On 25 November 1851, King Kosoko, an African ruler based at the town of Lagos on the west coast of Africa, came under attack from British naval forces. His men repelled the attack, killing two officers and wounding sixteen sailors, but in a second attack a few days later, the British landed on the eastern spit of Lagos island and burned down the slave barracoons belonging to three Portuguese slave-traders. Yet they were still unable to capture the town. They returned a month later.
Kosoko had been warned of trouble when he received an ultimatum from John Beecroft, the British consul resident at Fernando Po. Sailing to Lagos a few weeks earlier, accompanied by three naval officers, Beecroft had demanded of Kosoko that he should sign a ‘protection’ treaty with Britain. Kosoko refused, declaring that he had no need of protection and no desire for friendship with Britain.
The attack on Lagos marked another episode in Britain’s prolonged period of intervention along the coast of West Africa. At no period has the British Navy been more continuously engaged. . . in small wars’, wrote Sir William Laird Clowes, in a history of the navy that recorded ‘hundreds of minor operations’ that took place in the last half of the nineteenth century.1 The excuse for British intervention was the campaign to eradicate the slave trade that had so enflamed opinion in Britain, but behind the humanitarian impulse came the need to open up markets and to spread the ideology of Christianity.
The navy needed bases from which to operate, and one of the places chosen was Fernando Po, nominally a Spanish island in the nineteenth century. Between 1827 and 1843 the British leased two naval ports there from the local chief, and Beecroft, a trader and explorer-adventurer, was appointed as the British consul. In the 1840s, when engaged in exploring the creeks and rivers of the West African coast, he was made consul for the Bights of Biafra and Benin, to advance British commercial interests and to help regulate relations with local rulers.
Irritated by Kosoko’s resistance in November 1851, Beecroft and Commodore H. W. Bruce, the British naval commander, summoned Akitoye, a rival claimant to the throne of Lagos, to a meeting on their ship. In return for British support for his claim, Akitoye promised to stop the local slave traffic and to abolish the practice of human sacrifice that Kosoko was alleged to practice. The British naval force returned to Lagos on Christmas Eve, with four ships, 357 soldiers, and a locally recruited African army of 650 men loyal to Akitoye. While the British sailors rested on Christmas Day and held church services, Akitoye’s non-Christian army erected gun batteries onshore. Yet when the British force tried to land on 26 December, the resistance of Kosoko’s men was so effective that they were obliged to retreat. HMS Teazer ran aground in range of Kosoko’s guns, and a landing party was sent to destroy the battery - though at a heavy cost.
Lagos was bombarded and set alight on the following day, and much of the town was destroyed in the flames. Kosoko abandoned the town in the evening, but his followers fought on, resisting the British attempt to land their troops. The British suffered flfteen killed and seventy-flve wounded, but eventually claimed victory. Akitoye was installed as the new king.
Kosoko retreated to a base at Epe, some thirty miles away, and remained a thorn in Britain’s side, landing at Lagos two years later, in August 1853, in an attempt to overthrow Akitoye. A fresh battle for the city began, and British naval forces again intervened. Kosoko’s men were driven off.
Akitoye had never been popular, and when he died later that month the British installed his son Dosumo as the new king. Kosoko was eventually bribed to abandon his resistance, and he signed a treaty with the British the following year. Lagos was formally annexed to the British Empire in 1861.
William Dappa Pepple, King of Bonny in the delta of the rivers of Biafra, was the next African ruler in the sights of John Beecroft. Pepple had been one of the flrst to sign a treaty with the British, as long ago as 1839. Promised a ?2,000 subsidy payable annually for flve years, he had agreed to abolish the slave trade, but the money was not forthcoming. The king complained bitterly about ‘the bad faith of the English government’, for he needed the money to buy off rival chiefs. The trade continued through Spanish vessels, and British ships and traders had a rough time in the waters of Bonny. Fresh treaties were signed in 1848 and 1850, but proved as ineffective as the flrst.
In 1854 King Pepple had antagonised both local chiefs and foreign traders, and they turned to Beecroft, asking him to intervene. Pepple had become seriously ill and was partially paralysed, and in January he was persuaded by Beecroft to retire in exile to Fernando Po. Considerable controversy arose as to whether the king had chosen to leave of his own accord. Beecroft died in June, but King Pepple’s case was raised in the British parliament, and he was repatriated in 1861 and given ?4,000 in compensation. He became a convert to Christianity and sought to spread it among his people.2
In May 1855, Bamba Mina Lahai, the Muslim chief of Maligia, a town on the shores of the Melakori River north of Freetown, caused the British to suffer their worst military disaster in Sierra Leone during more than half a century of occupation. HMS Teazer lost seventy-seven men from the West India Regiment, shot, drowned or taken prisoner.3
The Melakori River had long been a centre of the lucrative groundnut business, controlled by English and French traders. In 1854, unhappy with their activity, the Maligia chief gave the traders ten days to leave, and three British gunboats arrived in December with 400 troops to persuade him to reverse his decision. Bamba Mina Lahai initially caved in to this pressure and agreed to pay compensation to the traders, but the promised money was not forthcoming; HMS Teazer returned in May 1855 on a follow-up mission to secure what was due.
Following established tradition on the west coast of Africa, the British ship would indicate its presence by attacking the town from a safe distance with Congreve rockets. On this occasion the ship had none available, and 200 soldiers went ashore to collect the money. Initially the chief’s men offered no resistance, but the town’s mosque and Bamba Minha Lahai’s house was burned down and the chief’s men fired at the re-embarking soldiers. On the following day, as the British set fire to other houses with Lucifer matches, they were shot at from the bush. Retreating to the shore, the soldiers escaped in a small boat, to return to the Teazer. The boat capsized, and although the Teazer picked up a handful of survivors, nearly eighty men were lost. It had been a disastrous expedition for the British.
World History
