Late 19th Century Naval Journals and Memoirs as History

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Cowburn. Professor P. M.
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Naval Historical Review
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HOW EXCELLENT the best naval journals and memoirs can be! Indeed, even the average ones have a directness and authenticity of observation that are often missing in more self-conscious descriptive writing, while the best journals are of quite extraordinarily fine composition, the texts sometimes enhanced by excellent calligraphy and the title pages adorned with drawings or decorations of a very high standard. Others, as might be expected, are a catalogue of statistics or routine duties so that the writer’s personality is completely obscured. It is the intention of this essay to discuss the value of this kind of writing, and, by way of illustration, to consider a few of the officers who served on the Australian Station in the last decades of the nineteenth century and have left behind them records of their service.

Logbooks are a more professional record than journals and are therefore likely to be less interesting, though even they can be shot through with unexpected shafts of light, if the writer has both imagination and ability. The habit of keeping a journal, formed at an early age, and the necessity of writing regular letters to far-distant relatives often lasted a lifetime and made the writer, however taciturn in conversation, able to describe and comment on his experiences at sea with fluency and candour, and almost always with a trained eye that missed few details. Also, just as it is easy to train a soldier to describe a landscape by means of such a device as a superimposed clockface - ‘church tower; two o’clock; clump of trees’, and so on - so techniques can be learnt by midshipmen which ensure a systematic appraisal of events and guarantee a minimum of omissions. As an example of the purely professional approach, we might look at a typical entry in the logbook of Midshipman George Talbot Wingfield, which reads as follows:

Anchored in Hobson’s Bay, Saturday, 27th November 1869. A.M. Employed as most requisite. P.M. 1.30 Out first launch and pinnace. 4.30 Mended furl of sails. Received jolly boat from flagship. Received fresh beef and vegetables. 6.00 Mustered by divisions. Served out clean hammocks. Sunset Up boats.

The writer was, in fact, a fifteen year old boy, and it was the day he first reached Australia - yet his personal excitement, if he felt any - and it would have been strange if he did not - has vanished behind the rather untidily written ‘required information’. Twenty years later, the writer of this account was a captain with fifteen years of service ahead of him - in fact an officer who had done well - so it can be reasonably inferred that the young gentlemen of the gunroom were encouraged to be factual and exact rather than personal and descriptive. Yet these brief entries have a value of their own as they often provide exactly the details of information that we might otherwise miss: a few days after the above passage was written, we learn that Wingfield’s ship, HMS Phoebe, was open for inspection on a Sunday before leaving for Sydney and Tasmania, that Divine Service was held at 10 and 6.30 on Sundays and that first the port watch and then the starboard watch were given general leave for forty-eight hours while those remaining on board were employed with a detailed inspection of the rigging, painting the masts and yards and generally cleaning the ship. Thus a study of even the most unpromising material may reveal some hidden ore, and, it is possible for the historian to write with confidence, in this case, about life on board a warship, how shore-leave was organised, and whether the ships were ever open for public inspection.

An example of the best kind of journal, and therefore one of particular value to the naval historian, is that of John Thomas Ewing Gowlland, a surveyor of ability. He was no mean artist, a skill he shared with his slightly older contemporary, Owen Stanley, for both surveyors had the ability to depict, often entirely successfully, a coastline, a group of aborigines crouching on some remote shore or a ship riding the waves. Gowlland joined the Navy as a master’s assistant in 1853, and while still little more than fifteen years of age served in the Archer in Napier’s Baltic Squadron during the Russian War. His journal contains some remarkable watercolour sketches. There is, for instance, the drawing of several British ships engaging the fortifications at Riga with the spires of the city, the fort and the shot furnace in the background below a pearly rift in an otherwise sombre sky and the warships set like chessmen on a churned-up sea of alternating patches of white and grey. Again there is his Squall off Memel Lighthouse, a clever study in greys and blacks, though perhaps more conventional, with its ship riding the storm and unearthly zigzags of lightning parting the clouds.

In an Australian setting Gowlland is no less perceptive, but it is his pen rather than his brush that has left behind the record. Gowlland arrived at Sydney in HM Surveying Ship Hecate in June 1863. Once we start reading his journal, we are struck by a quality it contains which can perhaps only be called its fidelity; there is no high writing, there are few purple passages and, except for an occasional outburst, there is a commendable commonsense about everything he writes. Thus the reader is at once transported to Sydney and can see the Harbour there with the sun glinting on its almost landlocked waters and hear the sound of activity on Cockatoo Island where the Miranda was undergoing repairs, a more serious affair than was expected since she was found to be ‘perfectly rotten’ with some of her timbers ‘literally crumbling away’.

‘Sydney Harbour’, writes Gowlland, ‘is, I suppose, one of the finest and most capacious in the world, good anchorage over it everywhere; and such numberless little coves running inland, forming each in themselves a tolerable sized harbour’. But ‘the great drawback’, he adds, ‘is the bar at the entrance on which at high water springs is 29 feet and at low water only 22, so that a line-of-battle ship would have to wait her opportunity to enter’.

