Heligoland Read online

  However, Colonel Hamilton was very impressed that the islanders, with their boats, had helped to disembark the 150 artillerymen he brought with him to replace the naval garrison.27 Crucially, he also noted that the inhabitants appeared to be satisfied with the status quo, largely because they had faith in D’Auvergne’s humane and good-natured governorship. This observation did most to overcome his scepticism about the islanders. The realisation that D’Auvergne’s departure in February 1808 was sincerely regretted by every individual on Heligoland further made Hamilton determined, when he took over as the new governor, to continue with that apparently workable approach.

  By then the defensive firepower provided by HMS Explosion’s salvaged mortars was heavily augmented with the arrival and installation on the cliff-tops of twelve large mortars and thirty-six cannon. However, for the moment the greatest danger came not from the Napoleonic forces but from Danish privateers preying on British-endorsed merchant vessels in the surrounding waters, beyond the range of the island’s artillery. This problem persisted until June 1809, when four enemy ships were successfully deflected from approaching the island by HMS L’Aimable, a frigate commanded by Lord George Stuart, who in late September 1807 had replaced Viscount Falkland as commodore of the Elbe blockade squadron.

  The potential for bad weather was itself likely to deter any but the most determined invasion force – especially in winter when the seas made Heligoland perilous to approach. During a violent storm on 7 December 1809 seven vessels were swept ashore at Sandy Island, including a Swedish galliot from Gothenburg and a vessel laden with sugar from England. In addition, a large sloop carrying goods from the West Indies sank in the harbour. The winds were so fierce the following night that several vessels were driven off the dangerously confined waters of the roadstead and perished in the Bight. Just how quickly a ferocious storm could engulf the waters around the island was described to readers of The Times on 15 June 1811. After a morning of remarkably fine weather, some dark and gloomy clouds were perceived about 4pm to arise on the horizon from the south, and by about 4.30pm the gloom was so great as ‘almost to equal nocturnal darkness’, claimed the writer.

  All of a sudden a white foam was perceived on the surface of the sea, drifting along with astonishing rapidity, and on its approach it blew such a hurricane of wind as has scarcely been witnessed by the oldest inhabitant on this island. In a moment every light article on the ground was carried into the air; for about half an hour the sea appeared one mass of foam, when a tremendous storm of thunder and lightning ensued, followed by a heavy pouring of rain. This calmed the wind, but we much fear that any vessel that came within the sweep of this violent whirlwind must have suffered greatly.28

  During the autumn of 1810 alarming intelligence reached Hamilton. On Napoleon’s orders a formidable Franco-Dutch expeditionary invasion force of twelve gun-brigs and twenty-four gunboats was being prepared in the rivers Ems and Jade, where special navigation marks had been placed in the shallow waters to enable ships to be moved at night. The invasion squadron put to sea on 20 November 1810.29 As soon as he received intelligence that they were on the move, Lord Stuart went in search of them, his ship L’Aimable being accompanied by a schooner, six gun-brigs, and two gun-boats. The next day he got sight of the enemy, but as he closed in on them they fled. Three of the invading gun-brigs were driven ashore at the Jade estuary, while the rest scurried upriver to Varel (near the port later known as Wilhelmshaven). Stuart was left to prowl around at the mouth of the Jade, watching for the enemy. It was a celebrated defence and it won Stuart much applause in newspapers in England.

  The 1810 invasion attempt had been ordered by Napoleon, who was becoming increasingly exasperated by Heligoland’s effectiveness in breaching the ‘continental system’. With a view to clamping down on the flourishing trade in contraband, in December 1810 Napoleon formally annexed from Prussia the north-west of Germany, including the mouths of the rivers Jade, Weser and Elbe. Insofar as the island came to be known of in Britain, it was as an entrepot for smuggling goods, in defiance of the French blockade, to and from Europe. In fact this trade did not commence until many weeks after Britain had seized the islands, and began by means of a certificate granted on 7 November 1807 by Governor D’Auvergne to a few London merchants to export British manufactured goods via Heligoland to Rostock.

