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| Detail from 'The Death of Nelson', painting by Samuel Drummond |
This is a brief account of a free Black sailor named Brown (a made-up name so he could not be traced), who was born in 1776, the year in which the United States declared independence from Great Britain.
His childhood was mostly on the Caribbean Island of Grenada. When he finished
school at age 10 or 11, he got a job in a shipyard, building inter-island
schooners, but at age 14 he decided he wanted to learn to sail such vessels,
so he joined the crew of a schooner. By age 18, he was promoted to commanding a
schooner, and two years later he was even a part owner of one.
At 20 (1796), he left home in a
hurry to avoid a family problem, and enlisted in the British Navy, where he was
placed on the 74-gun battleship Orion. Normally, an enlisted man in those days
was not allowed to talk to the captain, but Brown knew various important
Caribbean facts of which British officers were clueless, so he talked to a
junior officer, who passed the information to the captain.
The first such event was about ship
construction. All European and North American naval ships were constructed of
oak, which typically lasts only 15 years before rotting. The Spanish, however,
built their ships out of long-lasting Cuban mahogany (now an extinct species).
Cuban ships could be expected to last up to 120-150 years(!), but Brown knew
that the down-side was that this wood was highly flammable. When Brown’s fleet
was attacked on 14 February 1797 at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent
off the coast of Spain by a Spanish fleet of twice the gun-power of the British
fleet, Brown passed this information to Captain James Saumarez, who passed it
along to Admiral Jervis. The admiral ordered his ships to fire extra wadding in
their cannons at close range, with the result that almost half the Spanish
ships left the battle heading for home at maximum speed, with smoke pouring
out. The British won that battle, and the admiral became the Earl St.Vincent. Thank you, seaman Brown.
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| John Jervis Earl St.Vincent |
On 12 July 1801, Captain Saumarez himself had
been promoted to admiral in charge of the tiny fleet of four or five British
ships guarding Gibraltar. A much larger joint French-Spanish fleet arrived with the
intention of capturing Gibraltar, which had been British since 1704. Two of the
Spanish ships were 112-gun giants that had been built in Havana, so Saumarez
remembered Brown’s advice and ordered his ships to fire extra wadding into
those two Spanish giants at close range. The two ships were soon blazing
fiercely and suffered enormous explosions when the flames reached the magazines.
Over 3000 Spaniards died. The joint fleet sailed away as fast as they could,
and Gibraltar remained British at the Battle of Algeciras. Thank you, seaman
Brown.
In 1800, Napoleon conquered Italy. Why did
anyone care? Gunpowder in those days was one-third sulfur, and Italy contained
the three volcanoes (Etna, Vesuvius, and Stromboli) that supplied all the
sulfur used by all European countries and the United States for gunpowder.
Napoleon confidently thought that the British would quickly ask for peace,
because they could not fight without gunpowder, but Napoleon had reckoned
without Brown. Brown told his captain that two British islands close to Grenada
(St Vincent and St Lucia) contained stinky walk-in volcanoes with all the
sulfur the British needed. Thank you, seaman Brown.
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| the Emperor Napoleon |
In 1804, the British learned that the French
intended to capture all the British islands in the Caribbean, using their naval
base at Fort-de-France in Martinique. The British were at that moment powerless
to stop the French. Brown spoke to his captain. He told him that 600-foot-tall
Diamond Rock stands with almost vertical sides near the southwest corner of
Martinique. Brown had climbed that rock while a teenager. He said it was
possible to land sailors on the rock and have them haul up heavy cannons (18-pounder
cannons each weighed 4700 lbs or 2140 kg). A sea-level cannon has a range of 3
miles, but a cannon at 600 feet high has a range of 10-12 miles. When those
cannons were fired, they were able to prevent French warships from
entering or leaving their base in Martinique. The Navy authorized the
operation, and sent Brown seconded temporarily aboard the 74-gun Centaur
to advise, and they even commissioned the rock as a ship in the British Navy! The
capture of Diamond Rock: 7 January 1804. The French never made any
headway in capturing British islands. Thank you, seaman Brown.
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| A cannon is hauled up to the summit of the rock suspended by a cable lashed to the base of Centaur's mainmast. (Wikipedia) |
.jpg) | ||
| Taking of the Diamond Rock, Near Martinique, 2 June 1805 | Auguste Étienne François Mayer, 1837 |
Brown was serving aboard Orion on 21
October 1805, and took part in the glorious Battle of Trafalgar,
at which Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson was tragically killed by a sharpshooter’s
bullet. The Royal Navy’s fleet badly defeated the combined fleets of the French
and the Spanish off the coast of Spain, and thus persuaded the French to
abandon any hope of defeating Britain at sea. The Royal Navy expected its crews
to perform like a well-oiled machine, so there is no reason to single out Brown
for anything he may have done in the battle. He had done his work over
many years of seemingly tedious, endless drills that he had led from his
position on the foretop. Orion then faced several years of patrolling the west
coast of France close enough to persuade French ships not to set sail. After a
while, the admiral authorized the crew of Orion to land French-speaking
crewmembers on the French coast at night and sabotage shore installations.