Thus Gowlland at once puts his finger on one of Sydney’s chief disadvantages, and he moves on to another in the next sentence - the siting of the lighthouse on the South Head - understanding immediately why the Dunbar came to grief. Again, a few sentences later, he recognises a third when he writes that the defences were open to great improvements in that at present an enemy ship could enter the Harbour and inflict damage on a large scale with impunity. Later he reveals that the Imperial Government had offered the 84-gun Brunswick to New South Wales at a moderate figure on condition that the colony had her armour-plated, and he notes the significant point that this offer was hardly likely to be accepted since the expense of keeping such a vessel in commission would involve the Government in ’such a sum of money as would enable them to build batteries on almost every point within the Harbour from the entrance to the Pinchgut’. As far as is known, nothing further came of this suggestion.

Hecate left Sydney for Moreton Bay on 24th July 1863. On arrival there her officers were plunged into a local controversy about how best to dredge the Brisbane River. Gowlland again shows himself to have been sensible in his approach to this matter. He was not in favour of any snap decision, thinking it unlikely that his captain could hope to arrive at a satisfactory answer without ‘a most careful survey’ first. He noted that established settlers and steamer captains, who were more likely to know what they were talking about and would certainly know the river well, favoured the view of the engineer-in-charge, a man named Francis, who recommended that the north-west channel should be scooped out. ‘I should think myself’, writes Gowlland with detachment but without seeming at all patronising, ‘that a man who has had so much experience in dredging bar rivers as Mr. Francis has, and always with the greatest success and certainty, would be likely to know more on the subject than persons paying a flying visit to the localities, and not so intimately acquainted with the subject’. If this attitude is at all typical of those of other naval officers involved suddenly in local affairs, we can safely imagine that there was little wrong with the liaison between the Navy and the civilian authorities.

A few weeks later the Hecate had reached Rockingham Bay. Her officers had been asked to select a site for a new town ‘communicating by roads to the interior’, according to Gowlland, ’so that farmers living inland might more easily and cheaply ship their wool off to its final destination by this shorter outlet to the sea than by the present and lengthy mode of carting it all the way to Brisbane’. Though there was good anchorage in the Bay, shoal-water extended almost a mile out from the shore, necessitating the construction of long piers, though this could be carried out comparatively cheaply, since there was plenty of good timber in the immediate neighbourhood. Another ‘bugbear’, as Gowlland called it, which might easily prevent a successful settlement there, was ‘the numerous mangrove swamps that fringe the shore in all directions and from their foul effluvia emitting fever and ague to all white settlers in range’. Viewing this rather bleak prospect, Gowlland understandably concluded that the area could never be made into farming country, and indeed there were other difficulties: while a survey on the scale of two inches to the nautical mile was being carried out, the natives proved surprisingly tiresome, hauling down the marking posts as soon as the boats were any distance from shore. Gowlland was scornful of these particular specimens: ‘they are a miserable, puny race of creatures of small stature and little physical development, almost black in colour and both sexes entirely naked. The men are tattooed all over and are cunning, suspicious and treacherous, loaded rifles being the only mode of keeping them at a distance or prosecuting our work’.

During the early part of this appointment Gowlland was chief assistant to a Captain Sidney, but in 1867 he took over the survey from him. By this time he had married the granddaughter of Simeon Lord, the pioneer merchant, and had probably decided to remain in the surveying branch of the Navy in Australia where there must have been the prospect of any amount of work. He was appointed staff commander in 1873, and he compiled the Admiralty charts of the Hawkesbury, Hunter and Clarence Rivers, but he was drowned at the age of thirty-six during surveying duties off Dobroyd Point near Sydney in 1874, though ‘not’, according to the Sydney Mail, ‘before he had done the state some service’.

Many examples might be selected to show the quality of the naval memoir, but perhaps the writings of Cyprian Arthur George Bridge are of particular interest. Bridge served three times on the Australian Station, first, but only briefly, in the early months of the Station’s separate existence, then again in the early 1880s as captain of the Espiegle and lastly as Commander-in-Chief, 1894-97. His book Some Recollections, published towards the end of a long and useful life, describes events experienced years earlier, but it is a valuable source in that much can be learnt from it about life on a naval station, while it should be remembered that the writer was a highly intelligent man, well read in several languages.

Bridge’s first visit to Australia seems to have been fortuitous. He had joined the wooden steam corvette Pelorus in 1857 as a midshipman when she was being commissioned by Captain Seymour Beauchamp to join a five-ship squadron on the China Station, an additional force thought necessary because of the Sepoy mutiny and the situation in China that was about to erupt in the second Opium War. In May 1859 Pelorus was ordered to Australia. There was ‘a warm and hearty reception’ for her in Sydney, and for a young officer there were plenty of diversions. Bridge liked the clubs in Sydney, several of which made the Pelorus’s officers honorary members, he listened to debates in the New South Wales Parliament, went to the opera at least once - Lucia di Lammermoor - and made friends with William Bede Dalley. He was impressed by Blackett’s newly completed Great Hall at Sydney University and thought the Sydney Morning Herald a very good newspaper. Commodore William Loring, however, was a strict disciplinarian and did not allow his officers to wear plain clothes when off duty on shore, and Bridge relates how he was nearly caught out thus attired in the Australasian Club, but just managed to conceal himself behind the capacious pages of The Times where he remained until the Commodore withdrew.