  Originally it was the far-sighted Edward Thornton, in his memo of 30 August 1807, who first advised that the island could be used for commercial as well as military purposes. By early 1808 the trickle had swelled into a powerful flood. Attracted by the island’s proximity to the coastline of mainland Europe, nearly two hundred British agents and merchants had converged on it. With them they brought such immense quantities of goods that Heligoland seemed to be filled to overflowing. Scarcely a place could be obtained for storage, so great was the demand, and virtually any price the Heligolanders chose to ask was readily paid by the merchants. One entrepreneurial islander bought the hulk of the Explosion in a public auction on Sandy Island, and wondered if that too could not be utilised for storage.30

  Never in all its history had Heligoland known so much prosperity; to its inhabitants, it seemed as if all their Christmases had come at once. The whole island hummed with activity. The first inkling D’Auvergne had that a ‘gold rush’ was looming came in December when he was approached by merchants seeking permission to build a brewery on the island.31 Mariners’ requirements for sustenance were such that by this time the island had only one church but thirteen inns! Sometimes there seemed to be dozens of merchant vessels of all shapes and sizes jostling for decent anchorages in the harbour. Not only were the Heligolanders now enjoying high rents for warehousing and for providing personnel with accommodation, the island itself was receiving a few useful infrastructural facilities.

  In 1808 the British government spent £500,000 on improving the anchorage and erecting warehouses. By means of small coastal craft enormous quantities of British goods were systematically smuggled into the ports of Holstein. Great ingenuity was used in getting colonial produce into the Elbe. The Hamburgers arranged for bogus funerals in a riverside suburb – until inquisitive officials discovered that on the return journey the hearses were packed with coffee and sugar. Much trade also flowed westwards through the island, and in 1810 vast amounts of German corn reached England through Heligoland. Such was Britain’s preeminence at sea that, despite all Napoleon’s scheming, the ‘continental system’ eventually broke down. It had been a foolish economic weapon. By attempting to reinforce the French economy at the expense of other European states it prompted enormous antagonism. Indeed, the disastrous Russian war of 1812 was a direct outcome of the Russians’ refusal to endure Napoleon’s decrees any longer.32

  With the Napoleonic wars drawing to a close, the British government turned its attention to the question of what to do with the colonies it had acquired during the years of conflict. Now Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh showed great moderation in the peace negotiations with France, appreciating the folly of compelling the vanquished to accept crushing terms. Criticised in the House of Commons for this apparent leniency, he replied that the object of a peace treaty was peace and that if France were deprived of all her colonies and her natural resources she would certainly seek revenge. Offshore of Europe he secured what he thought Britain needed: Malta and the Ionian Islands. These, he hoped, would be enough to safeguard British naval power east of Gibraltar and in the Mediterranean, and control the sea route to India.33

  Once again, Heligoland’s fate in British hands was to be greatly influenced by Sir Edward Thornton. During the latter years of the war he had carefully begun to form a union of the northern powers against Napoleon. In the process, in October 1811 he journeyed to Sweden on a special mission in HMS Victory, to attempt to negotiate treaties of alliance with both Sweden and Russia. Thornton, like Castlereagh, believed that for strategic reasons Heligoland should be retained, and in 1813 it was he who was entrusted by Castlereagh to negotiate the te
rms with Sweden and Denmark by which Norway was ceded to Sweden and Heligoland ceded to Great Britain. He made sure that Anholt was returned to Denmark, as was St Thomas, a Danish possession in the Caribbean which Britain had seized in 1807. In his crucial memo to the Foreign Office that year Thornton had urged that the gains of the inhabitants, either from their fisheries or their pilotage, should be given up to them without tax. He made certain that this and several similarly benevolent measures were incorporated into the Treaty of Kiel, signed by Britain, Sweden and Denmark in January 1814, by which Heligoland was ceded to the British Crown. The island looked set to begin a new life as a peacetime British colony.

  2

  Gibraltar of the North Sea

  The crew of HMS Explosion must have wondered if they had been shipwrecked on the shores of a mysterious lost world, inhabited by distant relatives. The islanders who suddenly converged on the stricken bomb-ketch in a shoal of wooden boats seemed harmless enough. As they threw rescue lines aboard and helped to evacuate the ship, the crew of Explosion saw them clearly for the first time. In appearance the Heligolanders were almost Rubensesque: hearty and good-natured, beaked-nosed, with healthy tanned faces, burnished by an outdoor life. They looked rather Frisian, although also slightly Danish.

