Cities of Empire
Page 19
Yet Britain sought to erect this trade and maritime force in the face of a geo-political storm worthy of the Cape of Good Hope. The development of Boston on the back of an Atlantic war economy, the extraction of plantation riches from the Caribbean and the perennial fears of a foreign invasion of Ireland have all shown different aspects of the continuing battle for colonial supremacy in the eighteenth century between the British, French, Dutch and Spanish Empires. It was an epoch of ‘total war’, fought across oceans and continents at huge cost in treasure and men, to shape the pace of European imperialism. However, British victory in the Seven Years’ War had transformed London’s imperial strategy from a defensive control of existing plantations and settlements to a more aggrandizing posture focused on the taking and holding of locations in an effort to beat back the French. ‘Great Britain can at no time propose to maintain an extensive and complicated war but by destroying the colonial resources of our enemies and adding proportionately to our own commercial resources, which are, and must be, the sole basis of our maritime strength,’ as Dundas himself put it.35 What was more, ‘the primary object of our attention ought to be, by what means we can most effectually increase those resources on which depends our naval superiority’.36
Central to this strategy was indeed a hegemonic naval force – a military asset painfully lacking during the War of American Independence and regarded as increasingly essential in any future struggle against France. So, in the final decades of the eighteenth century, the might of the Royal Navy (and its place in British popular culture) expanded exponentially. During the Seven Years’ War, there were on average 74,800 men serving in the navy, but by the early 1800s it had passed 120,000. From the Navy Board at London’s Somerset House and from the dockyards of Deptford and Woolwich, and then Chatham and Plymouth, was hammered out an incredible escalation of naval capacity. ‘The natural strength of the nation is its navy; the builders or first movers in our navy are the shipwrights … They set the great wheels of commerce and war in motion,’ wrote the shipwright and Methodist pamphleteer William Shrubsole.37 By 1805, the year of the Battle of Trafalgar, Britain could boast under the leadership of Pitt and Dundas over 120 ships of the line (massive warships, such as HMS Victory, able to take part in the line of battle with broadside attacks from cannon fire) and another 160 cruisers. The backbone of the Royal Navy was the 74-gunner, two-decked third rate warship, just one of which boasted more firepower than all Napoleon’s artillery at the Battle of Austerlitz and helped to secure for Britain her command of the world’s oceans. But an effective Royal Navy required more than just sail, timber and cannon: it needed victualling stations and refreshment stops to allow it to remain at sea and dominate the enemy. ‘It is therefore as much the duty of those entrusted with the conduct of a British war to cut off the colonial resources of the enemy, as it would be that of the general of a great army to destroy or intercept the magazines of his opponent,’ explained Dundas.38 This meant the control of port cities such as Gibraltar (ceded to Britain from Spain by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht), Bridgetown – and maybe even Cape Town.
Dundas’s imperial scenario-planning was put to the test in 1793 when Britain went to war with a newly energized and revolutionary France. While France threatened Britain through attempted invasion of Ireland, the Royal Navy’s response was swift: in 1793 Tobago, part of Saint-Domingue, Pondicherry and Miquelon were captured, while in Toulon the French Mediterranean fleet was seized without a shot being fired. In 1794 the West Indian islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia were taken, followed by the vital eastern territories of Ceylon and Malacca one year later. Over the next decade, the navy would press home its advantage by taking Dutch possessions in the East and West Indies, then Trinidad, the French colony at Madagascar and Minorca (an island endlessly traded between the great powers over the course of the eighteenth century). At home, the British public lapped up these stories of naval heroics. ‘The extacy of joy displayed by the public on receiving the news of Lord Howe’s glorious victory, proves how much more Britons are delighted by success at sea than on land,’ exclaimed the London paper St James’s Chronicle in the aftermath of the Battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794, when the British fleet bested the French in the mid-Atlantic. ‘The sea is our protecting element, and as long as Britannia rules the waves nothing can hurt us. A victory at sea must ever give us more heart-felt pleasure than twenty victories on the Continent.’39
Early in the war against France, Dundas realized the strategic significance of Cape Town. Not lacking in ambition, France had declared war simultaneously on both Great Britain and the Dutch Republic. Any French conquest of the Netherlands, Dundas assumed, would also bring with it control of their colonial outposts. ‘The preservation of the Cape of Good Hope is an object of so much importance, both to Holland and Great Britain, it is impossible for this Country to view with indifference any circumstance that can endanger the safety of that Settlement,’ Dundas wrote to the foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, in April 1793. He wanted to know ‘what is the Force now at the Cape, either Naval or Military, what is conceived to be sufficient for rendering the Possession of its perfectly secure … and how far the Dutch are disposed to allow a Depot of British Troops to be placed at the Cape, either for its own Defence, or for acting offensively from it’.40
