Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (52 page)

On board little had greatly changed since Trafalgar. Even in the new ironclads life was tough, stuffy and fearfully noisy, with the primitive reciprocating engines thumping and rattling the entire ship, and the living quarters, encased in metal on the waterline, lit only by smelly tallow candles. Food was generally meagre, water was strictly rationed, pleasures were homespun and often bestial. The young officers, whose professional education had generally consisted of a few months on the old three-decker
Britannia
, moored in the River Dart, went in for practical jokes and horseplay. The ratings loved games like Sling the Monkey, in which a man swinging on a long rope was attacked with rope-ends, or Baste the Bear, in which the victim crawled about the deck on all fours. The bluejackets drank enormously, and nearly all chewed tobacco: when approached by an officer they simultaneously removed the hats from their heads and the wads from their mouths, returning both in a single movement when the officer had passed.

The Navy was full of odd characters, upper and lower deck—eccentrics, runaways, wild younger sons, Irishmen from Cork or Galway, lower-deck inventors, religious fanatics. The sailors were terrific dandies: with their heavily oiled hair, their meticulously trimmed side-whiskers (beards were not allowed before 1870), their wide-brimmed sennet hats of straw or canvas, and the knife-edge creases to their bell-bottoms, they went ashore in Bombay or Singapore cockily ready for anything, and returned in the evening liberty boats, as likely as not, insensible in the stern sheets or sitting on the thwarts singing bawdy songs. Until the 1860s they made most of their own clothes, even to boots, and they still danced hornpipes, as they had since the Middle Ages, when the boatswain’s mate piped all hands to ‘dance and skylark’.

Socially the Royal Navy had gone up in the world during Victoria’s reign. Its officers, once drawn chiefly from the middle classes, now included many men of title and means, so that even the Queen, who used in her younger days to wonder if it were proper to invite naval officers to the same table as her Guards officers, was now quite taken with the senior service. Naval ratings, too, were men of higher standing now. They were volunteers, pursuing a regular and relatively well-paid career, in a service which became more popular with the public every year. Impressment, though never legally abolished, was in abeyance—the Navy was only half its size in Nelson’s day, and there was no shortage of recruits—and flogging too, though it was never formally abolished, petered out in the 1870s.

Now this whole elaborate structure was threatened by the new technology. Steam threatened all—threatened the Navy’s status in the world, for now all navies could start from scratch, threatened the style of the service and the well-being of the admirals. Tenaciously the Navy clung to its heritage. In 1859 the last of the wooden three-decker battleships was launched—
Victoria
, the first warship to be named for the Queen.
1
But for her size and armament she was little more than an improved
Victory
, with auxiliary steam engines. Her sides were marked out in the traditional checker of black and white, her great masts were fully-rigged, her bowsprit rose above a splendid gilded figurehead, and from her big square ports protruded the barrels of 120 muzzle-loading guns, with an enormous 68-pounder mounted in the bows for the better pursuit of the French. In such a ship the Royal Navy still felt at home, and Sir James Scott could cheerfully have grappled with the most vicious of privateers.

But she was the last of the old kind, and even as she sailed with a dowager dignity to become flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet, the keel was laid of the first of the new—the original sea-going steam iron-clad,
Warrior
,
specifically designed to ‘overtake and overwhelm any other warship in existence’.
2
Throughout the 1860s
and 1870s ideas fell upon the Navy thick and fast, and slowly, creakily, not without magnificence, the Royal Navy adapted to modernity. Sometimes its trust in new methods was severely shaken—by the loss of the battleship
Captain
, for example, a revolutionary new turret ship which capsized on her maiden cruise in 1870, confirming the worst forebodings of the reactionaries. Sometimes it was beset by Navy scares, alarmist reports of French rearmament or American inventiveness. It progressed in a welter of argument, admiral against admiral, newspaper critics against naval spokesman, and if its professional ideas changed slowly, its gnarled, stubborn and ornate style was more resistant still.

