The History of the First West India Regiment Part 13

In August, 1831, disturbances having occurred amongst the Mandingoes[43]

living in the neighbourhood of Fort Bullen, Barra Point, Ensign Fearon, of the Royal African Corps, by direction of Lieutenant-Governor Rendall, had proceeded with thirty men of his corps and a few pensioners, on the night of August 22nd, to the stockaded town of Essaw, or Yaha.s.su, the capital of Barra, to demand hostages from the king. At Essaw this small force was attacked by a large body of Mandingoes, and compelled to retire to Fort Bullen, to which place the victorious Mandingoes advanced, completely investing it on the land side. The day following, Ensign Fearon, having lost twenty-three men out of his little force, evacuated the work, which was in an almost defenceless condition, and retired across the river to the town of Bathurst. After this defeat the chiefs of the neighbouring Mohammedan towns sent large contingents of men to the King of Barra; several thousand armed natives were collected at a distance of three miles only from Bathurst, and that settlement was in such imminent danger that the Lieutenant-Governor was compelled to send to Sierra Leone for a.s.sistance.

On November 9th the reinforcements arrived in the Gambia, and found Fort Bullen still in the hands of the natives, who fortunately had confined themselves to making mere demonstrations, instead of falling upon the settlement, which lay entirely at their mercy. On the morning of November 11th a landing was effected at Barra Point by the force, consisting of 451 of all ranks, under cover of a heavy fire from H.M.

brig _Plumper_ (Lieutenant Cresey), the _Parmilia_ transport, and an armed colonial schooner. The enemy, estimated at from 2500 to 3000 strong, were skilfully covered from the fire of the s.h.i.+pping by the entrenchments which they had thrown up, and from which, as well as from the shelter of the dense bush and high gra.s.s, they poured in a heavy and well-sustained fire upon the troops who were landing in their front.

Notwithstanding all disadvantages, however, the British pushed on, and, after an hour's hard fighting, during which the enemy contested every inch of ground, they succeeded in driving them from their entrenchments at the point of the bayonet, and pursued them for some distance through the bush. The British loss in this action was 2 killed, 3 officers[44]

and 47 men wounded.

The next few days were occupied in landing the guns, and placing Fort Bullen in a state of defence; and at daybreak on the morning of November 17th the entire force marched to the attack of Essaw, the king's town, leaving the crew of H.M. brig _Plumper_, under Lieutenant Cresey, in charge of Fort Bullen.

On approaching the vicinity of the town the troops deployed into line, and, the guns having been brought to the front, a heavy fire was opened on the stockade. This was kept up for five hours, and was as vigorously returned by the enemy from their defences, with artillery and small arms. The rockets were brought to bear as soon as possible, and the first one thrown set fire to a house in the town; but the buildings being princ.i.p.ally composed of "swish," and the natives having taken the precaution of removing the thatched roofs of the greater number, the rockets produced but little effect, as they could do no injury to the walls. Towards noon some of the enemy were observed leaving the rear of the town, and shortly afterwards a very superior force of natives appeared in the bush on the British right, threatening an attack in flank. A second body was also observed making a lengthened detour on the left, apparently with the intention of attacking the British rear. The men's ammunition being almost exhausted, and the artillery fire, though well sustained, having produced no effect upon the strong stockades which surrounded the town, it was deemed prudent to retire, and the force was accordingly withdrawn to Benty Point, having suffered a loss during the day of 11 killed and 59 wounded. Lieutenant Leigh, of the Sierra Leone militia, and 5 men subsequently died of their wounds.

On December 7th, Lieutenant-Colonel Hingston, Royal African Corps, arrived with reinforcements and a.s.sumed the command. Immediately upon this accession to the British strength, the King of Barra notified his desire to open negotiations, and, terms being proposed which he accepted, a treaty was finally concluded and signed at Fort Bullen on January 4th, 1832. The detachment of the recruiting company, 1st West India Regiment, returned to Sierra Leone on the conclusion of the war.

In the West Indies, the detachment of the 1st West India Regiment stationed at Barbados, had, in 1831, suffered from a violent hurricane which visited that island on the 10th of August of that year. The barracks and hospitals at St. Ann's were completely ruined, 36 men of various corps were killed, and a commissariat officer, with three of his children, and his entire household, entombed in the ruins of his house.