Other members of the British imperial establishment were equally concerned about a threat to the Cape of Good Hope. Sir Francis Baring, founder of Barings Bank and director of the East India Company, urged Dundas to launch an immediate assault before the French put a garrison down at Table Bay. Through a series of military alliances with Indian princes, the French were already putting Company interests in Bengal under pressure. If France gained control of the Cape, then British possessions in India – with all the wealth and power that came with them – could be lost. ‘The importance of the Cape is in my opinion comprised under two heads – as a place of refreshment for our ships on their return from India … Secondly, whoever is Master of the Cape will be able to protect, or annoy, our ships out and home, serving at the same time as an effectual check upon Mauritius etc.’ When it came to mercantile competition, it was a zero-sum game: the French had to be kept out as much as the British let in. Military men were making the same point from the perspective of imperial security. As soon as the French invaded Holland in January 1795, Captain John Blankett of the Royal Navy wrote to Evan Nepean, under secretary of the War Department, with an urgent briefing on the likely loss of the Cape. ‘Whatever tends to give to France the means of obtaining a footing in India is of consequence to us to prevent, it would be idle in me to say anything more to point out the consequence of the Cape than to say that what was a feather in the hands of Holland, will become a sword in the hands of France.’41
This was the nub of the matter. As British imperial concerns had started to turn, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, so a secure route around the Cape of Good Hope had become ever more vital. ‘It is our decided opinion … that whichever of these two great powers [Britain or France] shall possess the Cape, the same may govern India,’ the East India Company had declared as early as 1781.42 Captain Robert Percival was similarly convinced of the Cape’s pivotal role in the imperial contest. ‘For the purposes of defending our own foreign possessions, or keeping our enemies in check, no station can indeed be found comparable to the Cape of Good Hope,’ he averred. ‘Were the native princes of India to make such head against us, as that our army there required speedy reinforcements, we could from the Cape convey troops thither in less than half the time in which they could be sent from Europe.’43 For Dundas, trade with India was the central pillar of his imperial plan and British control of the Cape – the ‘Frontier fortress of India’ – was a prerequisite for it. Cape Town could not be allowed to fall to France.
A PLACE WORTH RETAINING
The taking of the Cape by British troops was a rapid and bloodless affair. On 11 June 1795, Admiral Keith Elphin
stone and Major-General James Craig sailed into False Bay with a force of 1,200 infantry and 200 artillery. The British usually liked to suggest some legalistic basis for their military adventures, and so Elphinstone and Craig carried with them the claims of Andrew Shillinge and Humphrey Fitzherbert to the Cape in the name of King James I in 1620. The Dutch, ‘seeing the impossibility of defending Cape Town, and anxious to spare it from assault and plunder’, swiftly surrendered. In turn, the British offered conciliatory terms with private property guarantees, no demands for reparations, and a commitment to uphold the local currency. This was, in their mind, a temporary occupation occasioned by the war with France, rather than the beginnings of British colonization.44
In addition to Cape Town, Elphinstone and Craig took possession (on behalf of His Britannic Majesty) of an extensive tract of Africa inhabited by some 20,000 Dutch-Afrikaans, over 25,000 slaves from East Africa and the East Indies, a collapsed Khoe-San population numbering around 15,000 and then, further east, a few thousand Bantu-speaking Africans.45 Truth be told, the king’s ministers had very little idea what to do with it all. Was the Cape to be held simply for the duration of the conflict with France, or should its obvious strategic benefits encourage Britain to develop the city and exploit the countryside? The agriculture and viticulture, the ship-building industry and East–West trading networks could all be usefully drawn into the service of the British Empire. Should Britain therefore start to populate its shores with industrious migrants, or continue to rely on the Dutch burghers and slave labour already in place? In 1797, in the face of continued French military threats, Dundas decided, for the time being at least, to hold on to the Cape. Lord Macartney was duly despatched to run the colony as military governor, with Andrew Barnard and Lady Anne in tow.
Macartney’s first impressions were not sympathetic towards maintaining a long-term British presence. ‘It does not indeed appear that this Colony is ever likely to become a source of very abundant revenue,’ he reported back to Dundas in July 1797. ‘Its chief importance to us arises from its geographical position, from its forming the master link of connection between the western and eastern world, from its being the great outwork of our Asiatic commerce and Indian Empire, and above all from the conviction that, if in the hands of a powerful enemy, it might enable him to shake to the foundation, perhaps overturn and destroy the whole fabric of our oriental opulence and dominion.’ However, maintaining these strategic advantages would not come cheap. To defend the colony from French invasion and keep a grip on the Dutch, Cape Town would be transformed into a formidable arsenal – with ‘5 ships of the line, 2 of 50 guns, 7 frigates and 4 sloops or small vessels’ as well as ‘4 battalions of infantry, 2 regiments of light dragoons and 2 companies of artillery’.46
As the year progressed, Macartney became ever less convinced of the capacity of the Cape Colony to sustain itself. The Dutch always ran the Cape at a large loss, and it seemed the Treasury was heading the same way. Macartney did, however, have a plan for the maintenance of British interests in the region. ‘The more I consider the subject,’ he explained in December 1797,
the more I am confirmed in my opinion that the administration of this Colony, if retained at a Peace, should be committed to the charge of the East India Company. The possession of it … whether in the hands of the Crown or the Company, must always be attended with a very great expence, and not a little embarrassment.