Like the Army, it became more and more an imperial force. It was increasingly concerned with the protection of the imperial sea-routes, the suppression of subversion, showing the flag and overawing the natives. Much of its energy was invested in gunboat diplomacy, that ubiquitous instrument of imperial prestige, which required the dispersal of innumerable small vessels in every corner of the world. In 1875, for instance, the Royal Navy had 16 ships on the North American and West Indies station, five on the South American, nine on the South African, 11 on the East Indies, 10 on the Pacific, 11 on the Australian and 20 on the China station. They might be required at any moment for the most diverse duties: shelling recalcitrant tribespeople, embellishing consular fetes, scaring off pirates, rescuing earthquake victims, transporting friendly potentates—tasks which, though not always directly imperialist, contributed to the mosaic of imperial pride, and strengthened the illusion of inescapable British strength.

It
was
partly illusion. The Navy had no war plans, no staff college, very little tactical training, and its attitude to war, as to life, remained incorrigibly conservative—nostalgic even, for the longer ago Trafalgar was, the more romantic Nelson’s navy seemed. Its power was none the less real, though, for its element of bluff. As C. J. Napier once observed, ‘an English admiral is difficult to reckon up. He may be wise, or he may be otherwise, no man knows, for he dwells not upon the hearth, but away upon the waters: however, all men know that he has a strength of cannon at his back….’ Even the Navy’s worst enemies admitted the splendour of its traditions
and its style, and at home, as the century passed, its legend became almost sanctified. Powerful lobbies arose to press for its well-being and expansion. The Navy League was one of the most insistent pressure groups of the late nineteenth century, and Parliament was seldom without its political admirals. The Empire and the Navy went together, and the very first statue ever erected of Lord Nelson stood not in Trafalgar Square, but in the cobbled New Place in Montreal.
1

And behind the Navy were the bases. Steam power, though it increased the mobility of British power, made the Empire dependent upon coaling stations, and the Royal Navy was tied more than ever to its bases overseas. Fortunately these were everywhere. Almost every strategic island had been acquired by the British at one time or another, and as the distant imperial stakes grew more valuable, so the safety of the shipping routes became the chief preoccupation of the strategists in London, and largely dictated the policies of the Empire. Almost any imperial possession could be justified, it seemed, by naval necessity. When the Ionians were abandoned it became absolutely essential to acquire Cyprus as a substitute, and the British Empire could scarcely survive without Bermuda, covering as it so obviously did the entrance to the Caribbean and the Gulf of New Orleans.
2
Ascension Island, originally acquired as a protective outpost of St Helena, where Napoleon was imprisoned, was now irreplaceable as a coaling station, and St Helena itself, though Napoleon lay harmless in Les Invalides, turned out to be indispensable as a source of watercress for the Fleet.

Sea-power was the basis of Empire, but Empire, it now appeared,
was essential to sea-power. It was an imperialist circle. By the 1870s the system was almost complete. The Mediterranean was policed and serviced from Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus, the Atlantic from Halifax and Bermuda, the Indian Ocean from Bombay and Trincomalee, the Pacific from Hong Kong and Esquimault, the Red Sea from Aden. And linking all these scattered dockyards, deposited everywhere along the shipping routes, the imperial coaling stations offered their mountains of best Welsh steam coal, and their sweating and blackened armies of coolies. Some of these bases and stations were new, but some were very old, and seemed in their Britishness part of some natural sea-order. It seemed organically rather than historically ordained that the Union Jack should fly over the watchposts and cross-roads of the sea. Foreigners for the most part accepted it as a fact of life, and the British scarcely thought about it.