An officer of the garrison, who gives an account of this hurricane,[45]

says: "Describe the appearance of our barracks, I really cannot. This I can say, in truth, that in no part of the world, a more beautiful range of buildings, or on a more liberal scale or appropriate site, could have been found. The establishment was complete in all respects for every branch of a small army. It was the depot of our West India military possessions. Well--in two hours during this awful night almost every building in the garrison was destroyed.... What a moment was that, when, thanks be to Heaven, the gale in some degree abated. The officers crept out one after the other, and the scene that followed can be compared only to that which one sees and feels after an action--who has escaped?--who is dead?... The first person I found wounded was Mrs.

Brockla.s.s, the lady of an officer of the 1st West India Regiment, who, with three fine children, finding the roof over them falling, hastened from under it. She had the misfortune to be knocked down by some s.h.i.+ngles, received a blow on the head, and had two or three ribs broken; the children fortunately escaped: her husband was on duty in a most perilous situation.... The huts which were the quarters of the married people of the 1st West India Regiment were blown to pieces, and four men and one woman severely injured. The north building of the men's new barracks accommodated the left wing of the 36th Regiment, besides which a detachment of the 1st West India Regiment was quartered on the ground floor. None of the latter were hurt, but two men of the 36th were killed. The greater part of the s.p.a.cious galleries was carried away, some of the arches that supported them fell, and many were very much broken. None of the roof remains that will ever be of service."

Towards the end of the year 1832, numerous complaints were made by native traders who were in the habit of trading to the Sherbro and the adjacent territories, that they were molested and their goods plundered by a marauding party of Mohammedan Acoos, who had established themselves in the vicinity of the Ribbie River. These Acoos were liberated Africans, that is, slaves who had been set free from captured slavers at Freetown, Sierra Leone, and had, contrary to the regulations then in force, clandestinely left the Colony.

A party of volunteers, having been despatched to gather information concerning these rebels, ascertained that they had been joined by other parties of marauders, and had established themselves at a place called Cobolo, on the northern bank of the Kates, or Ribbie River. The manager of the Waterloo District also reported various outrages and depredations committed by this band.

On December 13th, 1832, the Hastings company of volunteers, with that of Waterloo, marched from the village of Waterloo towards Cobolo, distant by road some thirty miles, with orders to capture and bring in the leaders of the rebels. Next morning, as this force was approaching Cobolo, the Acoos, who were concealed in the bush, fired upon the head of the column, and the volunteers at once, and without firing a shot, turned and ran in the greatest confusion; nor did they recover from their panic till they had reached Waterloo. The Acoos pursued the fugitives for some little distance, and killed seven of their number.

The rising, originally trivial, had now, through the shameful behaviour of the volunteers, become serious. The news of the defeat spread with great rapidity among the unruly tribes on the frontier of the Colony; and a Mohammedan priest, proclaiming himself a prophet, placed himself at the head of the movement. The Governor acted with prompt.i.tude; and recognising the great danger of delay, despatched, on December 17th, all the available men from the garrison of Sierra Leone, under Lieut.-Colonel Hingston, Royal African Corps. The recruiting company of the 1st West India Regiment accompanied the force, under the command of Lieut. W. Montgomery, 1st West India Regiment.

The troops proceeded to Waterloo in boats, and were there joined by the Wellington company of the Sierra Leone militia, and the Hastings company of volunteers. At the same time, H.M. brig _Charybdis_ (Lieut. Crawford) was sent with the York company of volunteers to the mouth of the Ribbie River, with orders for the seamen and marines to ascend the river in boats, co-operate with Lieut.-Colonel Hingston's column, and cut off the retreat of the rebels.

Lieut.-Colonel Hingston's force marched from Waterloo on December 18th, and, halting for the night at Bangowilli, about twenty miles from the former village, advanced towards Cobolo next morning at daybreak. The march was unusually fatiguing, and for many miles the troops had to move through rush beds and mangrove swamps, frequently up to the hips in mud and water. On emerging upon the dry ground near Cobolo the report of fire-arms was heard in front, and scouts being thrown forward, it was learned that the Kossoos, which tribe had suffered most from the predatory propensities of the rebels, had taken up arms and were then engaged in attacking Cobolo. The troops at once pushed on, and a few minutes after their arrival on the scene, the Acoos, completely routed, fled in all directions, many being killed and a great number drowned while endeavouring to escape across a neighbouring creek.

The British force remained at Cobolo for four days, daily sending out small parties in pursuit of the dispersed rebels. By one of these parties Oji Corri, the leader of the movement, was shot down; and the rebellion being at an end the troops returned to Freetown, Sierra Leone, on December 28th; a detachment of the 2nd West India Regiment, under Lieutenant Lardner, being left at Waterloo to watch the movements of the Mohammedan Acoos in the neighbouring villages.