Unfortunately, the East India Company was just as adamant that it didn’t want responsibility for the Cape. ‘As a Colony it would be rather dangerous,’ wriggled Sir Francis Baring, ‘as there is too much encouragement for settlers and we have already too many drains upon our own population.’47
Some of Macartney’s entourage were not nearly so unenthusiastic about British possession of the colony. Indeed, the wife of his colonial secretary was positively ebullient about her new life at the Castle of Good Hope. ‘It is a palace, containing such a suite of apartments, as makes me fancy myself a princess when in it,’ Lady Anne gleefully wrote,
but not an Indian or Hottentot princess as I have fitted it all up in the style of a comfortable plain English house, Scotch carpets, English linen and rush bottom chairs with plenty of lolling sofas which I have had made by Regimental carpenters and stuffed by Regimental Taylors … I shall not be stinted for room; as I have a Hall of sixty feet, a drawing room of forty, a dancing room of twenty, a tea room of thirty and three supper room.
As the Dutch moved out and the British moved in, Cape society became a little more frivolous, and the interior decoration a little more colourful. Under the professional stewardship of Lady Anne, the First Lady of the Cape, the castle’s social diary rapidly filled up.
In a week or two, I shall invite all who wish to be merry without cards, or dice, but who can talk or hop to half a dozen black fiddlers, to come and see me on my public day which shall be once a fortnight, when the Dutch Ladys (all of whom love dancing or flirting still more) shall be kindly welcomed and the poor Ensigns and cornets shall have an opportunity of stretching their legs as well as the generals.48
Among those keenest to take up Lady Anne’s invitation were the so-called ‘Indians’ or ‘Hindoos’ – the officers and administrators of the East India Company on their journey out east, or returning home to recover their health after years in the blistering Indian sun. For Cape Town’s mild climate, refreshing south-east winds racing off Table Mountain (known as the ‘Cape Doctor’) and healthy diet were all greatly valued by sun-drenched soldiers and fever-ridden Company men. Rather than travelling all the way back to Britain for their leave, they took cottages in the suburbs – Kenilworth, Constantia, Plumstead or Wynberg – and came into Cape Town to complain about its lack of culture in contrast to the sophistication of Madras or Calcutta. But in Lady Anne the ‘Indian men’ clearly found a most worthwhile attraction, as she hosted enough guests for ‘a Bengal levy every morning at breakfast’. At the centre of this circle was Lord Mornington, ‘who seems anxious to gain all he can from them’.49
Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, was the elder brother of Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, and another favourite of Prime Minister Pitt. Born in 1760, he spent his childhood years living in the heart of Georgian Dublin in Mornington House, Merrion Street. After Eton and Oxford, where he developed a passion for the classics, he entered the House of Commons as MP for Windsor and then for the pocket borough of Old Sarum. Wellesley’s growing interest in imperial politics saw him promoted to the Board of Control for India and then, to the surprise of many, appointed as governor-general of India aged only thirty-seven. Of smallish stature, at 1.7 metres, he had thick, dark hair, a high forehead, a straight Roman nose, large blue eyes and a powerful libido. The suspicious Andrew Barnard warned his wife of the ‘inconsistencies’ in Wellesley’s character: ‘he is clever but weak [and] proud … he will get through the task of what is entrusted to him to the satisfaction of his employers, but … in doing it he will get himself more looked up to than beloved’.50
In India, this ambitious imperialist would become known as ‘the glorious little man’, but in Cape Town en route to Calcutta he had more mundane issues to worry about. When he entered the Bengal breakfast one morning in November 1797 complaining of bed bugs at his own accommodation, Lady Anne took him up in an instant and moved him into the castle.
Lord Mornington is lodged in one of our back parlours into which a little tent is put to hold the great Man and from which he has only to step out upon the bricks of our Balcony to enjoy the Cool air as it hangs over a basin full of pure water supplied by a fountain descending from the Table Mountain.
Soon enough, Mornington was also soaking up advice from the legion of India-men resting at the Cape. ‘Every day produces something to entertain him, and he has a levee every morning of yellow Generals and Captains from India.’ But the natural beauty of Cape Town was as equal an attraction, and Mornington liked little more than a hearty hike up Table Mountain with a furious south-easter at h
is back. On one such occasion the winds became too strong: ‘“So” said he “I laid me down with my face on the ground at the calm side of great Stone, took off my hat, tied my handkerchief round my head that it should not be blown off and while in that situation laughed most heartily at the idea of the “pomp and circumstance” in which the Governor General found himself.’51
During his sojourn Wellesley also had time to think more deeply about Cape Town’s strategic value: its role in defending trade in the East Indies, securing territory in India and the profound threat posed by any enemy ownership. He too concluded it was a place worth retaining. In a letter to Dundas, he argued that ‘as a military station I believe it to be one of the most advantageous which can be imagined to a power compelled to maintain a large European force in India’. Indeed, he doubted whether ‘with the Cape in the hands of the enemy, it would be possible for you to maintain your Indian trade or empire, unless you could acquire some other settlement on the southern continent of Africa’. Characteristically, he also thought that the government of the Cape ‘ought to be rendered subordinate to the governor-general, or lord lieutenant of India’.52