Take for instance the naval base of Simonstown in South Africa. The Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost tip of the African land mass, was one of the most spectacular of the world’s headlands: a wild and glorious place, rocky, wind-scoured, where baboons and antelopes roamed the moorland, stormy seabirds of the south whirled in the wind, and below the precipitous cliffs one could see the waters of the Atlantic and Indian oceans mingling in currents of blue and green. Sheltering in the lee of this prodigy was Simonstown. It was one of the snuggest and prettiest places imaginable, and unchangingly British. Trimly around a sheltered inlet clustered its demure villas, its cottages, its sailors’ barracks, its steepled church and its esplanade of shops, the whole nicely washed and painted, and built to a happily domestic scale. The dockyard, its gates superbly surmounted by the royal cipher, was embedded so neatly between town and sea that the whole had a family unity, and everything in the place was comfortably Navy: the church memorials to Esteemed Shipmates and Ever-Regretted captains’ ladies—the shops selling naval gear, tobacco, homely souvenirs, needles, boot-leathers—the taverns, the smell of rum, the cab-driver’s transplanted Portsmouth’s slang—or the pleasant Admiral’s House at the water’s edge, whose gardens were fragrant with trellissed roses, and at the foot of whose private jetty, like a skiff on the Thames, the squadron flagship habitually
lay. Simonstown looked as though it had been there for ever, and for ever there would stay—like the great Cape above, or the Royal Navy itself, without which Victoria’s world seemed inconceivable.
1

But there was a weak link in this network of strength. Most of the imperial bases were concerned
au
fond
with India, the greatest and richest of the British possessions, but in 1869 the position of India in the world was shifted by the opening of the Suez Canal. This was a notably un-British event. The French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps had built the canal, French capital had largely financed it, the French Empress Eugénie had sailed to Egypt in her royal yacht to open it. At first the British unaccountably failed to grasp its significance. They had always thought a railway across the Isthmus a better proposition, and argued for years that a canal was scientifically unfeasible, if only because the Mediterranean and the Red Sea lay at different levels. When de Lesseps built one anyway, they doubted its effect—most traffic, they thought, would continue to sail around the Cape. Altering as it did the familiar shape of the world, the canal seemed unreal to them, even unnatural, especially as it was not British-made, and they appeared to think that if they scoffed at it for long enough it would dry up again.

Presently, though, they were obliged to take it more seriously, for their attention was repeatedly focussed upon Egypt by the Eastern Question. Disturbed always by the presence of the rival Russian Empire beyond the Hindu Kush, the British were perennially afraid that the western flank of India might be turned. They had fought the disastrous Afghan War of 1839 on this issue, and they went back again to Afghanistan in 1878, when another presumptuous Amir embarked upon a flirtation with the Russians, another
British Resident was murdered, another British Army was defeated, and another punitive force stormed back to Kabul in revenge. They fought a war against the Persians in 1845, they could be roused to Jingoism by any threat to the Dardanelles, and in 1875 Pendeh, a place in Persia whose existence nobody in Britain had hitherto suspected, became for a month or two a household name, as a near-miss
casus
belli
with the Russian Empire.

Many an obscure and dusty fortress, Herat to Kandahar, briefly achieved the eponym ‘Key to India’, but the master-key was now unquestionably Egypt. Napoleon had recognized this long before, when he called Egypt ‘the most important country’, and seized it as the principal staging-post of his advance to the east. Now the British belatedly recognized it too, and the future of Egypt became crucial to the Eastern Question. The Khedive of Egypt was theoretically a satrap of the Sultan of Turkey, so that whoever controlled the Dardanelles had a hypothetical control of the Suez isthmus too: when the British armies fought in the Crimea, when the music-hall audiences sang the Jingo song, when the statesmen met at Berlin to hammer out the future of the Balkans, Egypt was always in the wings.

By 1875 even the British had to admit the importance of the Suez Canal, and very galling it was. In the person of Lieutenant Waghorn they themselves had pioneered the Egyptian route to India, and though the Canal Company was a French concern, with the Khedive holding a 40 per cent minority interest, by 1875 more than three-fifths of its traffic flew the British flag, and nearly half the ships that sailed from Britain to India took the Suez route. The P and O company rebuilt its entire fleet in order to operate through the canal, besides abandoning its vast investment in the overland route and in the docks and shipyards that serviced its vessels around the Cape. Via Suez armies could now sail from Europe to India in a month, altering the whole pattern of imperial defence. The canal had become, in effect, an extension of India; for the rest of the century the British would think of Suez and India in the same breath, as part of the same preoccupation, and Suez replaced the Cape of Good Hope as a synonym for the beginning of the east.