The Story of the British Army

by Charles Cooper King

So, with the extension of the idea, the growing size of the fleet, came greater ideas of expansion and greater powers of carrying it out. Success had produced confidence. Confidence had created greater boldness. Commerce had increased, and continued to increase, despite the continuous wars. Though the loss of ships was terrible, the merchant navy still went forth bravely upon the seas. Merchant princes must have had calm, philosophical heads to have recognised, as they must have done, an almost certain percentage of serious loss of both ship and cargo. Such loss was to be risked from the mouth of the Thames to the mouth of the Hudson, and yet still the traders sought the open sea. Is such a spirit alive now, or is the commercial dread of loss in the end of the nineteenth century greater than the commercial fearlessness of the early part of it? That only the next war can prove.

But the next stage in the national growth which is clear in these bygone days, is that commercial expansion led to bold enterprises against the enemy’s colonies, on which his commerce much depended.

It was so with the expansion of the Indian Empire on the one hand, and the American Empire, after the conquest of Canada from the French, on the other. Both led to yet another idea, of which earlier history could show no trace. The connection between these growing empires and the mother country was becoming increasingly important, and so remained until they were self-supporting or self-dependent. With British India, then a mere spot on the peninsula of Hindustan, it was to home and England only that she could look for everything. Until the vast territories along the banks of the Potomac, the Hudson, or the Ohio had been subdued and become populous, only the mother country could be of use to help her struggling Western children in their early youth. To guard the roads by which this necessary help must come was all-important then, as it is now with such of our dependencies as have not grown up to that national manhood which means independence of all maternal support.

Hence, then, the natural and instinctive desire to possess the Cape of Good Hope. None saw then that there were other advantages and channels of expansion, besides the Cape itself, to be gained in the “Hinterland” to those unknown but reported “Mountains of the Moon.” It was only as being a port on the road to India, in those days, that made the Cape valuable, and for a very simple reason. Ships, like men, require stores and food. Supplies run short, sails are destroyed, boats swept away. These calling places are to the navy what “the Stores” are to the individual; and if access to such places were denied, the ship and the individual would suffer. A hostile Table Bay or Simon’s Bay would have meant, in those days, no house of call between St. Helena and Bombay!

Therefore it is so interesting to watch this gradual expansion of the national idea of empire based entirely, instinctively, and rightly on the colonies we were founding. The whole “earth hunger” of Great Britain, if viewed in its natural light, is the opening of new lands for trade, the extension of colonial empire by true colonists, men who mean to make the new realm their permanent home, and the preserving intact, with a good series of supply stations along these unmarked ways, the roads that unite Great Britain with her colonial children.

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Brave and gallant as had been the conduct of soldiers on board ship, whether acting as marines afloat or as landed parties, there are other instances of skill and courage equally well worth recording.

In 1852 the Birkenhead transport was on its way to India, with drafts of the 12th Lancers, and of the 2nd, 6th, 12th, 43rd, 45th, 60th, 73rd, 74th, and 91st Regiments, under the command of Colonel Seton, and, entering Simon’s Bay, struck on a sunken rock, and began to fill. She was ill provided with boats, for there was scarcely sufficient accommodation for the women and children, let alone the crew or the gallant representatives of the army, and the harbour swarmed with sharks. But the noble spirit of duty, that fearlessness of death and danger which all brave men have and which discipline intensifies, was never shown more grandly than in this moment of supreme peril. The men fell in on the upper deck as if on parade, and there they stood, bearing themselves as stoutly before that dread foe death, as ever they had or would have done before an earthly enemy, while the weeping, helpless, women and little ones were being saved. And standing there, while the officers shook hands and wished each other good-bye, the Birkenhead sank beneath their feet. Of 630 souls on board, only 194 were saved, and among them, Captain Wright of the 91st.

Similarly, in 1857, sheer coolness and discipline saved an entire ship. For the 54th were on their way to Mauritius, when the vessel caught fire. It was only through the exertions and steadiness of the men that the ship was saved at all, and then she reached her destination a mere burnt-out shell.

Nor was the case of the Birkenhead the only one in which the greatest of all bravery—facing death in cold blood—was evidenced by men of the 91st. In 1846, the reserve battalion was taking passage in the Abercrombie Robinson, when the vessel was wrecked near Cape Town. But the 500 men of the 91st assembled on deck as if on parade, and kept the grim silence of discipline until the women and children were safely in the boats.