Conflict and control

Issues of order in Britain’s most distant colonies

Recognising the rights of islanders while giving ‘an impression of power’ was a judicial balancing act

Writer and historian Dr Ian Hoskins was recently awarded the 2023 Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize, jointly sponsored by the museum and the Australian Association for Maritime History, for his book Australia and the Pacific: a history. The following extract, from Chapter 8, discusses some of Britain’s efforts to control its far-flung interests and colonies.

HMS ROSARIO WAS A ‘SCREW SLOOP’, an example of the transition from the age of wood and wind in which Europe discovered the Pacific to that of iron, steam and coal when it started to possess it. Built on the Thames in 1860, the Rosario was an all-timber vessel – one of the last of its kind in this regard – and was powered both by the breeze that filled its many sails and steam which drove its single propeller. It took its name by descent from a Spanish galleon captured by the English in 1588, a small lesson in the history of Britain’s imperial ascent. When it commenced its eventful Pacific cruise in October 1871, HMS Rosario was one of seven vessels of the Australia Station located at Garden Island in Sydney Harbour. From 1859 the Station shared the Pacific with the Royal Navy base at Valparaiso. Governor King had recommended, unsuccessfully, the permanent posting of two sloops as early as 1805. Then the disruptive activities of Europeans around Tahiti, Americans particularly, were the concern. By the middle of the century colonists were most worried about the threat of Russian attack from the north Pacific port of Kamchatka.

The Admiralty’s instructions given to Captain Fremantle stationed in Sydney in 1854 outline the role of security, power projection and maintenance of order in a region inhabited by many and varied British subjects:

You are to protect British interests in the colonies of New South Wales, New Zealand and the Islands adjacent and also to visit or detach a ship to visit the Feejee, Navigators and Friendly Islands, and it will be your object to give to the natives an impression of the power and of the friendly disposition of the British nation and whilst giving due weight to the representatives of the British consuls and missionaries and to strengthen their hands for good, you will repress any tendency to undue interference or encroachments on the rights of the chiefs and natives.1

Recognising the rights of islanders while giving ‘an impression of power’ was the judicial balancing act that would confront the likes of Commander Markham and Commodore Goodenough [who, in the 1870s, commanded the permanent Royal Navy flotilla at the Australia Station established in 1859]. The

By the 1870s British subjects, colonials included, were to be found throughout the Pacific islands living as traders, planters or ‘beach combers’

A wedding party within the South Sea Island community near Mackay, QLD, around 1895. They are wearing European attire for what was almost certainly a Christian ceremony. Despite adapting to their changed circumstances, thousands of those brought to Australia to work on sugar plantations were deported to their respective islands with the emphasis on protecting ‘White Australia’ after Federation in 1901. Image State Library of Queensland

Sydney-based squadron was substantially strengthened for patrol work after the 1872 Act [Pacific Islander Protection Act] with the construction of five schooners in 1873. They were slipped just three coves away from Garden Island in John Cuthbert’s Darling Harbour shipyard, and so were ready for immediate service without the delay of sailing time from Britain. By the end of the year the Australia Station was ten vessels strong, half of them new. HMS Sandfly was one of the Harbourbuilt schooners. The Station flagship was the 21-gun screw corvette HMS Pearl

The labour trade, and the problems it generated for the officers of the Australia Station, involved much more than Queensland’s sugar industry. By the 1870s British subjects, colonials included, were to be found throughout the Pacific islands living as traders, planters or ‘beach combers’ – those runaways and deserters who, in the words of one observer, had taken ‘leave for ever of their own race, and cast their lot in with the natives’. 2 Well over 1,000 British subjects were living in Fiji alone by 1870. Despite being represented by a consul who dealt with Cakobau, declared King of Fiji in 1867, their security was precarious not least because of exploitative labour practices.

Britain’s empire was expanding. The extension of Crown rule over India in 1858 alone added more than 300 million people and a land mass half the size of the Australian continent to that global balance. However, that spread was not always sought or welcomed by politicians and administrators at the imperial centre. The reluctance of the Colonial Office to assume control over the Pacific Islands after the annexation of New Zealand in 1840 remains a powerful corrective to simplistic characterisations of ever-eager imperialists. The British who had settled in the Fijian islands were a particular problem. When, in 1859, the ascendant Fijian chief Cakobau had offered to cede his territory to the British Government if they would pay his debt to an American trader, the British declined. They were cautiously cognisant of Cakobau’s questionable authority. Instead, the Melbourne-based Polynesia Company took on the outstanding amount in exchange for 200,000 acres of land in 1868. The combined request from the Australian colonies that Britain declare a protectorate in Fiji to quell the disorder there in 1870 was refused and countered with the suggestion from the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Kimberley, that New South Wales assume responsibility for the islands.

The colony declined that offer, much as it would the pass on the opportunity of controlling Norfolk Island in 1888. Cost and bother were ever-present entries in the tallysheet of imperial expansion.

But so too were security, order, national honour and morality. All these motivations moved the British MP William McArthur, Wesleyan and member of the Aborigines Protection Society, to form the Fiji Committee and press for annexation. His pressure resulted in the newly-appointed Commodore Goodenough being sent to Fiji from Sydney to report first hand on the situation in 1873. With the British consul there he recommended taking possession as the only solution to balancing the need for order with the interests of the white community, Fijians and indentured workers. Britain had a responsibility as an imperial power and the original home, direct and indirect, of most of those who had caused the problems:

‘I cannot but look upon annexation as a positive duty’, he wrote in April 1874. 3 Back in London there was popular agreement. The Spectator was typically droll: Some two thousand or so of our countrymen, blundering after their manner about the world in search of some profitable work to do, have settled upon a group of islands in the South Pacific … We may not be bound, as Lord Kimberley says, to follow British subjects everywhere, and compel them to behave decently, but we certainly have the right to do it when the general interests of mankind require each action; and when the Britons demand protection, and especially armed protection, the right becomes a duty.4

Fiji became a British colony on 10th October 1874, after Commodore Goodenough had conveyed the New South Wales Governor, Hercules Robinson, on HMS Pearl to finally accept the offer of cessation from King Cakobau on behalf of the British Government. Robinson thereby became the first Governor of Fiji, a position he held concurrently with his gubernatorial duties in New South Wales. Such were the ties that linked the Pacific colonies of a reluctant imperialist.

1 Quoted in John Bach, ‘The Royal Navy in the Pacific Islands’, Journal of Pacific History, Vol 3, 1969, p 8.

2 Hugh Hastings Romilly, The Western Pacific and New Guinea, John Murray, London, 1887, p 192.

3 Journal of Commodore Goodenough, RN, CB, CMG, During his Last Command as Senior Officer on the Australian Station, 1873–1875, Edited with a Memoir by his Widow, Henry S King and Co, London, 1876, p 117.

4 Spectator, 25 July 1874, p 7.