Lieutenant Montgomery, 1st West India Regiment, died at Freetown of fever, on April 9th, 1833, and this event left the recruiting company without an officer of the corps until the arrival in Sierra Leone of Captain Hughes on November 29th, 1834.

In the West Indies one company had been removed from the head-quarters at Trinidad to Tortola in May, 1834, and this detachment was, in January, 1836, moved to St. Vincent.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 43: The Mandingoes are a warlike Mohammedan tribe, inhabiting the territory inland from the Gambia River to Sierra Leone.]

[Footnote 44: Captain Berwick, Royal African Corps; Lieutenant Lardner, 2nd West India Regiment; and Captain Hughes, Gambia Militia.]

[Footnote 45: An account of the fatal hurricane by which Barbados suffered in 1831, published at Bridgetown, Barbados, 1831.

"DETACHMENT 1ST WEST INDIA REGIMENT.

"Return of the men killed and wounded during the late hurricane, 15th August, 1831:

"Killed--Henry Read, private.

"Wounded--4 privates.

(Signed) "H. BROCKLa.s.s, Lieut., 1st W.I. Regt."

CHAPTER XVII.

THE MUTINY OF THE RECRUITS AT TRINIDAD, 1837.

On April 1st, 1836, the 1st West India Regiment was increased from eight to ten companies, and recruits being obtained with difficulty, the Government commenced the injudicious practice of enrolling the slaves, disembarked from captured slavers, in the West India regiments. In September of that year the slaves from two slavers which had been captured off Grenada by H.M.S. _Vestal_, 112 in number, were drafted into the 1st West India Regiment. Similarly, in January, 1837, 109; on May 20th, 112; and on May 21st, 93 slaves, recently disembarked from slavers captured by H.M.S. _Griffon_ and _Harpy_, were sent to the regiment. Thus, in the years 1836-7, 426 such slaves were received, 314 of them in the year 1837 alone.

The formality of asking these men whether they were willing to serve was never gone through, many of them did so unwillingly; and it must be remembered that they were all savages in the strictest sense of the word, entirely unacquainted with civilisation, and with no knowledge of the English language. The majority of them were natives of the Congo and of Great and Little Popo, two towns on the western frontier of Dahomey; and it may be here remarked that the negroes of these districts have maintained their reputation for ultra-barbarism even to the present day.

The only result to be antic.i.p.ated from such a wholesale drafting of savages into a regiment was a mutiny, and every inducement to mutiny appears to have been afforded them. Instead of dividing them proportionately between the head-quarters and the detachments, they were nearly all kept at the former; and but three weeks before the actual rising, as if to further remove all check, 100 rank and file, all old soldiers, were sent from Trinidad and distributed between St. Lucia and Dominica. Thus, on June 18th, 1837, the day of the mutiny, with the exception of the band, officers servants, and mess-waiters, all the men at San Josef's barracks, Trinidad, were slaver recruits. The ringleader of the movement was one Daaga, or Donald Stewart, and the following account of him, and of the mutiny, is taken from Kingsley's "At Last":

"Donald Stewart, or rather Daaga, was the adopted son of Madershee, the old and childless king of the tribe called Paupaus,[46] a race that inhabit a tract of country bordering on that of the Yarrabas.[47] These races are constantly at war with each other.

"Daaga was just the man whom a savage, warlike, and depredatory tribe would select for their chieftain, as the African negroes choose their leaders with reference to their personal prowess. Daaga stood six feet six inches without shoes. Although scarcely muscular in proportion, yet his frame indicated in a singular degree the union of irresistible strength and activity.... He had a singular cast in his eyes, not quite amounting to that obliquity of the visual organs denominated a squint, but sufficient to give his features a peculiarly forbidding appearance; his forehead, however, although small in proportion to his enormous head, was remarkably compact and well formed. The whole head was disproportioned, having the greater part of the brain behind the ears; but the greatest peculiarity of this singular being was his voice. In the course of my life I never heard such sounds uttered by human organs as those formed by Daaga. In ordinary conversation he appeared to me to endeavour to soften his voice--it was a deep tenor: but when a little excited by any pa.s.sion (and this savage was the child of pa.s.sion) his voice sounded like the low growl of a lion, but when much excited it could be compared to nothing so aptly as the notes of a gigantic brazen trumpet.

