Commander by Stephen Taylor

Author:Stephen Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

Storm in the East, 1804–1806

In thirty-three years there was little at sea Pellew had not seen. Yet virtually all that time had been in the Channel or North Atlantic. He had only crossed the Equator once, as a boy of thirteen, and never glimpsed either of the other two oceans, so his passage to India represented change in every way. Rounding the Cape of Good Hope and racing east with the Roaring Forties, he entered what might almost have been a new element. Gone were the chill grey bleakness of the Channel, the stormy cragginess of Biscay. In their place were the pink and gold of sunrise and sunset, the hurricanes of the Eastern Seas.

The Indian is the smallest ocean, but still covers almost 29 million square miles, from the Red Sea to Antarctica, from Africa to Terra Australis. This was now the domain of Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Pellew. Having ventured halfway across the world in his 74-gun flagship Culloden, he gained some insight into the vastness of this far-flung command by the hunt he had to undertake to find the man he was superseding. When he put in at Penang, expecting to find Vice-Admiral Peter Rainier, he had covered almost 15,000 miles. Of Rainier, however, there was no trace. So he sailed across the Bay of Bengal to Madras. Rainier was not there either. Only on returning to Penang, where Rainier put in a week later, did Pellew take command – in January 1805. He had covered a further 3,000 miles to locate the admiral and six months had passed since sailing from Spithead.

Pellew went to India ‘in the hope of giving a blow to the inveterate and restless Enemies of Mankind’.1 He had other objectives as Commander-in-Chief as well – launching his son Fleetwood and shaking the pagoda tree, as the local idiom had it for reaping the riches of the East. (Rainier had sailed off with some £250,000, worth about £75 million today.) But his greatest desire was to engage the foe.

In the event, his most inveterate enemies over the next four years were not French but British, and his biggest battle would be with a brother officer.

The agency of British dominance was the self-styled Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe – more prosaically the East India Company, which had laid the basis for imperial rule with trade at three Indian presidencies, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, and outposts at Penang and Canton. The Navy Commander-in-Chief was accountable not only to the Admiralty but, to some extent, the grandees and nabobs of the Company. His primary duty was protecting trade. With a fleet at Madras far more potent than the French and Dutch squadrons combined, that might have seemed no great challenge. However, the French had shown more enterprise here than in home waters; and the task of safeguarding the riches Britain derived from the Eastern Seas was bedevilled by the scope and nature of Company shipping as well as by the monsoon winds that defined sailing seasons.

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