In 1881 Bridge was offered the command of HMS Espiegle, a full-rigged steam sloop then fitting out for service on the Australian Station. The chapters of his book that cover this commission are well-written, closely observed accounts of life in a part of the British world that owed a great deal to the Royal Navy.

Captain Bridge recognised that the islanders owed much to British naval officers, but he thought that the stories about the kidnapping of island labour were exaggerated. This is an important admission because it enables us to accept his views more readily since, in a sense, he was almost a hostile witness - or at least unlikely to overstress the illegalities of blackbirding. Thus, when Bridge writes of the ‘extreme delicacy of the position of a captain of one of Her Majesty’s ships ordered to cruise about the South Seas’, his reason for this judgement seems worthy of respect. Let us therefore take a closer look at what he says on this subject.

In Bridge’s view a naval officer was placed in something of a dilemma since ‘there was a public opinion in the dominions and a public opinion in the United Kingdom, neither of which he could afford to disregard; and the two opinions were not always the same’. Also he noted that ‘there were two sets of authorities, to one of which he owed obedience and to the other respect’. It was this ambivalence in his day to day relations with the labour traders, chiefs, Polynesians and other islanders that made the naval officer’s position such a difficult one. There were Europeans too, often his fellow-Britons, lotus-eating in the terrible beauty of some island that should have been, and perhaps once was, an aspect of paradise, but keeping wary eyes on the commercial advantages to be gained from every new development. Thus an officer on shore could not afford to lower his guard: in Bridge’s words, ‘the unwary, wanting to walk, shoot pigeons or collect specimens could land himself up in an incident in which reprisals were necessary’. Usually, naval training provided sufficient resourcefulness for dealing with most situations, but appearances could be deceptive as the following passage shows:

‘The arrival of a man-of-war was occasionally received by the savages with friendliness and the appearance of delight. When the captain landed, he was entertained with stories of the iniquitous conduct of the neighbours of his new acquaintances…. Soon he would discover that his ‘friends’ contemplated attacking their neighbours and hoped to secure the Navy’s aid.

The question then would be whether or not to give that aid, but often there was little chance of discussing the implications of any decision with anyone else. In fact there were usually only two methods of approach open: either the officer could demand to see the local chieftain and give him ‘a talking to’ - which might well be construed as weakness - or he might ‘convert him’, that is to say intimidate him, by an act of war. Bridge’s own experiences clearly made him sensitive about such matters even in recollection many years later. So often, he wrote, the actions of British naval officers in keeping the peace in the South Seas had been carried out ‘in the cold shade of Foreign Office dullness, not of the Secretaries of State themselves, but of their under-strappers’, so that the ‘bureaucratic solidity’ of clerks and the ’smug self-satisfaction of second-rate men’ provided the greatest frustrations.

To take another point, Bridge’s attitude towards the missionaries was scrupulously fair. He did not really approve of their work amongst the islanders himself, but he thought that no fair-minded man could refuse to admit that they had ‘conferred great benefits on their converts, and not on their converts alone’. Again, he conceded that missionaries ‘encouraged decently disposed white men to continue to behave decently’, and he rallied to their defence against the charge that they competed unfairly with the traders. Bridge was also impressed by the quality of men such as Robertson of Eromanga, doggedly carrying on his work there, though his two immediate predecessors had been murdered, or Wilson, a county cricketer in his younger days, or Moulton, that painstaking scholar in charge of the Wesleyan Mission in Nukualofa, who translated much of the Bible into Tongan and even produced a blank verse rendering of Paradise Lost in the same language.

If the amount of space given to Gowlland and Bridge in this short essay seems overgenerous, their virtues as writers of straightforward narrative and accurate observers can be cited in justification. Other examples might have been selected, and high amongst them should be placed Commodore James Goodenough. Though the printed version of his journal has been severely pruned so that all political references to his part in the annexation of Fiji have vanished, the manuscript volumes show throughout the observations of an intelligent and wellread man, deeply interested in local flora and fauna as well as in native customs and languages.

Commander George Palmer and Captain Albert Markham successively commanded the wooden sloop Rosario in the early 1870s and both officers wrote books soon after their commands ended to expose ‘the almost unheard of enormities’, to use Markham’s phrase, committed by those engaged in the island labour trade. Their books thus had a distinct purpose and their ‘political’ nature stirred up no little controversy, but this does not detract from their merits as more than competent examples of the literary genre we have been considering. John Moresby, who, like Markham, was to reach flag-rank, also wrote his New Guinea and Polynesia with a political purpose, but it and his combined study of his father’s and his own naval careers have many of the qualities that characterise the best naval writing. The list might be extended further to include less well-known personalities, but it is hoped that enough has been said to attract readers to the study of this rewarding branch of literature.


Originally printed in the Naval Historical Review-August 1972 Edition

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