Heligoland (4 page)

In the letter authorising the seizure of Heligoland the Admiralty also informed Russell that, to assist him with the capture, they had already ordered to set sail from Yarmouth the troopship
Wanderer
, carrying 100 marines, and the bomb-vessels
Explosion
and
Exertion
. On 3 September 1807, by which time Russell was under way on the 160-nautical mile voyage from Texel to Heligoland, he sent a despatch to the Admiralty, reporting that he had just ‘given chase to five vessels to windward, to make out whether they may not be the bomb-vessels and their escorts, only to steer away for Heligoland, on the presumption they are destined for the capture of the island’.
¹³
So the
Majestic
confidently pressed on, Russell remaining as yet unperturbed by the non-appearance of the reinforcements. He had, after all, the copy of Thornton’s letter in his pocket claiming that Heligoland’s garrison consisted of only some twenty-five troops.

At 2.30pm on 4 September HMS
Majestic
arrived off Heligoland and anchored between Sandy Island and Rock Island, menacingly close to the Lower Town. The
Quebec
lurked nearby with the brigs, all ready for action. What Russell had no means of knowing at that moment was that the Heligolanders were mightily displeased with their current lot. Even before the exclusion zone policed by Viscount Falkland had been imposed their supplies had been running low. For some weeks Napoleon’s ‘continental system’ and the resulting French pressure on Denmark had meant the islanders had been greatly impeded in their traditional occupations of fishing and piloting and so had been unable to make much of a living. Winter was approaching and they were, in effect, in the early stages of starvation. Initially, when the
Quebec
had arrived offshore a few days earlier, the island’s Danish Commandant, Major Von Zeske, had been determined to hold Heligoland for his country as long as he was able. But his resolve was now waning fast, influenced by the Heligolanders’ apparent reluctance to see their homes demolished before a surrender that appeared to be inevitable. Realising that his position was hopeless, at 6pm Major Zeske accepted a flag of truce and consented to a meeting with British officers the next morning.

The bomb-vessels and the troopship had still not arrived as Russell made ready to storm the island. He ordered a makeshift party of marines and seamen to be hastily assembled from the existing squadron. He was already anxious about the weather conditions and also became concerned that Major Zeske might be tempted to procrastinate, with the natural hope that so large a warship could not long continue to anchor so close to the town. His sense of urgency was clear in his letter demanding the island’s surrender, which his representatives handed to Major Zeske at dawn on 5 September 1807. Hoping that the aristocratic status of his negotiators might itself have some effect on Zeske’s position, Russell stated that the letter was ‘being delivered to your Excellency by Captain the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Falkland, assisted by my First Lieutenant, Corbet D’Auvergne (brother to His Serene Highness Rear Admiral the Duke of Bouillon)’. Expressing an evidently sincere concern to spare the islanders from bloodshed, he implored Zeske to ‘suffer me for the sake of Humanity to express a hope that your Excellency will not sacrifice the Blood and property of your inhabitants by a vain resistance, but that you will, by an immediate surrender, avert the horrors of being stormed’.
¹⁴

Mindful of Thornton’s memo to Canning urging that the island’s ‘Internal government should be continued without any alteration’, Falkland and D’Auvergne agreed with Zeske that all such rights and customs would be safeguarded and respected. Unusually, there was an ongoing tradition that the islanders were not obliged to serve on board Danish naval ships, a privilege which should henceforth mean they would be exempt from service with the Royal Navy. The British representatives were in no mood to make any other allowances with regard to the military surrender: the garrison must lay down their arms, surrender themselves as prisoners-of-war and without their weapons leave forthwith on their
parole d’honneur
not to serve against Britain during the war. Zeske attempted to secure an undertaking that after the conflict the island would be returned to Denmark but this the naval officers refused to accept. At 2pm on the afternoon of 5 September the delegation returned to the
Majestic
with Zeske’s signature on the Articles of Capitulation, which Admiral Russell briskly ratified.

British possession of the island began immediately with the arrival of a 50-strong landing party led by Corbet D’Auvergne. Even so, the commencement of British rule could scarcely have been more makeshift. To keep a record of events in the new colony he was furbished by the
Majestic
’s purser with an unused muster book – traditionally used to record the ship’s company’s wages and attendance data; D’Auvergne duly took a quill pen and neatly altered the words ‘His Majesty’s Ship’ to ‘His Majesty’s Island of Heligoland’. He began by recording that, such was the high regard for Russell among the captains of the squadron, they had – without the Admiral’s consent – named the highest part of the new possession ‘Mount Russell’. The cliff-top that guarded it was now ‘Artillery Park’ and ‘D’Auvergne Battery’, below which was the inhabited part, now called ‘Falkland Town’.

The capture of Heligoland had been a peripheral but psychologically significant naval triumph, and news of it came as a welcome change at a time when virtually all the gains elsewhere in Europe were being made by Napoleon. Seizing this opportunity to raise the British public’s morale, the Admiralty circulated to the Press extracts of reports written by Sir Thomas Russell himself. Within a fortnight of the territorial acquisition these were prominently published in the
London Gazette
and even the
Gentleman’s Magazine
. By such means the public learnt of the admiral’s dash from Texel, the Danish representative’s surrender of the island, and Russell’s appointment of D’Auvergne as Acting Governor, because ‘his perfect knowledge of both services, zeal and loyalty and a high sense of honour made him the most competent officer for the role’. The extracts concluded with the news that, on the morning of 6 September, at the very moment the British occupation was starting, the reinforcements arrived: ‘the
Explosion
,
Wanderer
and
Exertion
hove in sight round the North End of the Island’.