.JPG) |
| Model of HMS Orion |
After these important achievements, Brown was promoted to senior enlisted man in the entire Navy – not bad for a Black man from a remote island! When Orion had to be scrapped after several years of punching into the giant waves of the Bay of Biscay, where Orion’s job was to watch all the French ports to make sure that no French fleets sailed out from them, Brown and his entire crew were transferred to a new 104-gun ship, Queen Charlotte, the biggest ship in the Navy in 1813. When Brown had been in the Navy for nineteen years, the Napoleonic War came to an end in 1815. As the war ended, Brown was not keeping his guard up as well as usual. An officer came aft to talk to Captain Jackson:
‘Sir, I have some very bad news to report about Brown. This enlisted man with such an exemplary record has now turned out (after 19 years of service) to be a woman in disguise!’ The captain thought about it for a moment, and then replied, ‘Brown is the finest Captain-of-the-Foretop with whom I have ever had the privilege of serving. As you were!’
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| Queen Charlotte - Detail of Robert Salmon's The British Fleet Forming a Line off Algiers |
Queen Charlotte had to be demobilized
immediately (the Navy had no interest in continuing to pay up to 1000 sailors
when there was no longer any war). The London newspapers grabbed the story that
the top enlisted man in the whole Navy was not only Black but also a woman. A
copy of the story got back to Grenada. The reason Brown had left Grenada in
such a hurry was that his father had said, ‘I am sick and tired of you
masquerading as a man. You are a woman, and today you are marrying this man who
has just paid me for you.’ After one rocky night with this strange man, Brown
saw that her “husband” had passed out from drinking too much rum, and that’s
when he/she left Grenada. The “husband” knew that by law all a wife’s
possessions belonged to her husband in those days, so he brought suit through his
London lawyer for all Brown’s pay and prize money.
Brown asked his/her former captain, ‘Now, what do I do?’
Captain Jackson then asked, ‘Did you ever sign any paper to prove you
were married?' When Brown said no, the captain volunteered to talk to the judge,
and the judge gladly threw the case out of court.
While the various European navies were involved in beating each other up during the Napoleonic Wars, few people noticed that North African pirates from Algiers were busy gobbling up British, European, and American merchant ships that entered the Mediterranean. The thousands of officers and crews were sold all over North Africa as valuable Christian slaves (who could tell their Muslim masters that the tasty pig-meat they were eating was actually goat, and so the sin was on the Christian’s head). Admiral Lord Exmouth was ordered to take a task force to Algiers with Queen Charlotte as his flagship, and force the Arabs to return all the slaves on 27 August 1813. Obviously, a flagship of up to 1000 men ought to have experienced men who had worked together, so the former captain volunteered to get the old crew back. About 80% returned. The captain went to William Brown, and said, 'I have put you on the crew muster-list, but of course I couldn’t put down the London William Brown from Grenada, who is known to be a woman, so you are the Liverpool William Brown, from Jamaica, at your old rank, of course.'
So, Brown got to serve an additional two years in the Royal Navy. After the Mediterranean operation was over, there is no information about where
Brown was or what she/he did, except that we do know the year of her/his death in
London, 1835. One of the coveted Blue Plaques has been placed on the wall of
the Master-Shipwright’s House at the former Royal Navy shipyard at Deptford, (near
Greenwich) where both Orion and Queen Charlotte had been built. We have no idea
what Brown’s original name was.
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| One of the plaques at the base of Nelson's Column,Trafalgar Square, London, clearly showing a black African on the left |
Most people who know anything about the Napoleonic War are aware that Napoleon was eventually defeated by Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson and General Arthur the Duke of Wellington. It can be argued that those worthy gentlemen could never have accomplished what they did without William Brown smoothing the way first, even if Nelson and Wellington and Napoleon probably never heard of Brown.
Oh, in case you were wondering,
widely available herbs for women suppress or eliminate monthly periods.
© JOHN
FITZHUGH MILLAR, material-culture historian
Newport House, 710 South Henry Street, Williamsburg, Virginia, 23185; newporthse@widomaker.com
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Dispatches my on-line monthly diary |
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| Work In Progress (final content might change) |
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