  In 1666 Samuel Pepys, then Secretary to the British Admiralty, referred to that northern wind-blown maritime province of the Netherlands as ‘Freezeland’. And thus it remained – a place about which the British knew, or cared, very little. Culturally the outer reaches of Friesland’s influence were the Frisian Islands, which extended along the coast of the Netherlands from Texel, and off the Lower Saxony coast around the Elbe. The Frisian peoples were predominantly seafarers, and their native language was reputed to be dialectically the closest European language to English. Indeed, the similarities between English and Frisian were so extensive that Willibrod had found no difficulty in conversing with the islanders centuries before; nor, superficially at least, did the crew of the Explosion.

  And yet, despite their close links with the Frisians, the islanders always perceived themselves as Heligolanders, not Frisians. There was some justification for this, because Heligoland had rarely been constitutionally associated with any of the Frisian Islands. They even had their own dialect, Heligolandish, which they instinctively used when chatting among themselves. To those not of their island, even to Frisian people who spoke a similar language, Heligolandish was virtually incomprehensible. In the absence of a dictionary of Heligolandish (indeed, one was only compiled in 1954), early on in his governorship Colonel William Hamilton had to persuade the Colonial Office to supply him with a translator.1

  By 1811 the British had completed a census of Heligoland. This revealed that the civic population consisted of 2,061 persons living in 461 dwellings, and that 390 of them were pilots and fishermen, operating 100 boats and 9 schooners.2 Flesh was put on to the bare bones of those statistics by the distribution within official circles of a description of Heligoland. Even that found the islanders something of a puzzle. They were good people: quiet, strong, honest, courteous, friendly and law-abiding. And yet, though welcoming, they were also beguilingly inscrutable and obscurely impassive. They kept their thoughts to themselves. A stoical bunch, their distinctive character had been carved by the sea, like the geography of their homeland. Their island’s defiant ability to withstand the worst that the elements could throw at it made them perceive it as having magical qualities. Their pride in the island extended to their homes, which were all kept scrupulously clean. They regarded their island as the centre of the only world that mattered, and even the most skilled Heligolandish sailors seldom ventured into seas beyond the Bight. So content were they with their tiny island homeland that they regarded it – perhaps rather absurdly – as being a nation itself. Such pride derived substantially from the island’s exceptional geographical qualities. This they celebrated in their own popular rhyme, which translates as: ‘Green is the land, red is the rock, white is the sand; these are the colours of Heligoland.’

  In the archive of dusty official papers surrendered by the island’s former Danish administration, Governor D’Auvergne was delighted to discover seventy protocols and documents. In the absence of any sort of written constitutional history of Heligoland, these were the clues he needed to learn the arrangement of the previous structure of government. The island’s affairs were run by six Magistrates, who in turn nominated seven Quartermasters. As well as commanding pilot boats and other craft engaged in public service, their duties included keeping clean the streets in their ‘Quarters’. The Magistrates also nominated sixteen Aldermen, who acted for the Quartermasters in their absence. Together the Magistrates, Quartermasters and Aldermen formed the membership of the island’s parliament, the Vorsteherschaft, which assembled so rarely that it did not even have a meeting-house.3

  The Heligolanders evidently did not realise, or did not mind, that such a system discouraged individualism, and thereby inhibited the growth of indigenous leaders who could effectively speak on their island’s behalf. In any event, at the time of the Treaty of Kiel, Sir Edward Thornton made sure the island’s Danish style of constitutional system would continue virtually unchanged under British rule. Initially that suited Britain too, as her new colony had a well-established constitutional system. Although quite sophisticated, it was not greatly dissimilar to those in most of Britain’s other colonial possessions, most of which had a governor, a council and an assembly; so, from 1814, Heligoland joined the ranks of Britain’s smallest colonies – remote places such as St Helena and the Falkland Islands. Like them, it received a minuscule annual grant to cover the cost of employing a handful of British people to assist with the territory’s administration. The Colonial Office was so rigorously parsimonious that for many years the civil staff expenditure remained fixed, with scarcely any permitted alteration. In 1848 the total cost of the civil establishment’s salaries on Heligoland, as paid for by the Colonial Office, was just £1,022 – an amount scarcely changed from 1836 when it was just £963.

  Governor £500

  Governor Clerk to Governor £136

  Two Clergymen @ £50 £100

  Two Magistrates @ £30 £60

  Town Clerk £60

  Signalman £60 10s

  Navigation bosun £33 6s 8d

  Mail Carrier £69 6s 8d

  Keeper of the Blockhouse £3

  Total £1,022 3s 4d

  Unwittingly, Governor D’Auvergne’s generosity in facilitating the distribution of the forty bags of bread in 1807 had defined the dynamics of the crucial conflicting attitudes regarding Heligoland. On the one hand there were the islanders who, though independently minded, were instinctively well disposed, and indeed even affectionate, towards Britain; and on the other there was mean-spirited officialdom in London which was inclined to be predominantly concerned with the cold realities of Britain’s wider interests. Caught between the two were the governors, and it was they who played a vital role in reconciling those sometimes conflicting forces. Moreover it was the humane means by which they did so that cumulatively improved the situation. The islanders quickly realised that in January 1814 when, the war having ended, all the contraband merchants departed, bringing to an abrupt end a buccaneering business activity which had seen some £8 millionworth of goods transferred through Heligoland in each year of the ‘continental system’. Almost immediately, the islanders were left with virtually no employment. Even for the better-off that winter, Christmas dinner consisted of a plate of seagull and cabbage. They were further reduced to a deplorable state by the weather, as the island was encircled by great shoals of ice. In the absence of much Colonial Office support, on his own initiative Governor Hamilton launched an appeal for financial subscriptions to assist the islanders.4

  Subsequent governors did what they could to present the Heligolanders in a favourable light. Hamilton’s successor, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Henry King (governor 1815–40), did so for twenty-five years. The sympathies of the next governo
r, Admiral Sir John Hindmarsh (1840–57), were with the poorest of the working class. He was followed in office by Major Richard Pattinson (1857–63), who invariably took the side of Heligoland’s pilots in maritime disputes, especially when they were unfairly accused by shipowners of hazarding vessels in the Elbe.

  For decades the colony had been unusual in the British Empire insofar as it made remarkably few complaints against the Colonial Office.5 But all that began to change in 1864 when Whitehall began planning to reduce the island’s heavy £7,000 national debt burden – which had been growing alarmingly since the Napoleonic wars – by means of a tax on gambling. Local politicians, perceiving the imposition of such a betting levy to be an infringement of their ‘Ancient Rights’ of no taxation, refused to co-operate. In March 1865 a deputation proceeded to London to voice their opposition. Their protests were endorsed by the island’s newest governor, Major-General Sir Henry Maxse (1863–81), an energetic and fearless former soldier who had witnessed the Charge of the Light Brigade and distinguished himself in the Crimean War. In the dispute he took the side of the islanders. At his request, in June 1867 the Colonial Secretary, the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, arrived on the island on the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, becoming the first British minister ever to set foot there. What he heard and saw caused him to decide that a simpler form of government should be established on Heligoland, and accordingly that was done by an Order in Council in February 1868. For taking a humane stand on their behalf Maxse became something of a hero to the islanders – so much so that they named a street after him. It is still there.

  Regardless of the differences some of the island’s elders had with London, the inhabitants were mostly well satisfied with the post-1868 state of things, although naturally there was always likely to be a slight general hankering for the good old times of wrecking, gambling and no taxation. Britain continued to make no attempt to stifle local identity. Indeed, it affably accepted, and indeed encouraged, such distinctiveness. Its benignly disinterested stance towards the territory meant the islanders felt they were enjoying the best of both worlds. On the one hand their relatively strong sense of independence was respected, while on the other, their status as a British colony – unlike all the other Frisian Islands and neighbouring North Sea coastal ports – meant they were uniquely associated with the world’s greatest maritime power. Queen Victoria’s head appeared in the corner of all their distinctive green, red and white stamps. London had no objection to the Heligolanders evolving a flag of their own, depicting the island’s native colours of green, red and white, and formally approved of that tricolour having the British Union Jack motif in one corner. That flag became one of the Heligolanders’ most prized possessions. It tangibly linked their little island with Britain’s immense naval power, and they scarcely missed an opportunity to fly it proudly – if rather provocatively – from the ensign staffs of their fishing-boats when visiting neighbouring ports.