships travelled to Peru in 1805 – just in time to avoid a certain period of unpleasantness – and returned bearing transplanted trees, seeds and also a great deal of the dried bark itself. It returned at a crucial time, as the Company’s chief scout Daniel Houghton was dying of the disease. His dramatic cure by the bark, witnessed by the Ahosu of Dahomey (who he had been visiting at the time) served to convince the local Africans of quinine’s efficacy more easily than might otherwise have been expected.

  The plantations were not initially a great success, the local climate being unsuited for them. Smith and Humboldt used Linnaean principles to deduce the right climate, building variedly-heated sheds and air-pumped phlogisticateurs to vary the air pressure before considering which test plants survived. The Company continued to import quinine from Peru for years afterwards before eventually becoming self-sufficient after obtaining more suitable lands for plantations. Furthermore, malaria was far from the only deadly disease plaguing the region. Yet nonetheless, Humboldt’s cinchona plantations ultimately served to work a remarkable transformation on Guinea…

  Chapter 42: Jiyendo

  From : “IMPERIUM ORIENTALE: The Rise of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company” by Brivibas Goštautas (Royal Livonian Press, 1956)—

&nbs
p; An oft-stated apparent ‘historical paradox’ is that many of the strokes that led to Russian dominance in the East were made at a time when Russia herself was convulsed by civil war. In fact this simply illustrates that – even before the formal founding of the RLPC – the Pacific expansion was as remote and separated from St Petersburg as the British and French East India Companies were from London and Paris. Just as French East India remained loyal to the Dauphin even at a time when there was no Royal France, the Russians and Lithuanians in the Far East continued with their operations without even knowing about the Russian Civil War until late 1798. This was probably just as well, as the First Fleet included a number of politically suspect Leib Guards who Peter III had deliberately exiled, suspecting them of supporting Catherine. Had news of the Civil War reached Okhotsk earlier, it is likely that the ‘Japanese venture’ would have torn itself apart. As it was, by the time any potential Potemkinites were aware of the situation further west, things were too hectic for any disunion to arise…

  Let us recall that in early 1795, the mercurial Lithuanian expedition leader Moritz Benyovsky, impatient with Pavel Lebedev-Lastoschkin’s progress in expanding the Okhotsk colony, decided to unilaterally launch an expedition to Edzo in order to establish trade relations with the Matsumae Han who ruled there. However, being unfamiliar with the waters, Benyovsky’s ships were blown off course in a storm and they landed in the north of the island, in the area still inhabited by the indigenous Aynyu people.

  Benyovsky was adamant that the expedition sail again as soon as possible, but was beset by two problems: firstly, both his ships had been damaged by striking rocks off the coast and were taking on water, their pumps not capable of keeping the level steady for a long voyage; and secondly, they still had no clue where they were or how to get to Matsumae-town. At this point, Benyovsky’s second-in-command, Jonas Raudauskas, suggested that it might be best to return to Okhotsk for repairs and make a later attempt, as that was the port that the ships had the best chance of being able to find, and within the range that their leaking hulls permitted. Benyovsky vetoed this: according to his logbook, because he thought it would still be too far for the pumps to keep the ships afloat. In practice, almost all historians believe he rejected it simply because he was unwilling to swallow his pride and return to Lebedev with his tail between his legs.