But it might well have been a different story. By the time these extracts were on sale in the streets of London, Zeske and all the prisoners-of-war had been removed from the island, and shipped to mainland Europe for release. What was never revealed was the fact that the garrison’s strength was not ‘twenty-five Danish soldiers’, as Thornton had predicted, but 206 – more than eight times that!
¹⁵
In fact, Colonel Sontag’s assessment of the need to bombard the island had fairly accurately predicted such a figure. Fortunately, Sontag’s report only reached Russell when HMS
Explosion
and the other reinforcements arrived, by which time the garrison had surrendered. Significantly absent from any of the officially sanctioned extracts published was any mention of the islanders themselves.

The Admiralty most carefully hushed up the real details of the reinforcements’ arrival. Russell had correctly reported in his letter of 6 September that ‘the
Explosion
,
Wanderer
and
Exertion
hove in sight round the North End of the Island’ – but his despatch did not conclude there. The sentence continued with the astonishing words: ‘when the two former almost instantly struck and hung on the Long Reef’. What happened next was recorded in Lieutenant D’Auvergne’s muster book. The good-natured islanders rushed to their boats to try to save the ships, even though they had been sent from Britain to threaten them with death.
Wanderer
was floated off, but the bomb-vessel
Explosion
had been too severely damaged below the waterline.
¹⁶
Two days later, in fresh breezes and squalls, she broke free from the reef and drifted across the narrow anchorage to Sandy Island where she finally ran aground, a listing wreck.

The spontaneity with which the islanders had rushed to help, and the immediate rapport between them and the British seafarers, fostered excellent relations between the two sides. Indeed, the islanders welcomed the British almost as if they were long-lost relatives. (In a sense, of course, they were, as both the British and the Heligolanders were, to a greater or lesser extent, distant descendants of the Frisians.) This goodwill greatly helped D’Auvergne in his hurried efforts to strengthen Heligoland’s defences, lest the French should attack the island or Denmark attempt to recapture it. Under his directions the islanders themselves assisted in improving the ramparts of the cliff-top battery, which was to be the primary defensive position. The inventory of the captured Danish armaments provided grim reading. Of the dozens of abandoned cannon, virtually all were too rusty or poorly maintained to be functional.

Instead D’Auvergne turned his attention to the wreck of the bomb-vessel. With the islanders willingly providing most of the manpower, he set about salvaging all that might prove useful. First the
Explosion
’s fearsome 13-inch heavy mortars were brought ashore, as were her 68-pound cannon. Hauled aloft via the public oak staircase to Artillery Park they were duly installed at D’Auvergne Battery. Then, with great ingenuity, the islanders extracted the wreck’s towering top foremast and floated it over to Falkland Town; here, they hauled it up to the windswept plateau atop the 200ft-high red cliffs and raised it as an improvised signal staff, complete with yardarm. Ironically, at noon on 22 September 1807, it was there that the British flag was raised in commemoration of the coronation of King George III, with the Heligolanders loyally in attendance as the guns fired a twenty-one gun royal salute.
¹⁷

Evidently an inspired choice for the role of governor, D’Auvergne was quickly winning the approval of all the islanders. By his conspicuous zeal, excellent judgement and suavity of manner, he managed, to a considerable degree, to reconcile the inhabitants to the changes which they were experiencing.
¹⁸
One obscure incident helped to win him their affection. A few days after the surrender of Heligoland he was informed, on the authority of the magistrates, that there were forty families who had nothing to eat, not even bread, and no means of affording relief. D’Auvergne ordered the purser of the
Majestic
to deliver forty bags of bread to the island and directed him to see it impartially issued to the most needy families. On 16 September he wrote to Russell that virtually all the islanders were ‘destitute of almost every species of provisions except fish’, and to get them through the approaching winter he requested a shipment of 110 tons of rye, potatoes, flour and beef from England.
¹⁹
Aware that all supplies from Denmark had been cut off, Russell readily agreed to the request (and remarked that in view of the
Explosion
’s demise he would take a pilot from the island with him to ensure the supplies arrived safely).

D’Auvergne’s kindness towards the islanders was in many other respects supported, indeed encouraged, by Russell. On appointing him Acting Governor on 5 September the admiral’s written instructions had emphasised the need to treat the islanders with respect: ‘You are to see that the inhabitants are treated with the greatest kindness; to conciliate their affections; and secure their attachment to our Government; as I hope it will never be given up.’
²⁰
Two days later Russell wrote to the Governor, movingly expressing his heartfelt good wishes to the Heligolanders:

The content of that moving letter was never made public by the Foreign Office, nor was the grateful letter of thanks sent a few weeks later to Governor D’Auvergne, and signed by every member of the Heligoland government:
²¹

Perhaps, then, it was not surprising that the British public also never got to hear the story of the forty bags of bread, or its postscript: that Russell had to personally intervene with the Admiralty to stop the parsimonious Victualling Board from debiting the
Majestic
for those bags of bread for the starving.
²²
Even the two-page Articles of Capitulation were kept secret, as was the admiral’s declared hope that the island ‘will never be given up’. There were other official clampdowns on the release of news. The loss of the
Explosion
and the consequent court-martial that September of its commander, Captain Elliot, were never brought to light. Nor was the trial of Viscount Falkland for an unrelated matter, although the disgrace resulted in altered place-names on Heligoland. Within a fortnight of the island’s capture Russell personally made sure that all the names of British officers, including his own, were deleted from the map.
²³