"Daaga having made a successful predatory expedition into the country of the Yarrabas, returned with a number of prisoners of that nation.

These he, as usual, took bound and guarded towards the coast to sell to the Portuguese. The interpreter, his countryman, called these Portuguese 'white gentlemen.' The white gentlemen proved themselves more than a match for the black gentlemen; and the whole transaction between the Portuguese and the Paupaus does credit to all concerned in this gentlemanly traffic in human flesh.

"Daaga sold his prisoners, and under pretence of paying him, he and his Paupau guards were enticed on board a Portuguese vessel: they were treacherously overpowered by the Christians, who bound them beside their late prisoners, and the vessel sailed over 'the great salt water.'

"This transaction caused in the breast of the savage a deep hatred against all white men; a hatred so intense that he frequently, during and subsequent to the mutiny, declared he would eat the first white man he killed; yet this cannibal was made to swear allegiance to our sovereign on the Holy Evangelists, and was then called a British soldier.

"On the voyage the vessel on board which Daaga had been entrapped was captured by the British. He could not comprehend that his new captors liberated him: he had been overreached and trepanned by one set of white men, and he naturally looked on his second captors as more successful rivals in the human, or rather inhuman, Guinea trade; therefore, this event lessened not his hatred for white men in the abstract.

"I was informed by several of the Africans who came with him, that when, during the voyage, they upbraided Daaga with being the cause of their capture, he pacified them by promising that when they should arrive in white man's country he would repay their perfidy by attacking them in the night. He further promised that if the Paupaus and Yarrabas would follow him, he would fight his way back to Guinea. This account was fully corroborated by many of the mutineers, especially those who were shot with Daaga; they all said the revolt never would have happened but for Donald Stewart, as he was called by the officers; but Africans who were not of his tribe called him Longa-longa, on account of his height.

"Such was the extraordinary man who led the mutiny I am about to relate.

"A quant.i.ty of captured Africans having been brought hither from the islands of Grenada and Dominica, they were most imprudently induced to enlist in the 1st West India Regiment. True it is, we have been told they did this voluntarily; but it may be asked, if they had any will in the matter, how could they understand the duties to be imposed on them by becoming soldiers, or how comprehend the nature of an oath of allegiance, without which they could not, legally speaking, be considered soldiers? I attended the whole of the trials of these men, and well know how difficult it was to make them comprehend any idea which was at all new to them by means of the best interpreters procurable.

"To the African savage, while being drilled into the duties of a soldier, many things seem absolute tyranny which would appear to a civilised man a mere necessary restraint. To keep the restless body of an African negro in a position to which he has not been accustomed; to cramp his splay feet, with his great toes standing out, into European shoes made for feet of a different form; to place a collar round his neck, which is called a stock, and which to him is cruel torture; above all, to confine him every night to his barracks--are almost insupportable. One unacquainted with the habits of the negro cannot conceive with what abhorrence he looks on having his disposition to nocturnal rambles checked by barrack regulations.

"Formerly the 'King's man,' as the black soldier loved to call himself, looked (not without reason) contemptuously on the planter's slave, although he himself was after all but a slave to the State; but these recruits were enlisted shortly after a number of their recently imported countrymen were wandering freely over the country, working either as free labourers, or settling, to use an apt American phrase, as squatters; and to a.s.sert that the recruit, while under military probation, is better off than the free Trinidad labourer, who goes where he lists and earns as much in one day as will keep him for three days, is an absurdity. Accordingly, we find that Lieutenant-Colonel Bush, who commanded the 1st West India Regiment, thought that the mutiny was mainly owing to the ill-advice of their civil, or, we should rather say, unmilitary countrymen. This, to a certain degree, was the fact; but, by the declaration of Daaga and many of his countrymen, it is evident that the seeds of the mutiny were sown on the pa.s.sage from Africa.

"It has been a.s.serted that the recruits were driven to mutiny by hard treatment of their commanding officers. There seems not the slightest truth in this a.s.sertion; they were treated with fully as much kindness as their situation would admit of, and their chief was peculiarly a favourite of Colonel Bush and the officers, notwithstanding Daaga's violent and ferocious temper often caused complaints to be brought against him.

"On the night of the 17th of June, 1837, the people of San Josef were kept awake by the recruits, about 280 in number, singing the war-song of the Paupaus. This wild song consisted of a short air and chorus. The tone was, although wild, not inharmonious, and the words rather euphonious. As near as our alphabet can convey them, they ran thus: